Stewards of Plenitude

We inhabit a world that for the fortunate offers all that could be desired for human satisfaction. A plenitude of foods, stable personal shelter, the security of law and order, a country blessed with ample fresh water so lacking elsewhere in the world, our health-care and educational needs assured by our societal-minded government agencies. In fact, we are entertained by all manner of cultural and artistic exhibitions by the talented among us, along with tax-payer supported institutions which help us to understand our past to better form our futures.

With such a beneficent ambiance how is it that we have never learned the discipline of governing our predilection toward greed and super-acquisitiveness well beyond our needs? Because we are human, with all the faults of humanity - and more's the pity. Because it is pitiable that we continually demand more of anything that can be available, from our basic necessities of life to the kind of luxury goods that enhance life, but aren't at all required to sustain life.

For our short-term satisfactions before going on to greater consumption of energy and resources, we demand more of everything. In the process managing to pollute our very atmosphere, the air we breathe, compromising our health and that of the flora and fauna that live alongside us in our geography made our very own. We deplete existing resources and search for additional or compensatory resources. We complain about the ever-rising prices of commodities, although it's our wasteful use of them that add to their greater costs.

In seeking solutions to our energy-absorbing and depleting lifestyles we are now turning to the unspeakable; growing grains for the purpose of establishing a replacement energy resource, because, we say, it's sustainable and reproducible and never-ending. Huge corporations will take over from family farms to grow corn to produce ethanol to run alternate-energy-source vehicles. In countries where corn is a nutritional diet staple having suddenly to face a challenge for this life-saving food source, this is a disaster in the making.

We've gone from grazing corn-fed cattle which require enormous amounts of vegetation capable in itself of feeding large portions of a population to feed a relative few wealthy meat consumers. Turning now to the vegetation itself, vulgarizing it into an alternate energy source. Which will also, in its use, produce as much polluting carbon as any other energy source. Are we Man the Wise? We're impacting our closest environments on every level, and deleteriously.

With climate change we face the additional problems of an increasing lack of fresh water, not only for direct human consumption but also to water domestic animals and growing crops. With a potentially notable future decrease in the world's fresh water resources we have the spectre of farmers and herders in third-world (emerging markets economies) countries where each becomes the antagonist of the other, both struggling to maintain themselves. The herders' flocks require grazing fields in direct competition with the farmers who require the fields for agriculture. We can feed greater numbers of people with grains than with meat.

This scenario of herder-versus-farmer is what has propelled the crisis in Sudan. The Arab animal herders in competition for grazing land, opposed to the need of farming communities to safeguard arable land to grow crops to feed their population. The growing scarcity of resources compels attitudes that blame one side for complications suffered by the other. Where at one time the herders and the farmers made an effort to accommodate one another, where herders could graze their flocks on lands recently harvested, a larger influx of herders has swamped the ability of compromise to the detriment of the farmers.

People will be faced in the near future, if predictions about global climate change materialize to the extent forecasted, with decreasing geographical areas on which to settle and share resources. Our increasing use of arable land in developing economies for road infrastructure, factories and housing settlements results in less land available for agricultural purposes; particularly when the best agricultural lands are precisely those which have been targeted for 'development', further compounding the problem.

With the gradual advent of global warming comes the potential for encroaching desertification, along with coastal erosion, particularly in Asia where rising ocean levels and storm surges will affect low-lying areas and deltas in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China, whose populations will be forced eventually to higher ground in massive migrations. Human settlements in areas close to or even below sea level will be imperilled and human habitation become impossible in those and other critical regions of the world.

Those fortunate areas of the world like many in the West which are less populated than the East will be faced with the necessity of absorbing larger and larger numbers of people forced out of their traditional homelands by the juggernaut of climate change. Population density will increase dramatically in parts of the world where it is already thought a sufficient number of immigrants have been absorbed, impacting on traditional demographics. Will human beings be sufficiently welcoming of a new reality that flings people in greater numbers together in a tighter geographic area?

It's always been known that there is a risk in establishing sea-surging tsunamis. Those risks have been multiplied by the inevitability of global climate change.