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October 31 2018 Recently finished 'America's Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends'[1] by John W. Day and Charles Hall. Day is with the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University; Hall is a Systems Ecologist with the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York, and is best known for his development of the concept of EROI, or energy return on investment. The book is a fairly easy read and covers several topics pertaining to assessing the future sustainability of various cities and mega-regions in the continental US. Initially, based on the title, I assumed a comprehensive ranking of most US cities/regions but this is not the focus of the book. Instead the authors selected about 10 cities/regions which they felt were generally representative of the various ways the US was settled, how that settlement evolved starting with their initial natural assets and later non-renewable fossil inputs, and what the future tends look like with respect to climate change and fossil energy depletion. In several cases the assessments start with the original indigenous populations, their population estimates and how they lived. As one might imagine, the areas East of the Mississippi were, and in may cases still are, much more productive lands and the native populations reflected this, both in numbers and variety of ways of living. Also unsurprisingly, the European settlement patterns largely followed similar valuations of the natural environments; areas with ample forests, navigable waters, and good soils were most desirable and explains the current densities of population along the Eastern seaboard, Great Lakes region and Gulf coast with the exception of Florida whose attraction as a retirement and entertainment destination had to wait for the "era of happy motoring" that cheap oil ushered in. Similarly with Las Vegas, another selected city. Las Vegas and much of the rest of the American Southwest didn't boom until the massive waterworks could be built which wouldn't have happened without cheap fossil fuels. The narrow green zone that runs from northern California to the Pacific Northwest didn't see many Europeans until the 1800's but other than patterns formed by the gold rushes the settlements followed a similar pattern as the Eastern US with respect to proximity to forests, good soils and navigable waters. Which brings us to the present situation. Pretty much all the coastal areas will be affected by climate change, either from increased flooding, storm surges, and bigger more frequent hurricanes. On top of that, the population density, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic region, requires dealing with sizable inputs (food, energy, manufactured goods) and outputs (wastes of all kinds) which in the absence of cheap liquid fuels will be harder to meet and invariably more expensive. Although the regional soils were once rich in many cases they have been either previously depleted or simply paved over. Cities like New York and Miami will be particularly impacted. Most of the American Southwest will become increasingly arid and unable to support the masses that currently reside there. Lack of water combined with oppressive heat and urban sprawl will be pretty much impossible to overcome and these areas will simply have to depopulate. Northern California and the Pacific Northwest will fair better, at least those areas that aren't overly urbanized. The mega-region that spreads out from Portland and Seattle will not be anywhere as sustainable as their promoters make them out to be; as with any dense urban area, the shear volume of inputs and resulting wastes is their weakness. Anyone who has been to this area knows how car-centric it is; other than in the wealthy close-in neighborhoods a car is a necessity. In addition, much good farmland has been converted into suburban housing so localizing food sources will be a challenge. As one might have already gleaned, the cities and regions that have the best prospects tend to be smaller and more rural and in close proximity to good soils and water sources. Cedar Rapids, Iowa is held up as an example. Detroit many also be viewed as an "early adapter" in the number of urban farms that have sprung up among the former auto factory sites. Both Detroit and Cedar Rapids are also expected to see fairly benign climatic changes which invariably bodes well for them. For anybody not wedded to their current locale and wishing to relocate somewhere more likely sustainable down the road this book is well worth your time. It also contains many helpful graphs and maps relating to rainfall, soil quality, world energy flows, etc. [1] https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781493932429