The Resilient World

There's been a spate of coverage from the AAAS conference on the subject of environmental refugees, stemming from a figure given of 50 million by 2020. An expression made popular by Lester Brown, it refers to people to migrate due to deteriorating environmental conditions.

There's been some push-back from the chattering classes about that figure - some think that there are already that many, some very cynical about any news of hardship coming out of Africa in particular. We may have ourselves to thank for this - there's no doubt in my mind but that there is a scale of tragedy such that the farther away an event is, the greater the body count before it is newsworthy. (By that measure Australia should by rights need to be struck by a meteor before being mentioned in the US press - but hey, we speak distantly related languages and somewhat similar histories etc - yeah, you know what I'm talking about).

Back on point - I don't know the basis for the figure nor if it is credible. But common sense suggests that declining productivity and burgeoning demand translate into want, and there are consequences to this want. Drought-stricken populations on the move provides a great subject for a dystopian novel, but it makes for lousy reading in your morning paper. The race is on - can we put the chattering classes to work applying the vaunted human ingenuity to these problems before it is too late? Yeah, we've got a checklist for that - lessee,

cut the Agricultural Research Service, check
wipe out foreign aid. Oh yeah
halt climate change research. No brainer
eliminate job-throttling programs that cut back CO2 emissions? Now you're talking!

I've got it - let's give all those poor people Facebook and Twitter accounts. They can use them to find jobs ... when they migrate.

Maybe a better idea - let's just change places!

Amplify’d from www.physorg.com

"In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate," she continued, outlining with the other speakers how climate change is impacting both food security and food safety, or the amount of food available and the healthfulness of that food.

Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa, many of whom risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain from Morocco or sail in makeshift vessels to Italy from Libya and Tunisia.

The flow recently grew to a flood after a month of protests in Tunisia, set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment and poverty, brought down the government of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said Michigan State University professor Ewen Todd, who predicted there will be more of the same.

"What we saw in Tunisia -- a change in government and suddenly there are a whole lot of people going to Italy -- this is going to be the pattern," Todd told AFP.

"Already, Africans are going in small droves up to Spain, Germany and wherever from different countries in the Mediterranean region, but we're going to see many, many more trying to go north when food stress comes in. And it was food shortages that put the people of Tunisia and Egypt over the top.

"In many Middle Eastern and North African countries," he continued, "you have a cocktail of politics, religion and other things, but often it's just poor people saying 'I've got to survive, I've got to eat, I've got to feed my family' that ignites things." Read more at www.physorg.com