May 30, 2013 – We are offered so little worthwhile analysis
by American mainstream media. I had
understood that the civil war in Syria was an outgrowth of the Arab Spring – an
apparently spontaneous demand for freedom from previously abject populations. After reading Joe Romm’s article Syria Today is a Preview of Memorial Day
2030, I’m convinced the Arab Spring was a catalyst, and nothing more. Romm quotes from a Tom Friedman article, Without Water, Revolution:
“The drought did
not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita,
but … the failure of the government to respond
to the drought played a huge role
in fueling the uprising … after Assad took
over in 2000 he opened up the regulated
agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers,
many of them government cronies, to buy
up land and drill as much water as they
wanted, eventually severely diminishing the
water table.
This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had
to scrounge for work …
Then, between
2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the
drought and,
with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped
out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers
and herders, the United Nations reported …
with Assad doing nothing to help the drought
refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and
their kids got politicized.”
It was not the drought, it was the response – or lack
thereof – to the drought that caused Syria’s civil war. Not ideology, not theology, not the Arab Spring. How many other governments are equally as
ill-prepared to respond to climate volatility and the accompanying loss of
livelihood? Thomas Fingar, an
intelligence analyst, believes the chickens will come home to roost by the
mid-2020s. “Floods and droughts will
trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing
world.”
Add to climate catastrophe the compounding factor of
population growth and the concomitant rise in demand for food, freshwater and
energy, and the outlook is bleak indeed.
My greatest concern in reading these projections for the future is the
utter lack of willingness to admit that humans will live at a greatly reduced
standard of living. Writers insist that
future generations will demand all the niceties of life during the late 20th
century – and that their demands will be treated as though they were
reasonable! I keep wondering, where is
the person brilliant enough to figure out that nothing could be further from
the truth?
It’s time to tell ourselves and each other the
true story of our diminished future, and of how life can still be good, even without overabundance.
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