Lapis Magazine

The Coming Permanent State of Emergency by Ross Gelbspan

Long before the systems of the planet debuckle, democracy will disintegrate under the stress of ecological disasters and their social consequences.

Ross Gelbspan has been an editor and reporter at the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Harper's. He covered the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 and co-authored a four-part series on the Earth Summit in Rio. The following article is excerpted from The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate (1997, Addison-Wesley).

Two different men independently expressed this chilling insight to me — William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the EPA and now CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries; and Dr Henry Kendall of MIT, the recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize for physics, who has devoted his retirement to the study of critical global trends.

When I first heard the remark, it seemed shocking yet somehow irrelevant to the climate crisis. Only after the thought had burrowed its way into my consciousness did the connection became apparent: If we alter the balance of natural relationships that support our lives, those changes will ripple through the complex relationships that make up our society.

The question that struck me next was why this understanding has played no part in the climate debate. Environmentalists naturally focus on the ecological consequences of climate change — not on its impacts on civilization. Scientists, struggling with the urgent demands of their mission, focus on remedying the gaps in their knowledge and improving their methodologies — not on the political and economic consequences of their discoveries. And business leaders, insofar as they think about climate change at all, focus on its potential impact on their competitive position or its ability to affect their market share — not on the delicate balance between a democratic society and a corporate state.

Government leaders rarely address problems that cannot be solved before their next reelection campaign. The shelf life of many political issues is four years. In this age of instant response, businesses likewise are largely captive to the short-term demands of their shareholders and directors. In our late twentieth-century fast forward world, institutions respond to events only when they reach emergency proportions. Yet given the long atmospheric lifetime of greenhouse gases, the destructive instabilities of the global climate will continue long after we reduce our emissions — as we finally must.

In the United States the mere threat of impending climate change has impelled the oil and coal industries to engineer a policy of denial. While their campaign may seem at this point no more sinister than any other public relations program, it possesses a subtle antidemocratic, even totalitarian potential insofar as it curbs the free flow of information and dominates the deliberations of Congress. The stress caused by climate change is lethal to democratic political processes and individual freedoms.

For MIT's Kendall, it is the poor, precarious, nations of the developing world that would face the threat of totalitarianism first. In many of these countries, where democratic traditions are as fragile as the ecosystem, a reversion to dictatorship will require only a few ecological states of emergency. Their governments will quickly find democracy to be too cumbersome for responding to disruptions in food supplies, water sources, and human health — as well as to a floodtide of environmental refugees from homelands that have be come incapable of feeding and supporting them.

Diminishing food and water supplies already pose a grave threat to the survival of democracy in the developing world. As climate instability intensifies, that threat is bound to become reality. "The world's food supply," says Kendall, "must double within the next thirty years to feed the population, which will double within the next sixty years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century — as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops — population will outrun its food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change — a series of droughts or crop-destroying rains — and we're looking down the mouth of a cannon."

No country in the developing world better embodies the potential for war, disruption, and totalitarianism than China.

Until a few years ago, Chinese agriculture was able to support most of its 1.2 billion people. Farmers maintained adequate levels of food production by drawing from aquifers, and the country imported a relatively small amount of grain. But in the last few years, many of the aquifers have collapsed or are collapsing, heavily stressed from overdrawing — and malnutrition is becoming wide spread, especially in western and northern China. In 1995, for the first time in its history, China imported more grain than it grew.

As the farmlands failed, farm workers lost their jobs, and now about 120 million jobless and landless Chinese citizens — a number equal to almost half the population of the United States — are in the midst of a mass migration from the countryside to the coastal cities. There the urban population is growing by 10 percent a year, and the density of residents is three times greater than the national average.

A third of China's croplands are undergoing extreme erosion. Water shortages are becoming so severe that within the next thirty years, the entire country will reach what biologists call the "water stress" benchmark of 1,700 cubic meters of water per person. Large sections of the country will reach the "chronic water scarcity" benchmark of 1,000 cubic meters per person. Nearly half of China's 500 major cities already lack adequate water supplies, and a quarter of them face acute shortages, according to data from the World Resources Institute and the World Bank.

For the last decade the lower reaches of the Yellow River, known as the cradle of Chinese civilization, averaged 70 dry days a year. But in 1995 it was dry for 122 days. More than a hundred large Chinese cities stagger under acute water supply problems, and only six of those meet safe drinking water standards. In China's arid northwest region, peasants must walk up to ten miles a day to secure their daily water supplies.

