Building Resilience through Natural Resources

Building a Resilient Future: An In-Depth Look at Natural Resource Security.

This episode of Less House More Resilience dives deep into the critical, yet often overlooked, role of natural resources—specifically water, soil, and oil—in building personal and community resilience. Host Laura encourages listeners to move beyond sensational headlines and engage in the critical thinking and in-depth research necessary to navigate the compounding risks facing our world today.

Recommended Link

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRIxJ4B3fNQ&list=PLdc087VsWiC4_g-C740KBzvVFDMryTC75

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Go to thetinyhouseadviser.com

Transcript

Hey friends, Laura here. Today we're gonna continue our trip around the resilient wealth wheel and talk about resilience through natural resources. And really I'm gonna be talking about this in terms of my own journey here, my own learning and exploration, my own ⁓ study and research.

And so I'm gonna be speaking from my own personal experience and opinion as I guess always do. But this is really kind of unpacking the story of my own understanding of this topic.

My intent here is not to be prescriptive or to encourage you to perhaps think any particular way. I think my intention here is to encourage critical thinking and research as part of our resilience plan and not necessarily rely so heavily on

sound bites or headlines, but in fact get into the details of the things that are so fundamentally critical to our life on this planet.

As you know, as a certified financial planner, things that I say can be taken a certain way. So I just want to also mention that none of this is intended to be investment advice. I'm not here to provide any tips or strategies. Definitely not here to talk about anything from a tax advice perspective or legal advice perspective.

just sharing my own journey thoughts and asking questions or posing some ideas that maybe are worth looking into a little further.

Thanks for joining me.

So as we are in fact nature beings, everything about natural resources is foundational and essential for our survival on this planet, for our thriving, for our comfort.

And so in other episodes, I think I've mentioned some key natural resources that we all think of when we think of natural resources, air, water, food. And these are important things that nature provides for us. And they are things that have potential risks in our current environment that are worth understanding.

For example, I am living in the Western United States, as you may be well aware, and there are things happening with water systems in the Western United States that are not being shown actively on headlines or in the quick scroll of the news that you might do a couple of times a day.

you actually have to go looking for this information and you have to read the details, which for many of us quick ⁓ social media attention span doesn't necessarily allow us to go into great depth anymore.

And so it takes a bit of discipline actually to sit down and read an article about what's happening in the Colorado River and what's happening in the Rio Grande River. What's happening with aquifers. What's happening with surface water runoff. All of these things are applicable to our need for water.

and they are all experiencing a compounding effect that isn't so easily summarized with a quick headline. So really to understand what's going on with water systems, we have to look beneath the lid and really dig into the details and make critical decisions based on where we think water resources

might go in the future.

In our case, we've been working on water resource redundancy. I've probably talked about this before in the living environment episode. So we all lose a lot of our water resources right off of our roof. And so by capturing water off of our roof, we are able to create redundancy for water resources.

This is treated with different legality implications depending on where you live. For example, there are some states where you are not allowed to collect rainwater. And there are states where they are allowing certain amounts of rainwater collection. In our state of New Mexico, this is actually encouraged in order to use water naturally occurring through rain.

rather than continuing to draw down aquifers

So there is a lot happening in the water space that has implications for one of the things that literally keeps us alive. And so it may take some energy to dig into your region and what's going on with water there and understand the safety, the viability, in your area. And let me just encourage

that critical thinking and that research rather than just relying on someone to alert you in your local news or otherwise because there may be some incentives to keep information from people in order to not cause panic

resistance. So water.

Another key part of our natural resources is the soil that grows our food. And this has been something that I've been really curious about and interested in now for a few years. Once I learned that the number harvests we have in terms of how much topsoil is left in the United States.

is shrinking. We are losing a lot of our topsoil in this country and have been for a long time. It washes away and ends up in rivers and ultimately in lakes and oceans or blows away because it's not covered. And so my study in the permaculture world really highlighted how creating healthy soil is

critical to creating healthy food and that our topsoil resources are quite at risk.

