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This is not your granddaddy’s Dust Bowl. This is the other day, in the Texas Panhandle.
On Tuesday, the leader of the free world will mount the dais in the U.S. House of Representatives to describe the state of the Union. He will speak of a country recovering from a pandemic, an economy roaring back from near-recession, and he will assure us all that it will soon be 1950 again in America.
Meanwhile, more and more thinkers and writers — and fewer and fewer political “leaders” — are pointing out, often with barely restrained panic, the multitude of growing existential threats rising against not only this country, but the industrialized world.
A current headline in The Nation asks; “Should We Start Preparing for the Evacuation of Miami?” Alarmist? Not when you admit that there is no doubt whatsoever that Miami is drowning, sinking into rising seas. It is considered to be the most endangered coastal city in the world. High tides are flooding more areas of the city more severely every year. The rising saline water table is destroying the sewer system and threatening the fresh water supply. Then there are the hurricanes, more of them every year, each one, it seems, more destructive than the last.
One of them just about flattened Fort Meyer last September. It destroyed 5,000 homes and badly damaged 30,000. They are still finding bodies in the wreckage this week. Thousands of people are living in their cars, or in tents, or in relatives’ overcrowded houses, or in motels they can’t afford, waiting for the government aid for which they are qualified, but which the various government agencies are too overwhelmed to process. FEMA and the rest are falling further and further behind and getting deeper and deeper in debt every year.
Soon — perhaps when the next Category 5 hurricane hits dead on — Miami will begin to die. And soon after that, six million people will be looking for a place to live. To prepare for this, authorities in the Miami region have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on giant pumps that pump encroaching seawater back out to sea, and that are overwhelmed by three inches of rain; have elevated some critical roadways, often in ways that make nearby flooding worse.
The governor of Florida is far more worried about drag queens than he is about the impending fate of Miami.
The weight of those millions of refugees will not fall on what is left of Florida, of course, they will be headed elsewhere. And to prepare for their arrival — preparations that require public works projects on a vast scale over a very long time line — the federal government is doing precisely nothing.
Another hair-on-fire article appeared a week ago in Compact magazine, with the bone-chilling title “The Coming Dust Bowl.” Referencing the increasingly acute water shortages afflicting the American Southwest, the writer makes the point that the underlying drought has been a growing crisis for 50 years — an implacably spreading cancer on which the authorities have pasted Band-aids. Now two of the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell, are on the verge of becoming dead pools, unable to pass water downstream in the dwindling Colorado River or to drive their dams’ hydroelectric generators.
Where this is headed is as plain as Miami’s future; a new American Dust Bowl making a large chunk of the country uninhabitable and spurring a “massive wave of internal migration spilling out of the states affected by the crisis. And it now looks like the crisis will begin to bite at a time when the United States is polarized at home and overtaxed abroad.”
Then there are the wildfires, the melting of the permafrost, the dwindling supplies of oil, the crashing health care system, the failing electric grid. Etcetera.
But by all means gather the family around your console TV on Tuesday night and watch President Biden describe another wonderful day in the neighborhood, close your eyes and pretend it’s 1950. Lord knows we can use the distraction of a good fairy tale.
You are a little too optimistic, Tom, if you ask me.
1. Soil degradation– 30 harvests left…maybe.
2. Phosphorous depletion
3. Decline in sulfur production as fossil fuels deplete (source of most of our sulfur)
3. Potential war with Russia and/or China
4. Other, inevitable regional wars (Israel-Iran; Pakistan-India, etc..), which could easily go nuclear.
5. Brewing avian flu pandemic
6. Demographic bust
7. Imploding the debt-based, growth-dependent economic system
8. A totally disconnected, delusional, and pathological leadership class.
9. An OECD population completely ill-equipped for a powerdown, in terms of skills, knowledge, and psychology.
10. Aging, finicky nuke reactor fleet we cannot sustain in the face of all of the above, but which we’ve made no plans to safely shutter.
Oh yeah, mass extinction, ocean acidification and hypoxia, and ecosystem collapse. Almost forgot.
Both tallies are very comprehensive. But, in light of recent doings, I would add ‘earthquake’ to the list…I remember a bumper sticker that was popular at the turn of the century. I will paraphrase, “Mother Nature is coming back. And is she pissed!”
Should We Start Preparing for The Evacuation of Miami? We already did. Moved my MIL out of there in July 2021. She was the last of the family residing in Miami and living in the standard three bedroom house on her own. Of course, some recent New York immigrant bought it. Good luck with that. The traffic is horrible around there. Almost perpetual traffic jams.
The upside, the house is in one of the higher areas in South Miami. The reality is, these flood and not-flood zones are relatively small – maybe eight or ten square city blocks. Therefore and regardless, one is still going to be flooded in the surrounding area.
They will not prepare for an evacuation and I will tell you why. Plain and simple denialism. Not the denial of climate change, or even the threat of hurricanes and flooding. It’s the everyday, just gettin’ by and makin’ a living kind of denialism. We carry on until we can’t kind of denialism. And then, of course, it will be too late, and the crises will be as described by Tom and others.
It’s like death and taxes. We know it is coming and there is nothing we can do about it.
Our selfish interest is the family’s current situation in Jacksonville in the northeast corner. That Florida city actually has a reason for being there and will continue to do so. My thinking is people may flee South Florida, but they will still want to live in Florida. Therefore, our properties in NE Florida will continue to hold value. And hurricanes seem to be allergic to this concave corner as they get steered more into the Carolinas.
Miami will be a shining example of unintended consequences and the rapid collapse of value. That’s it, Wiley E Coyote levitating in air past the edge of the cliff. Splat!
You’re right; behavioral inertia – an object at rest tends to remain at rest. Humans are conservative where change is concerned. We prefer the devil we know – that sort of mentality seems to be at work with the Florida issue.