Given China's record on human rights, it is not hard to foresee, as the food and water crises worsen, the government detaining internal migrants on a mass basis and forcing them to labor on tiny, nutrient-depleted plots to squeeze the last possible bit of crop growth from the underwatered and overtaxed land. Another possible outcome is one for which precedents exist in the history books in an endless string of repetitions. Like its neighbor, North Korea, China may very well create a serious international disruption — if not an outright war — to divert its people into fearing some fabricated "foreign threat." I would imagine that, as China's domestic pressures escalate, national security advisers all over the world will report periodically to their presidents on their country's military readiness to engage China if the need should arise.

This scenario is one that could result from the food and water crisis — before the more severe impacts of our increasingly unstable climate make themselves felt. When those impacts are included in the scenario, an observation made by Harvard's James McCarthy takes on a new immediacy: "Had the climate change we are now beginning to see occurred 150 years ago, the world might never have been able to sustain its current population of five billion people."

In one respect the climate crisis parallels an economic crisis: it hits poor people hardest and first. "Vulnerability to climate change is systematically greater in developing countries — which in most cases are located in lower, warmer latitudes," according to Dr Cynthia Rosenzweig, a research agronomist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Dr Daniel Hillel, professor emeritus of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts. In the already impoverished countries of the South, they observe, "cereal grain yields are projected to decline under climate change scenarios, across the full range of projected warming." As grain supplies in the poor world dwindle, "agricultural exporters in the middle and high latitudes (such as the United States, Canada, and Australia) stand to gain" from the higher prices they can command. "Thus, countries with the lowest incomes may be the hardest hit."

Fortunately for prosperous and freedom-loving Americans and Canadians, Ecuador and China and the Middle East, with their growing food and water shortages, lie in different quadrants of the globe. North America is a blessed portion of the planet, rich with fields of wheat and plains of cattle, diverse and beautiful geographies, and an unshakable two-hundred-year tradition of democracy and personal liberty.

Can it survive the social explosion that is gathering just beyond the horizon? Today 25 million environmental refugees are roaming the world, squatting on other people's land, migrating to over crowded cities, sneaking under cover of darkness across borders, scrabbling to survive. Their number exceeds all other types of refugees – political, economic, and religious. But North Americans don't see very many of them — as of this writing, most are located at a comfortable distance — mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China, Mexico, and Central America.

In thirteen years, if not before, under current conditions, their number is expected to double. But if predictions of increasingly severe conditions — floods, droughts, storms, and temperature extremes — are realized, the tidal wave of environmental refugees will dwarf even that projection. At that point, the number could grow tenfold, to more than 200 million homeless migrants wandering the planet. This forecast is not the speculation of a chicken little. It is based on an eighteen-month research project using input from several UN agencies, the World Bank, refugee assistance groups, scientists, and field workers from all over the world.

In their extraordinarily well-ignored report titled Environmental Exodus, published in 1995 by the Climate Institute, Dr Norman Myers, a visiting fellow at Oxford University, and researcher Jennifer Kent examined areas of the world that are both the poorest and the most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change.

Assuming that crop yields continue at 1985 levels:

• In the next thirteen years sub-Saharan Africa's already stressed food production will decline by 20 percent – leaving more than 300 million people in a state of permanent malnutrition.

• Changes in the monsoon patterns that provide India with 70 percent of its rainfall will inflict severe shortages and disruptions on the country's projected population of 1,190,000. Even a half-degree Celsius temperature rise will reduce the wheat crop at least 10 percent.

To put this in perspective, recall that a half-degree Celsius increase is far below the lower limit projected by the IPCC. Skeptic scientists have called such a rise in temperature "negligible," but given its potential to cut into India's food supplies, I would be surprised if many Indians agreed with that disembodied characterization.

• In thirteen years 3 billion people — more than half the population of the developing world — could be cutting down trees for fuel and firewood. As displaced peasants slash and burn their already-depleted tropical forests, they will further reduce the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon dioxide and will release it instead into the atmosphere, where it will accelerate the pace of warming.

• Disease outbreaks, driven by changing climate patterns, will parallel the spread of poverty and displacement. As refugees cut trees and burn grasslands to make new settlements, they will unleash rare or remote microorganisms, infecting themselves and contaminating others. Even without Ebolas, climatic instability is fueling the recurrence of age-old diseases in the poor areas of the world. A 1994 outbreak of plague in India was directly caused by climate extremes. That summer blistering temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, combined with an unusually long season of monsoon rains, produced exceptionally high levels of humidity. That humidity created the breeding conditions for fleas in grain-storage centers. Later that summer, flooding from the unseasonal rains spread garbage through the cities, which triggered an explosion of rats. The fleas attached themselves to the rats, then spread the plague to humans, hundreds of whom died of its effects. Subsequently, flood-driven outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever took place in parts of the country where they had never before occurred.

