The disaster report you don't want to read

“Think of the starving children in India,†American mothers of the 1950s said to motivate their children to join the clean-plate club.  Most of us kids couldn’t figure out how leaving food on our plates would feed the starving in India, and we didn’t try, because India seemed so remote from our lives.

Fifty years has brought revolutions in communications, transportation and the global economy, but the problems of “the other half†still remain remote.  They shouldn’t, because — empathy aside — those problems are coming ever closer to enmeshing us, too.   

This summer, while we are being distracted by health-care-change protesters, Michael Jackson tributors, media food fighters, and the lack of really hot weather in northwest Connecticut, truly alarming things are going on in the world, and very few people, here or for that matter anywhere in the United States, have been paying attention.  

If you prefer not paying attention, then don’t bother to read the rest of this column, and certainly don’t look at the recently published 2009 report of the Millennium Project, on the state of the future.  (Available at millennium-project.org/millennium/sof2009.html.)

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The report paints a very dire picture of the future — and not of the far future, either, or only of the one that will affect India.   Current conditions, the report says, are creating a concatenation of disasters, bringing together in terrible fashion seven linked crises.  These are: pollution, food shortages, diseases, wars, natural disasters, crime and the recession.   

The report is not produced by some kooks out of touch with reality; the Millennium Project is headed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs and the report is backed by the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation and similar reputable entities, and draws on the statistics and opinions of 2,700 experts from around the globe.

The project’s experts point out such usually-avoided facts as that there are currently 15 wars going on.   While the United States is involved directly in two, there are a dozen other wars whose local violence could spread.  The continual conflict in Somalia is just one; such wars produce millions of refugees that strain the world’s resources (and its store of compassion). “Half the world appears vulnerable to social instability and violence,†the report says. “This is due to rising unemployment and decreasing food, water and energy supplies, coupled with the disruptions caused by global warming and mass migrations.â€

By the year 2025, the report predicts, 3 billion people could be without adequate supplies of water.  That number includes many in North America, by the way.  Ask anyone in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico or parts of Texas or California about the already-begun “water wars,†and you’ll get an earful on that score.

The ravages of diseases such as AIDS, swine flu, and antibiotic-resistant “superbugs†will affect half the world’s population, the report says, and surely some of those who will suffer and die from these diseases and infections will be nearer to us than in Africa or Asia.

Pollution that is adversely affecting our environment is not being slowed, the report warns, which means not only that the polar ice caps are melting, but also that such phenomena as the dead zone off San Diego, an ocean area that cannot support life because it lacks enough oxygen, is doubling in size each decade, and that 30 million acres of forest are disappearing every year.   (For comparison: Connecticut has about 3 million acres of farmland; imagine this much forest acreage disappearing every month.)  

The combination of such depredations, augmented by overfishing and by increasing reliance on meat as food rather than on vegetable matter, is pointing the world toward future incidences of mass starvation, in the manner of the starvation now taking place in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

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Can Americans really continue to believe that the United States will not be affected by the needs (and willingness to do anything to meet them) of tens of millions of poor Africans, Asians, South Americans and other poor people even closer to home?  

Currently, 1 billion of the world’s 7 billion people are undernourished, U.N. statistics show.  The report warns that the food crisis will worsen because of an obscure fungus, Ug99, that attacks wheat and has the potential to wipe out crops all over the globe.

If it happens in Asia, Americans don’t usually learn about it, which is perhaps why the 354 natural disasters on that continent in the year 2008, affecting more than 200 million people, went mostly unnoticed by us.  But the number and intensity of such natural disasters is increasing, and more of them will be affecting North America in the near future — which is when I expect we will wake up to their terrible results.  Can we handle a Katrina per year?

Climate change will also bring about more cataclysmic floods, storms and droughts.  The possibilities have been exacerbated by the world’s governments needing just now to pay attention to lessening the effects of the recession and therefore not funding infrastructure projects that could mitigate the effects of natural disasters.  

Climate alteration and increasing urbanization are also adversely changing patterns of insect and livestock distribution.  One result has been an increase in old diseases that we thought we had once completely conquered, such as yellow fever, diphtheria, malaria, even cholera.

The report suggests one way to ameliorate some of the crises: a combined program by China and the United States, on the order of what was undertaken to send men to the moon in the 1960s, aimed at combating climate change.  “We know more about [how to do this] than rocket planner Werner von Braun knew about how to land a man on the moon when President Kennedy announced that famous goal,†the report insists.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.