Tom Engelhardt at The Nation has a good question:
Why is it that, except at relatively obscure websites, you can hardly find a mainstream piece that mentions more than one drought at a time?
Elaborating, he quotes Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, thus:
It’s not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that’s almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We’re just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It’s a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it’s really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what’s happening.
Engelhardt himself resumes –
If drought–or call it “desertification”–becomes more widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole regions no longer have the necessary water, how many trails of tears, how many of those mass migrations or civilizational collapses are possible? How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to experience? And what then?
These are questions I can’t answer; that the Bush Administration is guaranteed to be desperately unwilling and unprepared to face; and that, as yet, the media has largely refused to consider in a serious way. And if the media can’t face this and begin to connect some dots, why shouldn’t Americans be in denial, too?
But there’s a small sign of mainstream media beginning to sit up straight: a new site on water scarcity, Circle of Blue, set up by a small network of like-minded journalists. One to add to the watch list…