Long before sea levels rise by two to three feet over the next century — and they are projected to continue to rise after that — the flood of environmental refugees will likely have overwhelmed both our compassion and our capacity to help. Bangladesh has lost 600,000 people to cyclones and storm surges over the past thirty years. In the next fifty years, given its vulnerability to coastal destruction and inland flooding, Bangladesh could, according to conservative estimates, contribute 26 million more refugees to an increasingly homeless world, according to Myers and Kent. Another 12 million refugees would be driven from the flooded Egyptian delta. Anywhere from 70 to 100 million Chinese citizens would be forced to migrate to new habitats, and 20 million residents of India would be displaced by the compounding effects of climate instability.

Where does democracy fit in this picture? Can there be any doubt that within the next century the migration of some 200 million environmental refugees will force many governments into martial rule?

Even in the United States, with its geographical variety and natural abundance, climate change could have explosive political repercussions. Climate change, for one thing, alters the distribution of rainfall. As a result, the continental interiors that produce the grain that feeds much of the world may well experience recurrent and increasingly severe droughts.

In 1988, the hottest year on record to that date, a midwestern drought depressed grain yields by 30 percent, dropping U.S. crop production below consumption requirements for the first time in three hundred years. The same year, Canadian grain production dropped by 37 percent.

The interrelated web of the global environment includes even the fertile plains of North America. "Unexpected 'surprises' may well accompany the buildup of greenhouse gases," according to Rosenzweig and Hillel…."Under changing climate conditions, farmers' past experience will be a less reliable predictor of what is to come….A seemingly small change in one variable — for example, rainfall — may trigger a major unsuspected change in another; for example, droughts or floods might possibly disrupt the transport of grain on rivers. One 'surprise' may then lead to another in a cascade, since biophysical and social systems are interconnected."

In 1995 scientists studying the natural history of our own great plains arrived at an unnerving finding. They discovered that the wheatfields could turn — in a decade — into a vast desert. As recently as the turn of the century, a prolonged drought launched a migration of sand dunes across the face of Kansas and eastern Colorado. The discovery brought home the fragility of the ecosystems that provide our food. The climate period we live in — scientists call it the Holocene- – is apparently not as stable as we once thought. Small changes in the climate can lead to large changes in ecosystems.

This is what is so frustrating about the arguments of the oil and coal lobbies, and especially their skeptic scientists. Their minds must work overtime to contrive ways to deny so fundamental a reality There are far more interconnections between our physical environment and our social existence than we will ever be able to identify, let alone control.

In a perverse way, many of them are contradicting their own political positions. They advocate expanded freedoms and a drastic reduction in the power of government to control its citizens. Yet in their blind presumptuousness, they believe they will be able to minimize and control people's reactions to the disturbed forces of nature. They tell us we can solve our problems through more economic growth, but they ignore the fact that such growth has impacts on the physical world. They tell us, more specifically, that any agricultural problems that are likely to arise will be taken care of by the self-correcting forces of the marketplace, but they refuse to acknowledge that the very farms on which the agricultural marketplace depends are vulnerable to the ravages of climatic change.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the droughts in the wheat-growing areas of North America are not so severe that they starve our own population. They only starve those in the poor countries who depend on us for their basic nutrition. It is a scenario Argentine diplomat Raul Estrada Ayala calls "a green North and a brown South."

The greenery of such a North would be deceptive. It would conceal a political and moral time bomb. It is hard to imagine that a society that fortresses itself against the rest of the world could continue to be an open society, vibrant with freedom, productively democratic, peaceful, and secure. It is hard to imagine that it would be able to nurture those human qualities we prize — hard work, ingenuity, compassion, and intelligence.

Environmental disruptions in the poor areas of the globe will not remain conveniently compartmentalized within their borders. If displaced refugees in South America, Asia, and Africa continue to burn trees and grasslands for fuel and settlements, that removal of vegetation will accelerate global warming. The plants and trees of the terrestrial ecosystem are the largest absorbers of carbon dioxide, which otherwise rises into the atmosphere. Nor is it the environment alone that overflows national borders. The economy is also, global. As more and more inhabitants of the poor countries are displaced, the emerging markets of the developing world will begin to collapse — exerting a tremendous downward pressure on centers of trade, finance, and manufacturing in the North. Without the continued development of emerging markets, the international economy will begin to contract, severely eroding the basis of its survival.

Listen to William Ruckelshaus, today a prominent captain of industry who knows the inner workings of big business. But as the first EPA administrator and as a delegate to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, he is also keenly aware of the threats to the global environment. (As one of the Watergate related casualties of President Nixon's "Saturday Night massacre," he was willing to sacrifice his professional career for the sake of democratic principles.)

