I have felt lately like I have joined a “preppers book club” as friends discuss books looking to an uncertain future, not as survivalists but as preparers or preppers. Concerns for the future range from electromagnetic pulses frying our electronics, our fragile electric grid, even that subtle and far-off specter of climate change. Preparing for the unknown is not a bad idea—if done strategically and with a clear view of relative risks. In fact this is what we at Getting Serious Now have been urging for some time.
A scenario from Lloyd’s articulates a very real concern for our future that we should all prepare for. Yes, Lloyd’s of London, the venerable insurance company that adds an air of authority to projections into the future. Their recent report is getting some much-deserved attention lately with an excellent synopsis and climatological backgrounder from Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, alarmingly called, “Food System Shock: Climate Change’s Greatest Threat to Civilization.”
Master’s synopsis of the Lloyd’s Scenario is well worth reading. They see “uncomfortably high odds,” pegged at an 18% chance over the next 40 years, of catastrophic disruptions rippling through the global food system, and then to the world economy and international affairs. Crop losses, food price spikes, food riots, stock market drops, famine, civil wars, terrorist attacks, and failed states.
“Yes, we have heard these warnings”—but let’s listen again with some real-world projections from Lloyd’s scenario: Crop losses (corn and soybeans down 10%), food price spikes (four times prices seen in 2000), food riots (Mid East, Latin America), stock market drops (European loses 10% value), famine (one million starve in Bangladesh), civil wars (Nigeria), terrorist attacks (US), and failed states (Mali). For a relatively fragile world system, these are shocks indeed.
“Still, just projections”—not so fast! Masters calls up the most extreme weather year of recent times, 2010, to illustrate how realistic these projections are. A stagnant jet stream brought Russian grain failures and a heat wave killing tens of thousands, food price spikes, riots in the Mid East and North Africa tied by many to the Arab Spring—among other disruptions across the globe. What strikes me as so alarming is that at the beginning of 2010, the USDA projected good global harvests and low prices. These experts seemed to have little inking in January what that very year would bring!
The key to the catastrophic global disruptions in Lloyd’s specific scenario is a few things happening at one time, a strong El Niño causing a US corn crop failure along with failures in two other regions of the world, coupled with two well-known diseases attacking global wheat and soybeans. The nature of our global food system and of global climate connections, such as when warm Pacific waters of an El Niño cause droughts and floods around the globe, makes the deadly combination of crop failures just a matter of time. These odds will grow if we allow population to surge, industrial agriculture to remain the norm, and if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Not a pretty picture. Yet, I find curious solace in a haunting poem from Wendell Berry, that gives me a literal and figurative direction.
February 2, 1968
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
Certainly we need to prepare, to be smart preppers. But even more important is to work as hard as we can individually and collectively to reduce the chances of the Lloyd’s Scenario. The beauty is that decoupling as much as possible from the global food system (heresy for sure), localization of our food systems (naïve indeed), and depending on our local foodsheds and keeping them healthy (idealistic to say the least) will help us prepare for the worst and make sure the worst doesn’t happen.
It isn’t all about local solutions though, we need to have wise national and international policies. Not the corporate, industrial, business-as-usual solutions predictably springing up, but “whole solutions” as Wendell Berry would propose—those that don’t create new problems along the way. As much as we might want to retreat politically into our local shell, we need to elect and support wise, compassionate, and clear-thinking leaders, in spite of the odds, who are willing and able to pursue these whole solutions.
As the day warms this beautiful May morning, I need to wrap up this piece, plow through all the other so-important pressing work on my desk, and get out to the garden I have been neglecting and get working on some of Berry’s truly whole solutions.
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