Since the turn of the century I’ve sat with my father and my sister in law while cancer slowly consumed them. My second date with a woman a couple of years ago was being summoned to the nursing home where her father’s final moments were fast approaching. I’ve also lost five pets in those years. I’m not unacquainted with death’s approach.
This time things are a little different, because it isn’t a single sentient being suffering near me, it’s an entire region of east Africa ... and I think this is a scene we’re going to play out more and more often as the deadly triangle of economic collapse, environmental change, and energy depletion closes in on our little overpopulation problem.
The Horn of Africa and the countries bordering it have been troubled my entire life. During the eighties it was the Ethiopian famine, the nineties brought the breakup of Somalia and the horrors of Rwanda, and the images of suffering from Darfur this decade are inescapable. If you had to name names you’d probably pick regional climate as the first villain with poor governance a close second.
Kenya had been blessedly free of these sorts of events since its independence in 1964, with the exception of the Northern Frontier District, a large, thinly populated region that has more in common with Somalia than the rest of Kenya in terms of its climate, and when so troubled the rest of the country could fairly easily carry the region through hard times.
Area #5 is the Northern Frontier District
This year’s drought, covering about 75% of the country, is different. The only areas spared are the far south west and thin strip along the coast. According a New York Times article the two pillars of the Kenyan economy, agriculture and tourism, are both imperiled. Elephants are literally keeling over from hunger.
About ten percent of the country’s thirty eight million people are in need of food aid and the United Nations’ $576 million appeal is only half funded.
I think we really need to stop looking at such situations through the lens of our 20th century experience and start considering the effects of credit, climate, and crude oil.
We’re in the middle of a massive economic contraction. Washington, London, and Beijing can huff and puff all they’d like, but the bubble is going to continue deflating until we get back to the place where all synthetic financial instruments are viewed as the junk that they are. Right now financial institutions know (the loss has already occurred) but they’re sitting with a portfolio of toxic crap (like an elephant with a belly full of those cactus fruit), hoping that either the market upset will pass or that they can unload the junk on some other sucker (that would be you, dear taxpayer). The bailout shuffle only works when people have confidence in it ... and those left with confidence are the uninitiated. Everyone who follows the financial sector knows the troubles haven’t even seriously started yet. I commend those not up to speed on these things to read The Automatic Earth for a basketful of the good news.
Economically we’re going to be a lot less able to respond to troubles like those in Kenya even if we have the political will to do so.
The 20th century view is that drought, crop failure, and famine occur at a certain frequency and not everywhere all at once. That assumption is probably incorrect at 380 ppm carbon dioxide. Look at where we have military trouble these last few decades – drought ridden Somalia in the 1990s, drought ridden Afghanistan this decade, and now spreading troubles in the Horn of Africa. When things get dry and people get hungry ... things change. We don’t see civil disorder in Australia due to their drought, but as one of the top three wheat producers a bad year there could equal a bad year globally if the U.S. Canada, or the wheat producing regions of the former Soviet Union also have trouble.
We’ve beat the hell out of our soil and wiped out ten thousand years of fossil water in the century since we learned to power pumps with fossil fuels. The large journalism organizations are talking about water bankruptcy and our own Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse has done a fine diary on the problem.
Underneath the credit crisis are the energy issues we face. Our economy is so dependent on inexpensive, readily available liquid fuels that we have trouble envisioning what will happen with our global peak of liquid fuel production fourteen months in the past and receding swiftly. Our economy never gets back to what it was due to the steady drag imposed by higher energy prices, so donors that used to exist are going to be busy tending to issues at home first. Would you care to guess the year and percentage of total lands under cultivation for biofuels in the United States? I bet you wouldn’t have picked 1915 and a third of our total acreage ... but that was what draft animals consumed before we began converting our agriculture to fossil fuels. Using biofuel powered internal combustion farm equipment won’t require that acreage to do the job, but if we face a mixture of declining and/or failing supplies coupled with a strong intention to get free of carbon emissions we will see an increase in the production of fuel crops at the expense of feeding humans somewhere.
Those who follow my work will realize that I do a bit of research on renewable fertilizer and that I’ve written before about the connection between biologically available nitrogen and human population. Yeah, it’s food, but down underneath it there is energy – hydrogen stripped from fossil fuels, or hydrogen stripped from water using renewable electricity, or fuels being used to haul the dwindling fossil nitrates of the Atacama desert around the world. We’re going to hit a wall here too, just like we have with oil.
I hope I’ve done enough to set the stage here. My personal beliefs don’t involve any sort of apocalyptic end times but I always get called out for that when I write a diary like this. I hope I’ve done a sufficient job of setting the stage for the impossibly difficult things I’m going to say next.
There isn’t enough for all seven billion of us.
Sure, we can all go vegetarian and that takes the heat off ... for a bit. But it doesn’t fix our overpopulation and such a culture change is a nice theory but it won’t simply happen out of enlightened community interest. We can’t change quickly enough even if we all agreed on what to do.
There isn’t enough for all seven billion of us.
There isn’t enough fresh water. And if it’s not that it’ll be oil, electricity, platinum needed to build renewable energy systems, or some other Liebig minimum for any proposed set of solutions will not be met.
There isn’t enough for all seven billion of us.
There just isn’t, but it’s not evenly distributed. Starving Kenyans on one side of the globe, obese, unhealthy Americans on the other. The lumps from us getting down off the overpopulation limb we’ve shinnied up over the last two centuries are not going to be evenly distributed.
TRIAGE
There’s a dirty word. You spend some time reading the various sites that focus on understanding the effects of peak oil and you’ll find discussion of a bilateral food/fuel trade. The U.S., Canada, maybe Australia if climate change isn’t too severe, and parts of South America will exchange grain crops (virtual water) with the OPEC countries. Everyone else? They’ll be "priced out of the food market" - Friedmanite free market triage in action. That’s a nice, Orwellian euphemism for starved to death, eh?
The causes and conditions are undeniable. As a species we approach the eye of a needle and I think it won’t pass more than one out of every three. I know some of what to do and say for a person (or pootie) who nears the end, but how do we, as a species, handle a situation like this? I imagine those folks rowing away from the Titanic in partially filled lifeboats, with the consensus being they couldn’t return because they didn’t have room for everyone and the desperate survivors would have swamped them trying to get aboard. We know women and children from first class watched husbands and fathers who remained aboard. Are you ready to help pick who gets a seat in the lifeboat?
Don’t think on this too much. I have and there just aren’t any good answers, no matter which way we might turn.