As Groundwater Dwindles, a Global Food Shock Looms
As Groundwater Dwindles, a Global Food Shock Looms
I’ve never really thought that the connections between soil, temperature, water, weather and seasonal variability were well appreciated by the general population. Most of us live highly insulated lives from the outside world. What food is produced is done by others, our role in this is simply a visit to the grocery store.
Our dependency should be obvious, but it’s not to millions and millions of people. There is always an assumption that someone else is going to solve our needs. I don’t subscribe to this attitude myself. I think it is irresponsible.
The above article totally fails to take into account what the headlines (headlies?) claim: food shock. Dramatically increasing prices, declining availability and decreased distribution were simply unmentioned, all part of what a food shock really means.
There is only one strategy that can possibly reduce the amount of present and future suffering, and that is severe limitation of breeding by humans.
Lots of scary numbers here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Isn’t it weird that humans tend to congregate in places that are going to fare particularly badly when oil becomes less available, when sea levels rise, when drinkable water becomes difficult to obtain and when food becomes difficult to acquire.
‘Greater Los Angeles lies on a coastal mediterranean savannah with a small watershed that is able to support at most one million people on its own water; as of 2015, the area has a population of over 18 million.’
Words like “insulation”, “disconnected” and “distracted” come to mind. Insulated from the real reality, disconnected from the natural world, distracted by inanities and endless levels of stupid shit. All while living in cookie-cutter cardboard boxes and driving on endless roads of concrete and asphalt. So you can shop and support Leviathan with your daily slavery. No, I am not a fan.
We call it civilization, although there is really nothing civilized about any of it.
I’m sure you are aware that there are more and more calls to move more and more humans into cities. Which is dumb as shit. Inefficient, wasteful, non-productive, dependent and easily controlled, cities are death traps in my opinion. I’d rather be dead (seriously) then live in one. They cannot provide for themselves. Once the trucks stop running, even for a day or two, they’ll go up in flames (or something like that).
There needs to be a non-human movement, i.e, no more growth, preserve and restore what’s left. It is the title of an article that I came up with. Population is a topic that some think is fine or can even grow larger, but it will only be even more disastrous then it already is.
I have mentioned this before, but I do not agree that the 11+ billion figure for human population growth will actually happen. The estimates given are all failing to account for climate change and the (real) effects upon global food supplies (as far as I have been able to tell, just spotted the section on scarcity). In other words, they are (still) optimistic, while the food outlook is just the opposite, pessimistic.
There have been studies that they will have to double current production levels of food, which isn’t going to happen. It can’t. It isn’t even advisable.
Gail has a article on population here – Human population overshoot – what went wrong?
I see religion as a factor that has contributed enormously to the mess we are in. The Biblical concepts of ‘man having dominion over the Earth’ rather than being a co-inhabitant of it and the concept of ‘going forth and multiplying’, that have been promoted for centuries, have been utterly disastrous in the long run. The Roman Catholic Church was particularly blameworthy for promoting prolific breeding until very recently, castigating those who attempted to promote birth control. Muslims seem to be the ‘new catholics’ in so far as many of them have enormous families, as evidenced by the population explosion of Saudi Arabia, which has burgeoned from about 4 million after WW2 to about 32 million now…..largely on the back of imported food paid for by oil revenues.
On the topic of religion, Christmas has absolutely nothing to do with belief in Jesus or any of his teachings, and is simply embellishment of the fake Roman systems (Romans who couldn’t even get the calendar right!) imposed onto pre-existing pagan systems.
The period we call 21st to 25th December (as a consequence of the Romans getting the calendar so utterly messed up!) corresponds to the Northern Hemisphere winter solstice, of course. And what is celebrated as Christmas is actually the new year -the time when the Sun stops ‘dying’ and begins climbing in the sky. So Christmas Day is actually New Year’s Day in the Northern Hemisphere. And New Year’s Day is yet another calendar foul-up.
Depending on how you interpret Jesus (i.e Jesus = the Sun) and how you interpret ‘died on the cross and was resurrected after 3 days’, it can be argued that Easter is actually also Christmas, which is in fact New Year. In other words, all the religious festivals associated with Christianity are actually extreme misrepresentations of planetary cycles.
People in the Southern Hemisphere should celebrate the New Year in the third week of June (and a few do). But that does not correspond to the short-term money-grubbing interests of the commercial enterprises who set the current, insane agenda, of course.
So these days the ‘season of good will’ has been morphed [by governments and corporations] into an orgy of squandering and overconsumption that actually reduces the quality of life and life expectancy of the majority of people currently alive.
15 years ago I thought that the human population would peak at around 7 billion about 2025. It turned out industrial humans had a greater capacity to produce food and to breed than I thought, but a peak about 2025 peak looks increasingly likely.
Population, food production, energy production: the future always seems to be predicted by extrapolating the curve in the direction that it has been going in the recent past. It HAS happened (or it happened once), therefore it WILL happen. It MUST happen, because we’re special.
I’ve been reading Wendell Berry recently, and I’m amazed by how his calm words reflect yours. He, too, laments the waste of the land by the “white men” (his words, just speaking the truth) who took this continent…and the rest of the planet. Walking into the woods, he counsels, and seeing what has been there since before us and will be there after us, just patiently waiting, makes us realize how little we really matter here. We are nothing if not hubris and arrogance. We must “…reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”