While Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination debate and compete over whose healthcare reform plan is best, and over whether or not it’s okay to talk with “America’s enemies,” and while Democrats and Republicans lob attacks over whose foreign policy is more muscular, there is a lengthening list of global catastrophes all of which are simply being ignored.
Let’s look at that list:
Famine According to the United Nations, there is a global food shortage approaching quickly, egged on by the rising cost of fertilizer, the declining availability of water, the erosion and urbanization of cropland, and the substitution of ethanol-producing crops—primarily corn—for food crops. By next year at this time, we could start to see starvation in Asia and Africa on an unprecedented scale, with no stocks of grain in reserve to relieve the crisis.
The collapse of the US dollar With the world’s reserve currency plunging in value to record lows, and the US trade deficit soaring out of control, leaving the Federal Reserve with no ability to stem the fall, it’s only a matter of time before the US becomes a broken economy, unable to fund its deficits any longer. Already, shop owners in New York are accepting Euros and Canadian dollars for goods, seeing those bills as a better store of value than the Greenback. The OPEC nations, for sure, will not be far behind. Iran has already set in motion plans to accept only payment in Euros for its oil. The loss of the Arctic ice sheet It is increasingly looking like it is only a matter of years before the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in the summer. Greenland is losing its huge cap of ice too at an accelerating rate, way past the outer limit imagined by UN scientists only last year. We could be looking at sea rises measured in meters in a matter of years, not decades, if this keeps up. There is growing evidence too that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf too is melting at an increasing rate, adding to the risk.
An end to commercial fishing Fish stocks in most of the world’s key fisheries—a primary source of protein for much of the world—are nearing collapse, and the habitats, thanks to the scouring of sea bottoms by industrial fishing fleets—are being destroyed forever. Add to that the acidification of the oceans thanks, to airborne and river-borne pollutants, a process which is destroying the plankton at the bottom of the oceanic food chain, and we have another major food crisis on our hands, not to mention the loss of the world’s primary carbon sink. Climate disruptions The oceans are warming, with a concomitant risk of ever worse El Nino phenomena in the Pacific, and the slowing and shrinking of the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents critical to the global weather patterns upon which the world’s current population centers have depended. This doesn’t just mean more severe storms along America’s coasts. It means, most likely, growing drought across the nation’s midsection, a loss of snowpack in the Rockies, critical to irrigation in the western US, and catastrophic droughts in Africa, Asia, South Asia and South America, and possibly even Spain and southern Europe.
Mass extinctions It's not just the polar bears and black rhinos. Everything from songbirds to whales, from sea otters to penguins, from the whole class of amphibians to even cottontail rabbits, are facing extinction. In fact, there are predictions from knowledgeable and cool-headed ecologists that in short order we could see the mass extinction of perhaps half the species on the planet--a tragic and dangerous event only seen several times in the half billion years of life on Earth. Resource wars and mass migrations The US, obsessed with controlling events in the world through its use of military power, has been run into a corner. The American military is now stymied in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and is at this point incapable of responding to yet another military crisis. Yet the world, for all the above reasons, is heading full-speed towards an era of global resource wars, as overcrowded countries full of starving people begin to press outward to claim lands with needed water, soil and other resources. Desperate migrants will also predictably be fleeing to safer havens, the US included. No mere fence is going to stop this inexorable flow of desperate humanity.
There are responses one can imagine which might be taken to confront or at least prepare for each of these crises, but they will require innovative and inspirational leadership of a kind not seen in American politics in generations. They will require, too, a massive shift in thinking on the part of the American people, who will have to shed their parochial isolationist and triumphalist mindset, and begin to see themselves as just another part of a global humanity. We are talking about threats and challenges greater than those posed by the Cold War, World War II, or even the Civil War.
Yet astonishingly and depressingly, not one of the candidates running for the presidency is addressing any of these critical issues, or is even attempting to speak to American voters about the crisis that lies ahead. Equally astonishingly, given that we are about to hand our children and grandchildren a devastated planet and a hopeless future, nobody seems to be demanding that they address these crucial issues.
