Surviving
In The Tough Times Ahead
By Emily Spence
20 January,
2009
Countercurrents.org
Ian Sample's "Billions
face food shortages, study warns" [1], based on findings by researchers
at Washington and Stanford Universities, points out some of the progressively
difficult conditions that will likely lead to widespread starvation
in times ahead. Its conclusions fit well with ones posed in Paul Chefurka's
"World Energy and Population Trends to 2100" and "Peak
Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in
the Room" [2].
Such reports, certainly, are cause for alarm and dismay. This is because,
with increasing credibility, they warn that humankind is quickly approaching
critical choices in terms of whether we, collectively, want to undertake
the necessary modification to shape the world to reasonably serve
life in the future or plan to bequeath a hell onto the generations
of people and other life forms that come after ours.
Obviously, ethically prone people -- ones strongly oriented towards
cooperation, support of justice and altruism, as well as ones at the
opposite end of the spectrum -- extremely self-centered, greedy, ruthless
brutes, can make out in good times, the moments of abundance and plenty.
However, the lean periods, ones in which there is competition over
dwindling resources (i.e., contention over a finite supply of food,
territory, water, oil, etc.), all but guarantee that the individuals
and groups with the most power will prevail over their weaker counterparts
and there are only two main routes to escape the pending conflict.
One path is for groups to hide (like Anna Frank's family) and hope
not to be found or, alternately, they can flee adversity (regardless
of the form that it has, such as religious persecution or lack of
jobs) into a new location and hope to not be deported. In other words,
they can try to stay alive by concealment in the difficult region
assuming that sufficient provisions are available to support them
there or reside in some other place with circumstances more auspicious
to maintaining an enduring, less guarded existence.
Primarily, it seems that two types of assemblages will prevail in
the times of paucity that loom ahead. One will include persons, such
as members of farming cooperatives, who are pretty much self-reliant
while in natural environments containing most of the indispensable
materials needed to foster their long term furtherance. The other
kind will consist of nearly all persons in the ultra-wealthy class
in that they possess enough money and command to get whatever is wanted
when wanted even if only on the black market or through legal and
illegal forms of theft, such as occurs through some eminent domain
rulings, certain Machiavellian Wall Street behaviors, usury related
loan practices and other deals for which the gain often winds up in
offshore bank accounts.
Meanwhile, the countermoves against the pilfering that occurs with
eminent domain procedures (i.e., for water or land rights) or in outright
wars -- especially in regions that have ample supplies of uranium,
gas, oil, agriculturally rich soil, gems and other coveted resources
-- will probably take place with greater frequency and fervor in the
years ahead. Invaded populations have learned that they can successfully
fight back. Recent evidence in the Middle East makes this fact a reasonably
correct supposition to entertain.
Similarly, there will likely exist increasing attempts by authorities
to control distressed populations in resource depleted lands, as well
as in ones rich in material abundance into which the desperate masses
could try to flee in huge numbers, which would obviously inundate
the reserves at the latter sites if they were allowed to come in full
measure. (The population is expected to hover somewhere around ten
billion in less than fifty years from now. At the same time, the most
highly populated areas, in many instances, are the ones most at risk
for crop failures, severe water scarcity and other shortfalls.)
In tandem, it seem reasonable to assume that prospective immigrants
and the inhabitants already settled in such favorable locales could
both be tightly controlled by military force to prevent riots and
other major social disruptions from taking place due to the enormous
disparities in assets held by the haves and the have-nots. As such,
the rules concerning allocation of needed supplies and the conditions
under which they are apportioned would probably be tightly proscribed.
In fact, rationing nearly always takes place when pervasive shortages
prevail, i.e., during and immediately following W. W. II and, to a
lesser extent, the Great Depression. All the same, some people in
most societies always seem to get shorted, anyway, such that they
have resort to garbage dump hunts, mud cookies, soup kitchens and
tent parks with Hooverville-like conditions as a last bulwark against
death.
Additionally, both the individuals with might, military based or otherwise,
to back their claims to greatest goods access and persons tucked away
in safe, resource abounding enclaves (i.e., the self-sufficient few
who happen to be in out of the way spots) will, in all likelihood,
make out just fine no matter what. Their needs will be met even when
others in their countries face glaring deprivation. For the most part,
this sort of result has always been the case throughout history in
the sense that whomever has adequate necessary stores, regardless
of the ways that they are garnered, generally does well regardless
of the prevailing surrounding conditions.
