Climate change and the destabilization of global agriculture.
As our climate changes, so will our world. The climate that has enabled our species to survive, thrive and conquer the world is changing. Our foundations of civilization and modernity are being flooded and scorched by our new erratic weather system. Food prices are increasing at the supermarkets due to monsoon like rainfall that are flooding the farmers fields here in the UK. Along with this, increasing temperatures and less rainfall in the southern hemisphere, are decreasing yields.
“Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it…
If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn’t like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.’ For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, ‘This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.’ They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don’t even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam–those who vanished.
But it’s not going to be this easy for the Takers. It’s going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they’re doing is *right*… Giving it up would mean that all along they’d been *wrong*. It would mean they’d *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood…. It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.”― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael