While the Big Potato Burns...

“Wheat.  I’m dead, and they’re talking about wheat.”
--Woody Allen, Love and Death

The old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression is that if your neighbor is out of a job, it’s a recession, but if you are out of a job, that is a depression.  Catastrophes and disasters, both the natural and the man-made kind, are received with  much the same ego-centrism. 

Not a day went by during the summer of 2010 when you did not see news headlines on every major media outlet in the United States about oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, and rightly so.  It was, and still is, a big news story.  In fact, the real tragedy is that even though the impacts of this spill will last centuries, it will probably be leaving the headlines soon, now that the principle villains in this little melodrama have won the propaganda war.  Truth is the first casualty when profit battles public health.

However, numerous stories with at least as big, and frequently bigger impacts never got airplay in this country, because they happened to our global neighbors, and not to ourselves.  In Nigeria, for example, by some estimates as much as 100 million barrels of oil were spilled between 1960 and 1997, and the trend continues to this day.  In essence, the oil industry in Nigeria self-regulates, because the government is weak and incapable of enforcing much of any kind of environmental rules.  New spills are hardly ever reported, because they are now just a fact of life.  The wonder is that the Niger Delta is still habitable at all – soon, Nigeria may join Somalia as an ungovernable wasteland, and oil is directly to blame.

Elsewhere, beginning in May of 2010, and up to the time of this writing, 1,420 people have died and over 1,700 are missing in China as massive flooding and mudslides have wracked that country.  The $25 billion Three Gorges Dam project is in danger of being swept away by floods, or at the very least severely damaged by an inundation of toxic flotsam and jetsam from major flooding and erosion from upstream.  This story has received a little bit of front page play in the U.S., but not much.

Pakistan has been devastated by the worst flooding in that country in at least 80 years; the terrorist organizations which we have known for decades pose the greatest threats, to India to the East and to all-points West, are also providing the greatest amount of humanitarian aid to the several million displaced Pakistanis.  Who will those people be most sympathetic to in the future?  Westerners preaching at them about the evils of fundamentalist Islam?  Or radical Muslim leaders who actually did something for them and their families in a time of need?

The list of stories like this goes on and on.  All corners of the globe are experiencing traumatic crises either directly caused by or at least made worse by global climate change, but in this country we largely ignore these stories.  There are valid evolutionary reasons for this phenomenon; frankly, as Douglas Adams noted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the one thing no human being could ever hope to survive is a sense of perspective.  Nevertheless, our selective reading of global news comes down to a form of triabalism which no longer serves a useful function.  It may not be comfortable to think about people vastly different from ourselves living in places we will never visit, but for our own good we need to start paying attention.

A good place to start is in a country which the West has spent the better part of the last century demonizing.  Russia has a long history of paranoia – again, with reasons paleopsychologists would have no trouble explaining, given that a list of countries who have not invaded Russia at some point in the past millineum might be shorter than a list of those who have.  And Russia’s callous abuse of their own natural resources – to the point of using tactical nuclear weapons as instruments of civil engineering – have given even the most sympathetic of westerners reasons to turn a cold shoulder when the bear gives a cry of distress.

However, we might wish to reconsider our attitudes towards Moscow after the events of this summer.  Following a heat wave of epic proportions – a heat wave predicted several years ago, by the way, due to a new “feedback loop” created by excessive peat moss consumption in a post-permafrost melt era – Russia is now experiencing runaway wildfires, which they have virtually no resources to combat.  It doesn’t help that they disbanded their national fire service a couple of years ago, choosing to decentralize – the Tea Party movement would be proud of their anti-government furor over the past decade, though some Russians are now beginning to yearn for a stronger central government again.  To understand how vast these fires are, picture a line running from Denver to Houston.  Now, burn it.

Given the magnitude of these fires, it is remarkable that so few lives have been lost.  “All” that has been burned has mostly been comprised of crop land – along with a naval research facility, several villages, and a good deal of infrastructure.  No major cities have been directly impacted yet, although that may still change, if the Russians don’t get some help soon from Mother Nature.

Still, leave aside the question of long-term global consequences (some have theorized leftover radiation from Chernobyl might be spread globally; others worry about particulate matter pollution spreading globally as often happens following volcanoes) and assume the Russians are able to put out the flames on their own.  Assume, too, that the human component, the requisite humanitarian aid to all those injured or displaced by this catastrophe, can all be handled internally by the Russian people, and that no outside assistance is required.

Why, then, would the rest of the world have any reason to care?

