Catch-Up

Thank the Universe I had some antidepressant left from when K got sick. Decided to take it again to get me through the holidays. Finally seems to be working. Depression lifting.

One of the more interesting things over the slow-news holidays was a piece by Reynard Loki for AlterNet titled: Sorry You Can’t Have Fries With That: 10 Foods That May Disappear Thanks To Climate Change.

Here’s the list: Apples, avocadoes, beer, chocolate, coffee, peanut butter, potatoes, rice and beans, seafood and wine!!!!! (Eleven items actually. Beans and rice are sufficiently different to me.) I don’t know about anyone else’s eating habits but taking those items off my grocery list is a pretty severe hit.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about a couple of days back. Changing weather patterns are already changing the national landscape of our crops.

I think future—and much more limited selection—crops will be owned by a select few families who have had the resources to commission science-driven predictions by experts of future climatic impact. I suspect they already own huge swaths of land in areas their reports tell them will be arable. (Some of us may be lucky enough to work the land for them as indentured servants but with computerized machinery doing all the planting and harvesting, jobs will be relatively few.)

A select few are already prepared to ride out the coming storms in their hidden fortresses tucked away discretely in hard to-access-areas that can provide water and fuel as needs arise.

The futurist guys over at Meland headquarters think the super-rich West Coasters have fallen back into two lines. The first line likely composed of the really rich who straddle the crests of the ridge of mountains extending from central Oregon down the eastern side of California. Others may be hidden in the national forests at the feet of those hills. (It really isn’t too much of an exaggeration to suggest that many of the properties of the really rich will be coastal in the foreseeable future. Any of today’s rich folk who hide in the hills on the west coast of California from a Gold Beach to Medford line, down through the Six Rivers National Forrest to north of Santa Rosa, will find themselves on an island.)

The second line of our hiding nobles will be the string of super-rich fortresses decorating the spine of the Rocky Mountains like monstrous, concrete bunkers. They are high and hidden. (Somebody knows where they are: builders, maids, security, chefs, suppliers. Somebody.)

Another line of super-rich will be found along the crests and valleys of the East Coast mountains running from northern Maine to Georgia’s northern border. Rising tides will push back the eastern coastline and people will be compressed between that mountain range and the new approaching outline of the sea. Florida will become nearly intolerable from the heat and disappearing land so most of those folks will be pushing up northwest. The Gulf is dead and those rising waters are going to reclaim huge portions of the southern states whose residents will head north also. (Sure there will still be people in all these areas but they are likely to be survivalist types who get along just fine eating snakes and alligators.)

The Southwest is going to be like an oven that’s been put on pre-heat: it’s going to start out hot like it typically is now (116 degrees not rare), and ratchet up to some lethal levels. Racist as it might seem, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Texas, New Mexico and Arizona repopulated almost entirely by South Americans and Mexicans. Americans may huddle in the major southern and southwestern cities constricted by limited bubbles of air conditioning, but the baking land will be populated by men who have endured the sun’s fire for hundreds of years already.

(On the upside, there will be jobs for persons willing to endure the hellish heat to install solar farms. If we’ve screwed things up so much that we are about to suffer massive weather changes, we better learn how to take advantage of all the sun’s excess energy real quick.)

If we lose California as a food source—and the deep south including Florida—food available to each of us becomes far less; far, far less. In a society used to unlimited bounty this will create major stress. This stress will have within its clutches the most heavily armed nation in the world. Let the culling begin.

The SR (Super Rich) will need a few followers to ensure their existences but the rest of us pretty much have to go away so that we don’t burden the food chain. The compression of all Americans into smaller land mass (with those Americans all armed to the teeth) is bound to bring out the best in us.