The floods in Iowa have spurred James Howard Kunstler to talk about ‘Katrina in slow motion’.
Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US Public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices. Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry — all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).
Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these “inputs” have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying x-amount of “inputs” (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.
The discovery of cheap abundant fuel in the form of oil was a dire mistake, that has enabled humans to crank up the rate of destruction – destruction that is inherent in the system that we call civilisation, but is more like a culture of empire. The natural worl has been assaulted at an unimaginable rate, along with our communities, skills, food diversity. We have been conned by huge agribusiness to do things their way – bigger, faster, more uniform, better (perhaps not!).
Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking-and-screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We’re heading into the Vale of Malthus — Thomas Robert Malthus, the British economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked farming allowed the global population to go vertical. Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed this to the “green revolution” of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now, along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.
For many of the world’s peoples, the expansion of empire and the impact of global economics, has brought famine, pestilence and war. More than a few people will be glad to see ‘the rich’ suffer, as the oil based economy crashes, and reduces the ability of the rich to impoverish and steal from the poor (thinly diguised as trade and economic development).
Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it’s also possible that, at some point, they’ll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on “the system” that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.
The yet-more-ominous thing here is that shortages of food and oil are two fiascos that are pretty clearly predictable for the second half of the year. That’s bad enough without figuring in the “unknowns” that could kick up American hardship a few more notches.The hurricane season just got underway — obscured for the moment by the bigger weather story in Iowa. The fate of the banks is a train wreck still waiting to happen. As it occurs — also heading into the high political and hurricane seasons — we could find ourselves not only a nation wet, hungry, and out-of-gas, but also completely broke.
And because we have used oil to devastate the natural environment, things are likely to get worse than most can imagine. In pre-oil times ‘poor’ people had forests, rivers, oceans from which to glean a basic living. If you had no money you could forage for wild foods or go fishing. People also knew what they could eat, where to find it. land was held in common, for the benefit of the community. All these things have gone. Lost to the endless march of ‘progress’, that wasn’t progress at all, but simply ‘the rich’ stripmining the world, and hobbling us, tying us into the system that was created for us with their vision of one world economy.
The longer we subscribe to this corporate and heirarchical worldview, the worse things will be for us and other creatures as it crashes. The sooner we say ‘enough’ and walk away, and start seeking food and energy independence in local communities that value and cherish their local land bases, the softer will be the inevitable end of all things ‘civilised’.
