In a month, my family and I will be embarking on our next big life adventure: #vanlife. It’s been years in the making, during which we’ve been mentally preparing to shift out of a permanent lifestyle and into that of a digital nomad. I’ve traveled extensively during my life, but I have to say I’m a bit nervous about this one. It’s been a while since we’ve left a permanent home for months at time—pretty much since we’ve had children.
As climate change increases its impact on humanity, I can’t help but wonder if humans (well, us) will return to their nomadic roots and their former lifestyle of letting nature determine where they should go next. Native Americans did this. Pastoral communities in northern Asia and across Africa did this. Tropical jungle tribes in southeast Asia did this. In all cases, they were following resources, mostly food. We also see this same drive in migrating animals, like birds, whales, and wildebeests. The reality is that if resources are not being moved towards you, then you must go to them.
Another thing these nomadic groups had in common were impermanent, temporary homes. One of the last remaining nomadic tribes in northeast Thailand used banana leaves as part of their home construction. When the leaves yellowed, they knew that it was time to pick up and go.
With our large, expensive, permanent homes, picking up and leaving is not an easy task. Indeed, with the devastating fires in Paradise, California and Louisville, Colorado over the years–and now in places where large forest fires rarely occur like Maui (so freshly horrifying that its full impact is still unknown), all of these fires are upending the way we think about how we live and the resiliency of our economic system. Indeed, in this paper we wrote a few years ago, we argue that due to a changing climate there are simply places where people can no longer expect to live in permanent homes.
If that feels astonishing to you, consider that private landownership is a fairly recent societal construct. In the US, for example, private ownership was brought into the US via European colonists. They sought to escape land oppression in their home countries, while unfortunately transferring this same oppression to Native Americans. Throughout human history, and still very active today, a more typical type of land ownership relies on “commoning” or the sharing of common resources, like forests and arable land. As private land becomes more scarce due to changing sea level rise and climate, will humans rely more and more on a commons-based economic system?
During our #vanlife experience, we’re certainly not planning to follow American bison around the plains or anything. But I’m curious to explore what it’s like to separate ourselves from our long-time physical space. Aside from experiencing #vanlife, we’ll go back to our own cultural roots by spending months with our families in Florida, Brazil, and Thailand.
We’ll also spend time immersing ourselves in completely new environments to learn through context and experience, otherwise known as worldschooling–not just for my two small children, but for us adults as well. My intention, of course, is to wonder and muse about all the incredible livelihood complexity that we encounter among communities of different shapes and forms–just as I describe in My Journey to Community Activation.
I started my community work focused on very small subsistence-based communities. These days most of the communities I work with have transcended place—members are located all over the world. Today, it’s less about where you are and more about who you are. At the same time, however, we are all very much connected to place.
Are there new ways of life that you ponder about? What could be our new future as humans living in a quickly changing climate?
For me, I think that anything is possible.
[Photo by Chris Briggs on Unsplash]