And the topsoil in this country that has been degraded over time for conventional agriculture is really just a dead medium. And a lot of chemical fertilizers and herbicides are used to grow the crops and largely commodity crops, crops that are sold

in order to make industrial products rather than healthy food for humans. And those chemicals that we rely upon for even those commodity products, ⁓ corn, soybeans, etc., are currently in a shortage due to what's going on with the war. So it's April 21st.

the ceasefire that has been in place for a little bit of a week or so here is getting ready to expire today. We have not had those fertilizer shipments moving around the global economy since the Strait of Hormuz was shut down at the very end of February. So this is again something that as I am

Looking through my news headlines, I am not seeing discussion of what is going on with fertilizer component shortages. There are a few headlines out from the farmers in the United States and some other world leaders who are calling out this potential food crisis situation. But in general,

I am not seeing a loud enough revelation that the entire globe is experiencing a shortage of key components that are used during spring planting season. And I think that this is when it is talked about, it's talked about primarily through the lens of inflation.

talked about primarily through the idea that food prices will go up. But as I have come to understand over the past six months or so of doing a lot of reading and a lot of research on a number of these topics related to natural resources, everything is one of those compounding

formulations. When we look at the news headlines or the market headlines and we see that oil is $95 a barrel today and it was $98 yesterday the ceasefire it was $116. We really only think about that in terms of inflation and the cost of goods. And so when we think about fertilizer shortages

causing less yield of food commodities or crops. We only think of it in terms of rising prices. We don't think about necessarily how those food shortages globally compound other critical things happening in our world, including in our natural resource space.

If we think back to the COVID pandemic, and we think about how that the smallest little things that caused some sort of weird shortage created a compounding effect. It created a compounding in terms of resource scarcity, which created some civil effects, which created

shutting down of businesses, which created shortages of those products. I remember listening to the market news every day about the number of container ships stacked up at ports waiting to be unloaded and the wasting of fuel while they're sitting there idling in ports and listening to dock workers and

how they were full up and backed up with containers. And these situations that we face today, including the fertilizer shortage, have ripple effects that are deeper than what we're seeing on headlines. And we have to have, if we're gonna pay attention, the attention span to sit down and actually dig into the details beyond just the

cursory headline that we see and that we scroll right past. And maybe we don't want to pay attention, right? I have spent many, many, many years, ⁓ sort of limiting my exposure to news in order to protect myself from the stress that listening to the vacillations going on in political discourse or the

innumerable crises that are always happening, I have taken time off from the news. And so I don't pass any judgment to anyone who is doing that actively right now. For myself, I feel like in this particular awareness that I've come to over the past six months, and especially since the start of such an impactful conflict on the globe,

It is in my best interest to understand what is happening in order to prepare my expectations for the future, in order to take steps towards creating some resilience and in fact to buffer myself against shocks because shocks come when we're unaware. And if we can work to have some

understanding of what's happening, then we can be a little bit more prepared for what may come. And none of us know, right? None of us have a crystal ball. And every single day, there are six different, ⁓ six different directions in the media in terms of how this war is going. ⁓ One minute, there's talks and the next minute, there's war and the next minute there is

an end to the war and the next minute we're going to kill the entire ⁓ country of Iran. And so it's really hard to even have a sense for where things are going from a geopolitical standpoint. However, the literal shortage and elimination of huge key components to our survival in terms of

food resources. ⁓ And we're going to talk about oil here in a second is a literal thing that is happening that is for sure. ⁓ There has been, a shortage of these basic components of fertilizer, urea, and sulfuric acid and other things since the end of February. And so that's a literal

like missing puzzle piece to the puzzle of growing food in the spring planting season. And so these are things that are actually unfolding that maybe not everyone's aware of. And so that's why I wanted to talk about it. And I'm not an expert, right? I've read a lot. I read a of words about this and try to synthesize it in my brain. And here I'm just trying to...

touch the surface to encourage critical thinking and more research in this area.

So from the standpoint of natural resources in terms of food resilience, now is a good time to be working on our ability to perhaps buffer ourselves against supply chain.

brittleness when it comes to food supplies, all those corn and soybeans, they play into the economy of the United States and globally. ⁓ What happens when farmers don't grow the expected yield and make the expected.

amount of dollars for their farm in a year where they're not able to grow yields at the same size they can't afford as much or any fertilizer. So how does that play out in terms of their contribution to the supplies of commodities, their contribution to the economy? There are so many trickle-down effects that we can't even really conceive of at the moment.