At the same time, it somewhat exemplifies the way that evolution,
itself, has always operated in the sense that survivors, during periods
of privation, are those with the greatest advantages when compared
to less fortunate peers. Therefore, people will have to be increasingly
resourceful to endure in the worsening hard times on the way. As David
Smalley said, "Survival of the fittest is the ageless law of
nature. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for
adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the
unavoidable, to harmonize with existing and changing conditions."
Moreover, it is unambiguously clear that humankind cannot go on as
is with always an ever greater population, ever ramped up resource
ravage to maximize utmost personal profit, ever more severe climate
change difficulties and so on. The combined damage of these processes
will not stand and, so, a large number of people will either have
to accept drastically altered lifestyles and assorted types of curtailment
(i.e., pertaining to family size, consumer activities, travel and
energy consumption to name a few) or many of them will face the most
tragic sorts of failure on a scale barely imaginable.
In spite of many of our government and business leaders seemingly
understanding that deep changes are necessary to be carried out, they
are not willing to avert even half of the funds used for current war
activities, amounting to trillions of dollars lavishly spent each
decade, towards support of a sufficient supply of energy generated
from benign sources like wind, solar and geothermal activities delivered
with opportune timeliness. In other words, global warming will possibly
not be adequately addressed fast enough to offset some truly terrible
effects like a significantly raised ocean level and crippling heat
waves. Most of all, they will not be prone to limit ecologically unsound
economic activities, nor publicly push for the deep cuts associated
with energy conservation that are desperately needed.
In a similar vein, it does not seem likely that food and other material
aid will ever be tied to birth control education and provision. On
account of this contribution lacking, each generation of recipients
saved from untimely demise will produce many more additional people
so that the overpopulation problem in localities that, from an environmental
standpoint, cannot support them with which to begin will only become
more exacerbated over time, especially so in light of imminent sweeping
scarcities.
At the same time, one can assume that, with major food deficits on
the way, the majority of the produce derived from huge factory farms
owned by multinational corporations will go to the highest bidders
on the global markets. Simultaneously, there could exist problems
with transporting sufficient supplies of it into urban areas or far
off regions due to lessening availability of oil needed for the shipments.
This occurrence, in turn, could intensify the overt and covert resource
struggles currently taking place in areas of the world possessing
fossil fuels.
All of these factors in consideration, one has to, first, ask himself
whether he is doing everything that can be envisioned to ensure his
own and his family's continued existence for a long duration. In other
words, is he setting up circumstances that can be fairly certain to
promote survival in the rough times ahead?
Secondarily, is he undertaking all that he can to try to soften the
blow for others? In short, is he maximizing their chances to carry
on during the increasingly hard times? Indeed, they could become so
precarious that the present number of people, approximately 35,000,
dead each day from malnourishment, actually, seems a modest quantity.
Furthermore, anyone who entertains the illusion that we can "save"
all life everywhere or, at last moment, humanity will turn everything
around relative to dire global warming impacts, overpopulation, equitable
sharing of income and requisite resources, protection against environmentally
devastating opportunism, etc., needs simply to look at the overall
history of our species thus far on the planet. As an alternative,
he can, instead, consider events pertaining to the final settlement
at Easter Island, deer on St. Matthew's island, our world wars, our
current battles in the Middle East and Africa, the ongoing shaky state
of the world's financial markets; the staggeringly high extinction
rates for other species, such that almost one third have vanished
from 1970 to 2005, which correlates with human commercial advancement
and the swift rise in our population; the quickening pace of deforestation
and accompanying large-scale desertification, the accelerating methane
release from permafrost and other formerly sequestering sites, the
rapidly transpiring deglacialization across the entire globe with
its impending impact on delta zones and rivers, the spreading ocean
dead zones or any number of other deeply ruinous occurrences in progress
to envision the difference between reasonable and outlandish expectations
relative to events that will take place in the future.
In the end, individuals and groups will have to energetically and
conscientiously look out for their own best interests. However, this
does not mean that they will need to hoard or should forego cooperating
with others. Indeed, they can enhance the chance for surviving and
surviving well if they plan and work together to build the community
bonds that foster mutual aid and uplift. As the Dali Lama suggests,
"If any individual is compassionate and altruistic, wherever
that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when
that person faces tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will
come to help."
[1] The report "Billions face food shortages, study warns"
is located at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
2009/jan/09/food-climate-change.
[2] "World
Energy and Population Trends to 2100" can be obtained at http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html
and "Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the
Elephant in the Room" is available at http://www.321energy.com/editorials/
chefurka/chefurka051207.html.
Emily Spence is a progressive living in Massachusetts.
She has spent many years involved with assorted types of human rights,
environmental and social service efforts.
