It feels like fall is coming early this year.
It’s not that the temperatures are in the high 80s and low 90s.
That’s still relatively warm.
It’s that the temperatures are 15 degrees less than two weeks ago and during at least 80 per cent of this past three months.
It has been a hot summer. Not a historically hot summer, but along an upward slope of long, hot summers mixed with 5 years of unrelenting drought. Although it doesn’t rain as much, the hot air holds moisture, so we have a proliferation of insects and insect-borne diseases. We can’t count on long, cold winters killing off ticks, mosquitoes and spiders.
The desertification of the Great Plains is underway. The Dust Bowl years in the 1930s were difficult. Thousands of farmers starved, were forced off their lands, were victims of vulture capitalism and died from emphysema, pneumonia and fungal diseases ferried on the dirt that blew from Texas to Canada.
The Great Plains became the great Bread Basket of the World, producing more wheat and corn and raising more cattle than any other country or region on earth.
The new wars will not involve land and fences. We will slaughter each other for water, for access to groundwater, streams and rivers. We will destroy those who pollute those sources. We will not wring water from the sticky and humid air.
Like oil, we will drill ourselves into a catastrophe, until we move on to some other resource to hoard and exploit and create the rich and the poor.
Humanity cannot live without water. We will later, rinse and repeat. Next time it may be in Asia or in Africa. Canada’s slow thaw will open millions of fertile acres.
Empires will rise and fall. Mankind will grind and toil for shiny things.
And the cycle will repeat.
Howling Yeti 