You probably remember it from Psych 101 or some similar course--that description of the relative urgency of human needs with "self actualization" at the top.
We here at DKos seem to spend a lot of time in the top triangle, discussing issues of morality and acceptance.
But there is a growing body of work that suggests we soon may be fighting battles lower on the rungs.
Read the bottom layer in the pyramid:
Breathing, Food, Water, Shelter, Clothing, Sleep
I would imagine that for most of us, all of those needs are met in sufficient quantities to move us further up the pyramid. Sure, we may not be totally happy with the quality of the food we eat or the shelter we use (concerns higher on the pyramid), but we aren't in desperate danger of losing it altogether.
But two of those basic first-tier items, food and water, are inextricably interlinked and, some scientists are telling us, are no longer items that even the privileged citizens of first-world countries can take for granted any longer.
The body of work on this matter is deep, and below are a few of the best sources of information I have read on the matter:
Collapse by Jared Diamond
Discussion on TED
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
Talk at Town Hall, Seattle WA
Interview of David R. Montgomery on KUOW, Seattle, WA
The End of Food by Paul Roberts.
And his exceptional:
The End of Oil
Talk in Portland, Oregon
Talk in Seattle, WA
And there are other writers dealing with these issues, as this New Yorker book review attests.
Roberts’s work is part of a second wave of food-politics books, which has taken the genre to a new level of apocalyptic foreboding. The first wave was led by Eric Schlosser’s "Fast Food Nation" (2001), and focussed on the perils of junk food. "Fast Food Nation" painted an alarming picture—one learned about the additives in a strawberry milkshake, the traces of excrement in hamburger meat—but it also left some readers with a feeling of mild complacency, as they closed the book and turned to a wholesome supper of spinach and ricotta tortellini. There is no such reassurance to be had from the new wave, in which Roberts’s book is joined by "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System," by Raj Patel (Melville House; $19.95); "Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood," by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury; $24.99); and "In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto," by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group (Penguin Press; $21.95).
:::Summary:::
Perhaps the best summary of all these issues was recently published in Scientific American: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?, by Lester R. Brown.
In this article, one of the sustainability movement's leading thinkers summarizes all of the major themes that are leading to food insecurity on a global level:
Water Depletion
Soil Depletion
Fossil Fuel Depletion
Industrial Monoculture Farming
Increased Meat Consumption
Biofuels
Climate Change
And he explains why this is an issue for America, still a major breadbasket for the world:
No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies, not even the U.S., the world’s breadbasket. If China turns to the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has recently done for soybeans, it will have to buy from the U.S. For U.S. consumers, that would mean competing for the U.S. grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising incomes—a nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, it would be tempting for the U.S. to restrict exports, as it did, for instance, with grain and soybeans in the 1970s when domestic prices soared. But that is not an option with China. Chinese investors now hold well over a trillion U.S. dollars, and they have often been the leading international buyers of U.S. Treasury securities issued to finance the fiscal deficit. Like it or not, U.S. consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, no matter how high food prices rise.
Americans, whether they realize it or not, are facing a major crisis of our way of life. Sure, everybody has been hearing this for years, about energy or nuclear destruction, or 'communism', or whatever the current threat du jour happens to be.
But this is different. This crisis is driven by so many independent and contributing factors that it is impossible to ignore. And, in fact, this is something that we are already seeing:
In the past, most famously when the innovations in the use of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice created the "green revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand for food was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the technological fix. This time, regrettably, many of the most productive advances in agricultural technology have already been put into practice, and so the long-term rise in land productivity is slowing down. Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2 percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to slightly more than 1 percent. In some countries the yields appear to be near their practical limits, including rice yields in Japan and China.
And that is for land that can be properly irrigated. In some parts of the world, fossil aquifers which were tapped to bring on a local "green revolution" are quickly becoming depleted:
Usually aquifers are replenishable, but some of the most important ones are not: the "fossil" aquifers, so called because they store ancient water and are not recharged by precipitation. For these—including the vast Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the U.S. Great Plains, the Saudi aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain—depletion would spell the end of pumping. In arid regions such a loss could also bring an end to agriculture altogether.
[snip]
As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8 percent since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice production dropped 4 percent. The world’s most populous nation may soon be importing massive quantities of grain.
But water shortages are even more worrying in India. There the margin between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Millions of irrigation wells have dropped water tables in almost every state.
[snip]
A World Bank study reports that 15 percent of India’s food supply is produced by mining groundwater. Stated otherwise, 175 million Indians consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will soon be exhausted. The continued shrinking of water supplies could lead to unmanageable food shortages and social conflict.
Reflect upon these issues as you snack on those french fries, or munch on that toasted bagel with cream cheese. All is not lost. There are many things individuals and governments can do to address the fundamental imbalance of our environment and the current agricultural/food industry. But the first step must be a general awareness of the precariousness of our position. Without that, there can be no will for change
::: Will For Change :::
I had a recent reminder of why elections matter. I work in a major energy-consuming industry as a vendor of energy-using products. Certainly, for years energy efficiency and 'sustainability' have been common selling points in our repertoire, but for most vendors, development of efficient products had always been at the margins--tweaking a device to squeeze a few more points of efficiency out of it instead of a holistic development of product line, technologies and analysis tools to really change the industry environment.
In April, I attended the national meeting of one of my major product lines, held in a city just about in the buckle of the Bible Belt. The tone of the meeting was set by the president of the company's keynote speech--in which he excoriated the country's recent move to 'socialism' and lauded the recent tax day protesters as standing up for American ideals. He trotted out some typically misinformed conservative trope about how we would soon see a carbon tax that was really just an attempt by 'politicians' to 'control everything we do'.
But the punchline was the strategy he was charting for the company to address the issue: Revamping his product line and his entire sales approach to position his company as the leader in sustainable products for his industry. He introduced new, innovative product lines, provided for in depth training for his sales force in applying these products, and provided the tools for them to excel.
He started off his speech with a message portraying climate change as a hoax, but ended it with concrete action to make his company a leader in the fight against it.
You don't have to convince everyone you are right to win.
You merely need to win.
As we debate issues high on Maslow's hierarchy, and alternately praise or criticize Obama on, say, his handling of the the torture issue, I think it is important to step back and to realize what we have already accomplished simply by having put him where he is.
It's easy to forget that for many issues the ground has already shifted.
Let's do what we can to shift the ground on food security, too.