During my journey I found myself working 12 to 14 hours a day, for an hourly wage, with no health insurance, retirement, and a mountain I was trying to ascend called “Mt. Sallie Mae”. The elevation was quite high and the tools I was using were quite primitive. Being laser focused on this effort left very little time for much else. However, during this period a person traveled into my path who taught me a valuable lesson, one that took me quite a time longer to fully embrace. The lesson I learned was how to be present, pay attention, and appreciate the experience of rebirth we get to see each day by simply tilting our head up into the sky at the beginning and end of each day. That gift of seeing the sunrise and set each day can teach us a multitude of lessons if we are open to receiving them.
One lesson I am learning is that our economic and environmental systems are not mutually exclusive. The decisions we make economically have consequences environmentally, and our failures to learn from the lessons of what nature tells us, do not create the conditions that allow humanity to “win”, nor do they allow us to create systems that form the foundation of a nurturing partnership. This has manifested itself in how the world reacts and deals with how the climate is impacting subsistence farmers.
During the past two years we have read stories that the “migrant caravans” from Central America need to stop and that these “criminals” needed to stop coming. We get caught up in trying to treat the symptoms and not the root causes. In the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the main reason for this “step migration” is that climate change decimated the livelihood of a large number of subsistence farmers whose reliance on the land is the only way they can support themselves. When this happens, they are forced to move to urban area’s that don’t have the jobs and are overrun with crime, so to simply survive they need to look north. How does the U.S. denial of climate change and its inability to provide its neighbors with the tools it needs to adapt work against us? Lt. Commander Liver-Leighton Barrett, U.S. Navy (Ret) puts it this way “unfortunately, improving resiliencies to drought and other damaging environmental trends don’t feature amongst the projects the U.S. Administration aims to underwrite in the region. This is unfortunate, as it is consequential, since although trends such as human trafficking and gangs are serious problems that must be addressed, if policies do not address the serious climate change factors at play, they will ultimately be ineffective.” His point: If we help farmers figure out a way to work their land, then perhaps they might not have the desperate urgency to seek a better way of life at the U.S. border? People generally want to stay in the places where they have invested sweat equity. So, would helping them develop climate mitigation and adaptation strategies be better than a wall? Might we use those same strategies to help the farmers that live in the Middle of our own country?
So, what might be the consequence of ignoring climate change in the Southern Hemisphere be? Shifting your focus to West Asia/Middle East and Syria can prove quite constructive. In this part of the world wars over water have been going on for thousands of years. The earliest conflict over water occurred there over 4,500 years ago when a dispute over access to irrigation water led Urlama, King of the City State of Lagash in ancient Mesopotamia to cut off the water to its neighbor Umma, thus depriving it of water. Water is a scarce resource in Syria, it receives less than 250mm of rainfall a year and is considered “water scarce”. In 2006, Syria experienced a multi seasonal, multi-year extreme drought that contributed to agricultural failures, economic dislocations and population displacement. This dry period has continued and has been described as the “worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the fertile crescent many millennia ago” (Gary Nabhan, as cited in Fernia and Werrell (2012). In 2008, the U.S. State Department received a diplomatic cable from Damascus, Syria. In it the author warned of the implications of the drought and how the displacement of large numbers of subsistence farmers could create the “perfect storm” where population displacements could act as a multiplier of the economic and social pressures the country was experiencing. The effects of the drought were compounded by the highly inefficient flood irrigation systems that Assad utilized made worse by the subsidizes that were provided to the production of water intensive crops. Between 2006 and 2009, around 1.3 million inhabitants of eastern Syria were affected by agricultural failures. By 2011, the UN estimated that 3 million people were affected with 1 million people experiencing food insecurity. During this time 1.5 million of these displaced people moved from rural farms to urban cities, thus adding to the pressures that ultimately resulted in the Civil War. It is 2019, have things gotten better? One wonders if an under reported motivation of Erdogan’s desire to “ethnically cleanse” the Kurds in Syria has anything to do with securing increased control of water resources? In an assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change by the World Bank they concluded that projected decreases in annual precipitation would lead to worsening water scarcity for Southern Turkey and Syria, so is that any part of the current story?
The sun will rise and set, the earth will continue its orbit, the question is will we listen to what Mother Nature is telling us? Will we start “valuing” the planet and realize that climate is upstream of economics, and that the planet may recover from what we have done to the planet, but that people might not survive what they have done to it? If we “value” life, then shouldn’t the economic decisions we make be geared towards developing nurturing and resilient pro planet choices? Doesn’t that start with looking at those at the U.S. Southern Border as “Climate Refugees” and developing systemic solutions that allow us to implement adaptive solutions that mitigate the harm, and develop innovative answers that allow us to work in partnership with the planet? I see the sunrise, have learned how to appreciate it in the stillness of the morning, so that is why I am hopeful, but we need to come to the recognition that if we continue to view the economy and environment as mutually exclusive systems; that the sun may set, but we might not be here to see it. So, lets all work towards making sure the light will always shine?
Economic Journeyman 