adventures in disaster

planning for the future

Now we all know that the risks of pandemic, drought, grid failure and crop failure exist but the risk of one happening and throwing the human race back into the dark ages instantly is pretty damn small. It's highly unlikely the world would experience one of them on a grand enough scale to really make much of a dent in the population. Sure we would maybe lose a billion people, sounds horrific right? But there is still 5 billion of us left. We can agree that some countries, states, provinces will become ghost towns but on the grand scale the loss of a billion people will be hardly noticeable unless you happened to be one of the ghost towns hopefully former inhabitants.
It's all relative you see.
In fact we could easily absorb the loss of half our population. The world would be considerably more manageable at that population level. Cruel but true.

The problem is we wont experience just one of these sentinel events. It's obvious that right now we are experiencing all of them. Granted it's all on a very small scale at present. Every country is having problems with drought and water allocation. Many underdeveloped countries are already at war with each other over water resources though they call it different names like religious or political conflict.
Many countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are experiencing the effects of a viral flu that appears to have crossed over to domestic bird stock and people from wild, migratory birds. We have only recently recovered from SARS and we still have no real plan in place other than isolation, quarantine, cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Electrical grid failure is a daily fact of life in underdeveloped countries, some have no existing grid at all outside their major cities. Those of us in the developed West and Europe have experienced grid failure only rarely and it is treated each time as a catastrophic emergency. The countries without constant electricity are thrilled when it does go on and resigned when it does not. It is only us, the technology dependent that find the loss of the grid paralyzing and awful.
We haven't got very far in the crop crisis. Corn is the most visible concern. Many are fighting against genetically altered sterile seed. They are fighting to keep the modifications but fighting against making the plants sterile. They understand the huge risk of a monopoly on seed.
They are fighting some giant multinational companies with endless resources and lots of cronies.
If they lose this battle they will have to make some very hard choices. To ignore the advantages of the modified to escape paying the yearly ransom they will have to accept that their yields may be smaller. Their farming more labour intensive. They will be less competitive in the global market. Their profit margins will be smaller but they will have protected their control over their food and in turn they provide jobs and factories that will help maintain their economy.
The corn for ethanol issue is much trickier. For years environmentalists have begged,pleaded and cajoled governments into looking for alternative fuels. They promoted the ethanol solution. It will be very hard to publicly admit that the choice of corn was a terrible one. Corn farmers who have invested millions to create refineries to transform corn into ethanol will be immovable. They have gambled all they have on the success of corn based ethanol. Convincing them to change to sugar beets or switch grasses wont be an easy sell. It will require intense political pressure and large financial subsidies to get this turned around. There will be some egos involved here. No one wants to have to take the blame for idiocy and for putting the food supply at risk.
It will need a leader of incredible will and I look around at my own country and the countries around me and I don't see any potential leaders with that kind of focus and will, do you?

So the reality is all these disaster ingredients are already in the blender and the blender is turned on. We can turn the blender off of course. The cost will be shocking and in the early days it may be a form of political suicide to take such a stand.
In reality it looks more like most of the political leaders of the world are so intentionally uneducated about environmental costs the first thing they pledge to do is crank that blender to 9.
I have no faith left in any political leaders. I have no belief that Oprah and her new cult will do anything either. You have to realize that this women flies across the country in a private jet once a month or so to get her eyebrows tweezed,scrubbed and buffed. She has no environmental awareness at all. Worse she believes wholeheartedly in pulling young girls away from their family and their community so they can attend boarding school. The place to go to be taught how to succeed in the middle class predominately white controlled city world. Too over educated and too curious to return home to help their community rise up. Oprah wants them to be leaders in their country. A country they have been segregated from for all their formative years. They will have such a sense of disconnect they will spend years wandering from place to place searching for that they could call home. Who will call them leader when the people no longer know who they are?How much more good could have been done if the schools had been created within their own communities? They could have shared all their newfound knowledge without losing the culture and ritual that makes them who they were born to be. Educating one within the community offers education to all of the community. Instead Oprah chose impersonal culturally blank segregated boarding schools. What a recipe for dislocation and disconnect. Leaders that once again have no idea how the people live and what would be necessary to make things better while respecting culture and ritual.
Kings and dictators of Africa have alway sent their children away to boarding schools and Oprah has embraced the same disastrous model .Arrogantly disrespecting the ability of native teachers, substituting foreigners as if they were better. A recipe to make the students ashamed of where they came from.


I believe that the blender is blending and the end results have become inescapable.
The world will slowly devolve into crisis after crisis. Waves of disaster reported casually by Anderson Cooper. No one noticing, no one caring until it begins to come home. Your home.

posted by adventures in disaster @ 10:30 PM