"This is democracy's time on the world stage," he said in an interview. "With the collapse of authoritarian systems in the Communist world — which proved even less capable than democracies in dealing with global warming and other chronic environmental problems — this is our chance to show we're capable of coping with our own complexities.

"If we do not bring ourselves to solve these chronic problems, all of our free institutions will be challenged. The institutions themselves will be the first things to go. I don't honestly believe that global warming can't be solved. Not that we can turn on a dime, but we can and should set in motion new policies that will come to fruition over the next several decades.

"The real question is whether we can deal with them in the context of freedom. It is a very open question. We could well be forced to revert to some sort of dictatorship to act in the face of the kind of problems posed by the global climate."

If governmental repression is at least comprehensible, however, it is harder to visualize the more subtle threat to our freedoms that might be imposed by the largest and most powerful industry in history — the one most threatened by the gathering climate crisis.

I surely don't mean to suggest that corporations are eager to abuse citizens' civil liberties. They are not in the business of government. No long-range corporate strategic plans include repression. But when their basic survival becomes threatened, that situation could change in ways we are not prepared for. Certainly they will lean with all their corporate weight on the government to protect their interests. But whatever the government can't do, they will try to do themselves. Survival is the motive force of any enterprise — especially those that have been tempered in the crucible of the ruthlessly competitive late-twentieth-century global economy.

Private and corporate security forces have already grown significantly over the last twenty years. In pursuit or protection of profits, companies have intercepted mail, tapped telephones, and conducted extensive surveillance of adversaries. Corporate whistle-blowers and grassroots community groups have endured harassment. An international information war is being waged over trade secrets and has become so pervasive, it is now a major focus of the CIA.

The early round of attacks by the fossil fuel industry on established climate science provides one clue to how the oil and coal lobbies might behave in the future — and to the fragility of the public's right to know. Personally, I find the industry's assaults on the integrity of the scientists – in collaboration with its ideological allies in Congress — even more intimidating.

Like most power grabs, that of the oil and coal industries begins at the relatively invisible level of determining public perception — waging war through the media to suppress areas of reality that are likely to become the most active arenas of conflict. Their campaign is a prelude to a kind of totalitarianism that is based on the control of information and the subversion of truth. The core technique is to turn truth on its head — and then relentlessly repeat the untruth. It recalls the society of George Orwell's 1984, in which citizens are constantly bombarded with the message: "War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength." In this case, however, it is not the dictatorship of a government that looms. It is a dictator ship of corporate interests, whose well-rehearsed attack squads assault scientific truth and personal reputation with equal ruthlessness. For people in the developing world, the onset of martial law may lie just beyond the next wave of climate-triggered disasters.

For those of us in the wealthier countries, relatively unaffected as yet by climate change, it may lie just beyond the next pulse of propaganda. Overlay the politically volatile times we live in with a succession of climate-induced body blows to the nation's economy, and the highest level of personal freedom in all of human history may well become a fond memory.

This much is true of totalitarianism: it usually begins with the lies.

In the late spring of 1996, while much of the Midwest was reeling from unseasonal snowstorms and floods, parts of Kansas and Oklahoma were suffering from the worst drought in a century. The drought destroyed millions of acres of wheat, triggering a 12 percent wheat shortage — the smallest harvest in 16 years. The two successive poor growing seasons, combined with increasing international demand, have dropped U.S. wheat reserves to their lowest level in 50 years. Recalling the debilitating Dust Bowl of the 1930s, 71-year-old Lewis Mayor told a New York Times reporter that he had decided to plow under his winter wheat crop, which he had declared a total loss. "There's just no rain at all. It’s hotter than blazes," Mayer said of his Oklahoma farm. "I was a ten-year-old boy in 1935, and as near as I can remember, it just looks similar. Very similar." The impact of the drought of 1996 on farmers in the Southwest, said Texas agricultural commissioner Rick Perry, "has the potential to have the magnitude of nothing we have seen in history. It is a devastating thing, mentally and spiritually."

On November 8, 1996, the worst cyclone of the century killed nearly 2,000 residents of the Hyderabad section of India. The storm, which was fueled by warm surface waters in the Bay of Bengal, destroyed thousands of homes, ravaged crops and livestock, and triggered an outbreak of cholera. "The most beautiful and fertile rice-growing district of [the region] has turned into a burial ground," Chandrababu Naidu, an official of Andhra Pradesh, told reporters. Some 500,000 people were stranded without food by the storm, according to officials. The storm swept away tons of rice and turned banana and sugar cane plantations into swamps. Inundated fields were littered with the decaying corpses of livestock. When the cyclone struck, the region was still recovering from another major storm, three weeks earlier, that had killed 350 people.