It's every single product every where on the planet being painted/woven/molded pink that causes cancer...

Oh, wait. No, the pinkness causes homicide of the marketing dimwits who dreamed it up.

Life causes cancer. Life and exposure to a million and one things that were rare in the environment before the Industrial Revolution. And the fact that we live long enough for our cells to mutate and go cancerous. There was a heck of a lot less cancer around when half of us died before we hit forty. But even then, cancer happened -- Amy Dudley is one of Tudor England's most well known cases. Cancer's part of life. As long as cells divide and mutation is possible, cancer is with us.

Eat right. Exercise. Live life and be glad you have today. Death comes for us all... the mortality rate's never budged, and given the choice of hacking my lungs out with TB, my skin sloughing off with leprosy, or medical treatment for cancer?? I'll take door number 3, please.

And move some place that can afford to have you ecologically. Don't be a burden on your new home.

1. Check your debt. Realize that you WILL be taking a pay cut. The CoL is significantly lower in most of the Great Plains states, and so you're likely to bring home less. That's no problem if you've got less than $100 a month in debt payment, but if you've got a car payment, a couple of credit cards and student loans, you could be hurting real fast. So hang out, stay kidless for a while and pay off before you move.

2. North of the southern border of Kansas, the Plains are COLD for at least three months of the year. You will adjust, trust me, but it takes a couple of winters to really get it in your bones.

3. Burbs here are burbs everywhere. If it's a new subdivision, no one knows anyone, everyone drives, and there's no neighborly chatting. Burbs are hell, packaged as progress. Pick an older neighborhood, preferably one with kid-high wear marks on the doors, toys on the porch, basket ball hoops and clothes lines. They're not eyesores to be CC and Red away, they're LIFE.

4. Accept that midnight fish tacos, dawn beach walks, and the Garment district are things you're leaving behind. You'll be subbing in regional cuisine (hopefully), the wide skies and local community, but some things just aren't within reach. You'll live.

5. Don't go where the region can't absorb you. Please avoid the dry, high plains (i.e. Denver, Cheyenne, Santa Fe) in the Eastern Rockies; that region is short on water to support the people there; please don't make it worse. Likewise, if you really can't handle heat and humidity, skip the southern Midwest instead of becoming an AC addict four months of the year. Southern California can't afford the people who live there, so I commend you for wanting to leave, but please don't go from being a burden in one place to being a burden in another.

6. And be prepared to be frustrated politically. You'll be changing cultures; prepare for culture shock. You might try reading Joel Garreau's "Nine Nations of North America"; it's a bit dated, but even 25+ years on, some parts are still dead on.

The root cause is not meat.

It's not oil.

It's not coal.

It's the fact that we, humans, as a species, are too damn successful. We outbreed any environment in which we live because we can make things work just a little better, for just a little longer, and thus make the problem last just that much longer.

We can replace every light bulb, switch to biodiesel, end coal mining and use only biomass in electricity production, stop making plastics out of oil and only make them out of the plastic we already have at hand... but if we don't stop having more babies than replacement and we don't stop living longer and longer, we are still a net drain on the planet. It's that simple. We need fewer of us, permanently. (And yes, I'm doing my part -- no kids, and one way or another, when I'm 70, I will not be walking on this earth.)

We eat local, and the local climate cannot support soy, a lot of beans, almonds, olives, and other veggie proteins (we're high in the Rockies). We CAN support chickens, brook trout, sheep and goats, and deer and elk. We eat a lot of wild meat we hunt ourselves - turkey, geese, elk and deer. We trade that meat for chickens. But there's no way we could go vegetarian without putting a lot of oil-based CO2 in the atmosphere (plus heavy metals, acids, and some nasty salts...) And in our region, getting the soy beans from field to table would put a lot more CO2 and et cetera than the methane the deer and elk make anyway.

Don't breed. Eat locally. Walk. It worked for thousands of years....