calclimateag.org
reports the following. (we all knew this in broad outline. Now what?
Climate change is creating widespread disruptions in our food and farming system.Farmers and ranchers face unprecedented challenges with increasingly scarce water, extreme heat, flooding and wildfire events, and unpredictable weather and pest patterns. Even experienced farmers are struggling to stay in business, and new farmers face not only climate-related challenges but also a lack of access to affordable, secure land. Ongoing structural and discriminatory barriers exacerbate the challenges for farmers of color. Climate-related crop losses are on the rise, driving up food prices and contributing to an increase in the number of people who are food insecure and hungry. Farmworkers are on the front lines, exposed to unhealthy air and facing the reality of working on more dangerously hot days. They and their families and communities are among California’s most economically vulnerable people and also often lack access to healthy food, safe drinking water, and homes that are affordable, air-conditioned, and energy efficient. Because the stakes are high, re-envisioning how we grow food must be one of our highest and most urgent priorities.
The conclusion would be very rough times within the next couple of harvest cycles. Since these trends are getting worse, not just in the future but ongoing. What to do? It seems to me that this leads to, first, pockets of death and violence followed by regional failures and million-scale dying from heat and or starvation and violence leading on to species death as we join the sixth species extinction that we created. There is nothing in the pipeline strong enough to alter this line of causality.
Can we talk about it? Practical questions: how to manage ourselves families and communities. The mainline question for philosophy has always been learning how to die. OK. How? (while I go back to painting
Painted a few days ago at a seaside fish restaurant in Penang, Malaysia
email responses to doug@dougcarmichael.com