I always read Kuntsler when I need to feel more depressed than I already am. He doesn’t disappoint this week:
These are not your daddy’s or granddaddy’s floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people starting living out on that stretch of the North American prairie. The vast majority of home-owners in Eastern Iowa did not have flood insurance because the likelihood of being affected above the 500-year-line was so miniscule — their insurance agents actually advised them against getting it. The personal ruin out there will be comprehensive and profound, a wet version of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with families facing total loss and perhaps migrating elsewhere in the nation because they have no home to go back to.
Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US Public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices. Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry — all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).
Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these “inputs” have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap.
And all of this, he asserts, will reach peak train wreck time in the fall - just, coincidentally, as the U.S. is about to elect a new president.
On a national level we’ve not really talked about how the Midwest flooding might affect the harvest; haven’t even really addressed how it all might be linked to climate change. And at times I suspect all of this is deliberate; let’s now panic the population, even at a time when panic might be warranted. But then panic, as Kunstler says later in his piece, could lead to hoarding of both food and gasoline - which just makes things worse. So there’s a good reason, perhaps, for the Kevin-Bacon-in-Animal-House routine - “Remain calm, all is well!” Because to admit otherwise might just make things even worse.
