As the world burns
Bob Morris @ Nov 17th 2007 07:56 - Category: drought
There are droughts worldwide now, with the US southwest and southeast suffering badly from them. TomDispatch has a long, thoughtful post about this asking, what happens if water really does run out somewhere? And doesn’t come back?
2 Comments »
2 Responses to “As the world burns”
Leave a Reply
Comments subject to deletion at whim of capricious webmaster. Disagreements are ok. Flames, trolls, and right-wing attacks are not. If your comment doesn't appear immediately, then moderation is on, thus there's no need to re-send it.
(However sometimes the anti-spam programs here go awry. Email us if your comments seem to vanish into the void.)
DJ on 17 Nov 2007 at 10:09 am #
We’ve had a preview. Few of us were alive at the time, but Steinbeck captured it for all of us to read in high school. Wiki summarizes:
“The Dust Bowl was a series of dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1933 to 1939, caused by severe drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation… This ecological disaster… caused an exodus from Texas, Oklahoma, and the surrounding Great Plains, with over 500,000 Americans left homeless.”
Half a million new homeless out of a population of 123 million Americans.
Bob Morris on 17 Nov 2007 at 5:08 pm #
Now imagine if, apocalyptically, it wasn’t 500,000 people but major cities instead.