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As the world burns

Bob Morris, on Nov 17, 2007, 7:56 am

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?

Category: drought | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

  • http://www.asymptoticlife.com DJ

    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.

  • http://polizeros.com Bob Morris

    Now imagine if, apocalyptically, it wasn’t 500,000 people but major cities instead.