What will the government do to help keep farmers afloat while this happens? Just lots of things. So we can't all wake up tomorrow and decide to grow our own food, though certainly I am personally working on increasing my ability to grow food. As I mentioned before, soil is a key component of that and I had to start from scratch in terms of building soil and

compost and working within the community here to collect the waste stream of food scraps coming out of the local restaurants and repurpose them into creating soil and purchasing some soil too and building places where I can grow crops in a way that's, feasible given the challenges of the dryness and the wind and the short growing season that I am currently

Living in.

But we can do a couple things on the food front. We obviously can deepen our pantry. We can stock up on a few things that we use on a regular basis. We can start to work on either growing or ⁓ frequenting our local community growers who are probably not as at risk of what's going on with a global

fertilizer component shortage, ⁓ maybe they're organic growers and so they aren't as dependent there. So a few different ways that we can start to think about how to buffer ourselves against that at this particular juncture. So food, water, food, and it's come to my realization

that another one of the natural resources that maybe we don't necessarily think of as a natural resource largely because it's very invisible in our life is oil. And I'm sure that you are a little aware of what's going on with the shutdown of oil tankers that are not going through.

the strait of Hormuz. Perhaps you are also aware that the United States is to some degree independent in terms of our production of oil and our refining capacity. I have taken a lot of really nerdy deep dives into all of the steps of what oil do we produce

What does that particular oil turn into once it is refined? Where does the diesel come from that fuels absolutely everything in our economy? So all of that food that we may buy at a grocery store comes on a truck that is fueled by diesel. All of that food

dependent upon diesel powered tractors or other farm tools. No one is farming at large scale with hand tools as we all know. In addition to that, all of the food that we purchase is largely packaged in plastic, which is a oil product. In fact, if you

Take a moment and you spin around in your current space wherever you are and look at everything around you and think about how oil has played a role in that particular thing showing up in your life. You will realize that even though all we hear in the media is oil is at $95 a barrel today.

and it was $98 yesterday, actually oil is the very lifeblood of our economy. And for sure, we in the United States at least are privileged to the extent that we have less shortage as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and whatever other straits are to be closed in the future. However,

We are also now exporting more than we usually would to stop gaps that are happening in other places in the globe. And so that means our supply will go up in price and be reduced by the exporting that we are doing. And then all of the effects of shortages around the globe will affect what products come from those countries.

All container ships that bring us all the things across the globe are fueled by bunker fuel, which is an oil. And everything that may be produced in countries from an agricultural product or any other product that we buy is fueled through oil. And so therefore the prices or availability of things that we get outside of this country may also be affected.

the global economy will have impacts of this that is beyond what we are seeing in the markets. So of course, as a financial planner, I am watching the markets closely and aware of the...

we'll call it cognitive dissonance of the markets right now to the fact that there has been a 20 % shortage of fuel in the global economy since the end of February. So just because the stock market was at all time highs last week does not mean everything is fine. And so

We need to be a little bit more able to think for ourselves and be thinking critically about what a 45 day or a 60 day or a 90 day or a six month or a nine month shortage of 20 % of the lifeblood of the global economy could potentially mean in terms of our resilience.

So how do we think about that most basic of natural resources, the effect of the lack of it, will have on our daily life?

And this doesn't mean that we need to necessarily go out and stock up on a year's worth of everything that we would buy, but maybe we start to triage what's most important and we start to focus on making sure that we have enough of those special and particular things. And we start to release

our psychological need for things that aren't completely necessary. So the work at this moment may be prioritization, it may be letting go, it may be acceptance, it may be if we have the means, doing a little bit of stocking Obviously,

It is really about coming to terms with the world that we are in right now. And we can't do that if we're not aware of the world that we're in right now.

Again, not suggesting that everybody spend three hours a day reading all of the ins and outs of the global oil markets and refining capacity and understand all of the oil products and how they're going to affect every particular thing in our lives and not saying that we need to all of us three hours a day.

keeping up on the nuance of every movement in the war and not saying that all of us need to go out and learn how to grow all of our own food. But in fact, I think I just want to be a counterpoint to the blissful ignorance that is shown when you look across the news headlines.