Putting aside all moral and ethical objections to global apathy, there are practical reasons why the global community should care about its individual parts – “we are all connected” sounds like either a commercial for an international telecommunications consortium, or else a variation on one of a thousand insipid, kumbayatic campfire songs at an “Up With People” day care facility.  However, “we are all connected” is, in every conceivable way, an apt description of the 21st century economy.

We should care what happens in Russia because what happens there, much like what happens anywhere else on the planet, has the inherent potential to complicate all our lives, even to extremes unforeseen and unforeseeable.

In the case of the burning Russian Steppes, the chief danger (outside of the long-term consequences which we are glossing over at present) lay in the destruction of wheat crops.  On July 23rd, before the widespread fires began destroying even more of the nation’s wheat and barley fields, Russian Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik announced that low rainfall and high temperatures had damaged 32% of all Russian grain crops.  There is no telling how much will eventually be salvaged, but is difficult to conceive of even half of the usual Russian crop being available, and that is only considering part of the equation – the distribution network is also going to be affected by these fires, with railroads, highways, trucks, fuel depots, communications centers, grain silos, all being reduced to ashes.  Even if the grain matures, there may not be any way to harvest it and ship it to market.

Agricultural economics has always been an interesting shell game, with devastating losses for some producers resulting in a bonanza for other producers, and surely there are some Kansas wheat farmers who are going to feel like they won the lottery this fall and next winter, but any discussion of the implications of wheat yields should not stop just with producers.  Consumers world wide will be affected, and the consequences will quickly spiral farther than any rational analysis of cause and effect can follow.

Easy to see consequences will include higher prices for bread and cereal; these are things with which even American Idol fans can relate.  Harder to see will be the effects of 3rd world hunger exacerbated by higher prices for smaller quantities of grain.  More children than would have otherwise gone hungry will starve, but this is a tragedy against which our sense have been innured.  “Surely you’re not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot?”  Yes, even Christian sensibilities can handle the idea that a child somewhere will go hungry.  That, after all, is a big part of why remote controls were invented – we got tired of hearing Sally Struthers asking why no one will think of the children.

But what of the child whose father reacts the way Mr. Myrtle Personell would react, were his children to be going hungry through no fault of his own?  There are 6 billion people in this world, most of whom, we imagine, would not be averse to taking up arms if it meant life or death for our children.  It sounds like a grand thing to do, fighting for your family, but the problem is that even though this biological impulse is almost universal, it never really does any good.  You kill other human beings, and now their children go hungry just like yours.  Misery may love company, but it does not have much time for real solutions. 

We sympathize greatly with the people of Palestine, for example, because expecting people caged up like animals and then deprived of every necessity to react with anything other than all available means – which, in their condition, are almost exclusively violent means – is just… and there is no other word for it… stupid.  Of course they react violently.  They are being slowly starved to death.  The fact that firing unguided rockets into your enemy’s cities does nothing but alienate your potential benefactors elsewhere in the world does not displace your fundamental need to do something for your starving children.  We would react the same misguided way.

Now picture dozens of other nations being slowly starved to death because they cannot afford to buy wheat.  Picture some of those nations being places where the United States has reasons of national security to not want rioting in the streets – say, Egypt, because such violence would threaten our historical ally Israel, or Indonesia, because they are a key (and often underreported) component of our fight against al Qaida, or Japan, because a colapse in the Japanese economy would bring down global credit, and with it, cause a descent into another Great Depression, or a host of other places like South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and on and on, where we get vital natural resources and precious minerals we cannot do without.  If social unrest due to famine were to occur in any of these places, our troops would have to be dispatched; we would have no choice.  It would be a matter of our vital national interest; our men and women in uniform would go in harms way because somebody who needs to feed their children and cannot took up arms in a foolish attempt to secure grain, and instead started a war.

That is why we should care about what happens in Russia, even if we choose not to care because they are our fellow human beings.

For the time being, we can afford to just wait and see what happens on the steppes.  European nations are pouring aid into Russia, and we suspect that the fires will eventually burn out, as summer gives way to fall, and somehow a global food crisis will be averted this time, or at least mitigated to the point that it does not cause World War III.  But at some point, someone is going to have to come up with a way to make a sense of urgency a viral quality.  Global Warming is now a four decade old concept, and there are still people in positions of authority who deny that it is a fact.

Myrtle knows better, and she’s a chicken.  She’s also a chicken who, after watching the evening news, really wants a shot of vodka.  We sympathize, sister, we really do.

Happy farming!