Lucky for you that you had 36 years of cheap fossil fuels to get where you are today. Retirement, perhaps?, in a "little rural enclave".

My goals, when young, always included a rural bias. I started to head back to the land with my young family when I was 27. That, of course, meant that I was part of the long-distance daily commute for 36 years (and was, therefore, a serial polluter on a significant scale). It also meant that I built up my garden and other rural accoutrements gradually and within my means.

And this is precisely the problem, in my opinion, on both a micro-scale and a macro-scale. The only way most Americans, er USians, can replicate what you advocate is to follow a similar high-polluting life choice while building up a green arsenal.

We, as people of this plant, cannot afford to have more "serial polluters" working in one area and living in another. We're over the redline for greenhouse emissions  already, this approach will not work and without the 'city' job funding the 'rural' survivalist lifestyle, it is a fast road to poverty, in my view.

On an international level, this is life the West, especially the U.S., living the modern fossil fuel lifestyle and becoming prosperous and then telling the developing world - that sorry the way to become prosperous is to burn fossil fuels, but its too late for that because the West has burnt too much already.

It's never too late, until it's too late, to paraphrase a great American philosopher.

But I think it is too late to follow your specific example. Another path must be blazed. The destination may need to be the same, but the world cannot afford any longer for Americans to travel there in the same way.