I may have mentioned before that I...

have felt that I wasn't getting a clear picture and I wasn't sure of the bias when I did look at the news and so I proactively went out and searched down a third party independent app where you can see 20 different articles about the same topic and see their bias rating and their factuality. I use that app and I'm following.

like 25 different particular topics that I wanna be aware of. And through this, even with this level of traditional media research, I still feel that there is a severe lack of information in terms of implications. News

seems to be only reporting the most basic tidbits and not really getting so much into and maybe they can't right they can't project or forecast so much ⁓ but it's really just not helping us to think critically about what this all means for us and so that's why I have been out

searching down alternative independent news sources, in-depth reading of essays and really trying to have a better understanding of the

second and third order implications of the world that we're in today. So from a natural resources perspective, resilience at this moment may look like figuring out what are the key natural resources that are needed for my survival, for my comfort, for my thriving.

And how do I protect, create redundancies?

How do I make changes in my life that will make sure that I have the ability to take care of myself in this way and perhaps help others in the community if I have those resources available to be supportive? How can I engage with others in my community about these topics, about water availability, safety, about...

food availability, access, local growing, smaller growers or local resources that aren't necessarily so dependent upon oil. How do I think about everything in my life that is literally just a product of the oil economy?

nothing here got here without oil. So how do I think about these things? And how do I let go of what is superfluous and focus on what is necessary?

Obviously there are other natural resources in our life. The air that we breathe, the beauty that we see, the plants outside our door, the animals that are in the earth. We are part of the natural resources. I guess we are a natural resource. So how do we as our own self natural resources go out and have an impact

in this moment where so many natural resources are being fought over or being restricted or being contaminated. How do we as natural beings

natural world? How do we help ourselves? How do we help others? How do we advocate?

All of those things, there are lots of other people much more articulate in talking about the earth and what's happening with the biosphere and what's happening in ecologies and how we can have impact there. But I definitely wanted to really zoom in to some of these key things that are being impacted at this moment that are literally critical to us

as people on this planet and though we can't affect what's going on geopolitically and we can't snap our fingers and make our aquifer restored or stop the degradation of our soil or

turn our communities into bread baskets of local growing, we can take small steps that will have a positive impact on our resilience and the resilience of our communities. And now is the time and we have to learn in order to do it. We have to learn what's happening and we're not gonna learn what's happening.

by scrolling through headlines for three minutes. We have to actually do a little bit of work here.

in past crises, I have, as I mentioned a little bit ago, have really tuned out and really just assumed everything is going to be fine. And I guess there's an argument to be made for doing that now. However, I think being witness to what is happening at this moment feels more

real. I know I am not alone in saying that what we're experiencing now feels

different than some of the prior crises And maybe the Great Recession felt different and I just wasn't paying attention. ⁓ Certainly I was paying attention during the COVID pandemic and was pretty terrified. But this doesn't feel, though I have certainly been terrified at moments, this doesn't feel so much terrifying as fundamental shift. Big change.

that we have to.

Roll with.

And so if there is a big shift happening, then now is the time to start collecting ourselves and figuring out what's important and making some sort of rough plan for how we adjust our expectations

and our resources to take the best care of ourselves. If you are interested in digging into this topic with a little bit higher level and you don't know where to go, may I recommend Nate Hagans? There is an Oil 101, 201, 301 podcast three-part.

on his podcast, The Great Simplification, that really helps to understand more about this oil piece. There are other places you can go to learn about what is happening with water, what's happening with climate, what's happening with soil, what's happening with

food, though certainly Nate Hagens also talks about all of these topics. But I think the oil understanding is just such a revelation because it has been so invisible to our entire lives. And all of us have grown up in a time where oil was intensely cheap, though we don't think about it as cheap when we fill up our gas tank, but it is cheap,

and it is fueling everything. And it has literally created our modern life in exactly every aspect of it. And so I think it's worth understanding this at a greater level in order to just be awake to our own lives and be awake to what's happening with oil. So again, that's Nate Hagens.

The podcast, The Great Simplification, Oil 101, 201, 301 is a series that he just put out last week.

So natural resource resilience, basically the very most critical part of everything that we talk about with the resilient wealth wheel. If you don't have the resilient wealth wheel yet, it's over at https://www.thetinyhouseadviser.com/resilientwealth and come back and we'll continue these conversations about these different domains of our life and creating resilience there.

I hope that from this, can take one small action to be more aware of what's going on in the world, in our own lives, the implications, and perhaps figure out some way to take action for yourself to build some resilience in an area of natural resource.