James:
“Doug Carlton” makes many salient points for those currently searching for retreat locations. Might I add a couple more that helped me in finding our place in southwest Virginia.
For every region of interest to me, I gathered a century worth of census data, available online. If you want to get a good picture of a community, this is an excellent place to start.
Second, I read Mark Monmonier’s “Cartographies of Danger.” Monmonier is a bit of an odd duck in the professorial geography/mapping community. I have no idea of his world view, but everything he writes is engaging and informative. “Cartographies of Danger” is perhaps unique in the world of scholarship-based publishing in that it a very low political correctness factor. He calls ’em like he sees ’em, including insightful content on social instabilities. Of course, it includes the items you would expect especially the distribution and frequency of natural disaster occurrences that I had not fully appreciated before. All the Best, – Crusher
JWR Replies: Most SurvivalBlog readers are well aware that my view of economics is of the Austrian school. Perhaps less well known is that my view of history is of the geographical determinist school. I’ve been enthusiastically in that camp for three decades. That viewpoint is part of what has driven my strong emphasis on relocation to lightly-populated regions that are well removed from major population centers and safely away from refugee lines of drift.