by Alex Evans | Aug 29, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in order to grow crops for biofuels instead], the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.
We first posted on this subject on Global Dashboard back in March, and Vidal’s right to be worried. Here’s a link to the one page table we published a few months back showing how the major scarcity trends reinforce one another – and how it’s absolutely the issue of food security we really need to be worrying about.
What’s alarming isn’t just the scale of the challenge, but the extent to which managing it requires a degree of policy coherence both within and between governments that just isn’t there.
by Alex Evans | Aug 14, 2007 | Conflict and security
If you’re off on holiday shortly and casting around for some readable tome, try Thomas Homer-Dixon’s outstanding The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon’s 300 page essay on global risk trends and the prospect of a multidimensional ‘perfect storm’ is a real page-turner that skips neatly from the decline and fall of Rome to the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, seeking to extract the key lessons from each to apply them to the current predicament.
The book’s recurring theme is that resilience is all about being able to make creative use of moments of breakdown so as to turn them into processes of renewal – rather than sliding into outright collapse (a la Jared Diamond). So, for instance, after we’ve had Homer-Dixon’s epic description of the city fathers of San Francisco enlisting heavy artillery pieces to blow up one of its more well-heeled avenues – this in a last, desperate, and ultimately successful attempt to create a firebreak – we learn that the earthquake and fire led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.
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by David Steven | Aug 1, 2007 | North America
In 2004, we had Howard Dean, until the ‘I have a scream’ speech gave the commentariat a chance to say, ‘enough, already.’ For the 2008 presidential election, we have Ron Paul looking increasingly comfortable in the Dean spot. Coming in fast from the fringes – check. Webby campaign that circumvents traditional party structures – check. Inspires unquestioning loyalty among the true believers – yes, yes, and yes again. (more…)
by David Steven | Jul 31, 2007 | Conflict and security
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins first described the idea of ‘brittle power’ in a book published twenty-five years (!) ago. Modern energy systems, he warned, were highly vulnerable to shocks, ‘easily shattered by accident or malice.’
In a recent interview with the excellent Grist magazine, Lovins describes his efforts to promote a more resilient energy system in Iraq:
Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq] and there’s a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S. political authorities on the grounds that they’d already given big contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.
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by Alex Evans | Jul 12, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Regular readers of GlobalDashboard know that we’re big fans of fourth generation warfare theorists William Lind and John Robb. Both writers have warned persistently that 4GW isn’t just something that happens “over there”, in Anbar or Helmand. It’s “over here”, too, whether “here” is low-intensity war in Mexico (see the Economist on Mexico’s drugs conflict a couple of weeks ago), or proliferating use of 4GW tactics by home-grown insurgents in the UK.
Lind, reviewing John Robb’s new book, summarises the latter’s conclusions approvingly:
Robb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security but in de-centralization. What Robb calls “dynamic decentralized resilience” means that, in concrete terms, security is again to be found close to home. Local police departments, local sources of energy such as roof top solar arrays – I would add local farms that use sustainable agricultural practices – are the key to dealing with system perturbations. To the extent we depend on large, globalist, centralized networks we are insecure.
John Robb, though, thinks that as the use of 4GW tactics “over here” proliferates, things will develop much further:
Members of the middle class will (take) matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security — as they do now with education – and shore up delivery of critical services. These “armored suburbs” will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boost their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems.
And in case you thought the idea of decentralised local energy and food independence was only for survivalists in Michigan: we have news for you.