That being the case, what is the likelihood that our next government will take any kind of effective action on any of them? ______________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
It really pointed out the problems with our generation. Seems we are headed to doom. I want to help, but seem the public wants war, and more law, and more this and that. Humans are strange creatures, they always think that the space around them is there territory and justify in anyway that the space is theirs for rule. We need a many things in life and think this would categorize itself as more a utopia society of lifestyle. I want a world of peace after justice. Where people can live free (truly free) free from government rule of life. Sure we have to have some authority but not so intruding on the lifestyle of mankind. My childrens children will have to live the world we are now creating for them all. The children need us right now to keep fighting the unjust ways of life.
I hurt inside, from the life we live now. We need to stop war, stop rule over others, and stop bombing the sh*t out of other countries. The eutopis life probably wont come until there a drastic change in human history that reshoes thinking of life. Where we on the planet are faced with something that if we dont will effect all of us (even the ruling rich elite classes) I think the rich people of the world who continue walking around thinking they are better than all the other under them that have no money and are struggling are the main problem. It is capitalism that has dominiated humankind and destroyed its most essential part of love? We should unite mext month and bring to light the many problems the world faces from a different perspective. War is not just the answer but a problem fueled by the need for wealth in our society. http://worldagainstwar.org as I have heard will be larger and more resilant that any other protest in the history of mankind. And from this we can see that we are in deed headed for a change...
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Tri 'cat' Oxtail (0 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 15 comments)
on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 3:53:42 PM
No candidate will dare to point out coming calamities, because it will not endear them to the voting public. When I say it will not endear them to the voting public, I mean it will cause their rejection. That would make for a public service career that would comprise uttering a few paragraphs. Were a person standing for office to do such a thing, they would no longer be a candidate, they would be a martyr.
The media needs to step forward in this exercise, and the efforts made on this site and quite a few others are correctly taking the lead. In the past week or so, I have heard some bits of economic truth leaking into the MSM's propaganda stream, and that may be because the problems are becoming increasingly difficult to hide, and so, impossible to ignore. It is unfortunate that the other trends noted in Dave's excellent article will likely come to general attention in the same way. That is to say, too late.
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John Sanchez Jr. (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 900 comments)
on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 4:27:18 PM
Some time after World War II, it was as though things changed. I think of 20th Century history beginning with living off the land and helping one's neighbor. Everyone became institutionalized after times got good with tuition grants and school lunches and the twin programs we elderly would be hard put to live without. If not sports and electronic gadgets, what would people have to think about now? Most of the schoolchildren since VietNam have been poorly instructed in how to "make it" if food is gone and money is too. All of the safety nets in the world will not save them if they don't know how to plan.
So here we go again! How do you turn a consumer society into one which can subsist in meaner times? I agree they are coming. In the United States many do not have the basic knowledge to ask questions.
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Margaret Bassett (19 articles, 1115 quicklinks, 24 diaries, 615 comments)
on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 11:22:49 PM
Lindorff right again. The Democratic debates have focused on health care and immigration, two issues that are of national concern, particularly the former. And it's all about America, and the sufferings of Americans. Americans regard the fact that a fifth of the nation has no real medical insurance as tragic. None of the candidates of either party have alluded to the fact that few of the Iraqi people have adequate health care; that their medical system has been shattered by the war; or, for that matter, that USA is morally-bound to rebuild a country President Bush's criminal invasion has largely destroyed. We hear talk now and then from Congress and the governors about the need to rebuild our own infrastructure, crumbling around the edges, and not a word about Iraq. Power failed in South Florida for a few hours? Tch! Tech! Try living in Baghdad! Somebody once defined fascism as "organized selfishness." Does that sound like anybody we know?
Sherwood Ross
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Sherwood Ross (153 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 88 comments)
on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 9:20:32 AM
