I know it´s impolite to simply steal somebody else´s comments without asking, but I´m going to do it anyway. Here are two interesting contributions from the commentary thread appended to JMG´s recent blog post "The Future is a Landscape". Steve T talks about invasive species (among other things!) and Ben speculates about the future of Russia. I tend to agree with the statement that this world of ours is "Hell´s rooftop garden"!
Steve T
"A while back Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland, and was widely denounced for it. I have a feeling we may live to regret that. As I recall, the Greenlanders themselves were against the idea. They too may live to regret it. They are 50,000 people living on what is about to become prime real estate; they’re going to be conquered by someone, and history shows that people who are conquered by the United States end up doing rather well for themselves, even if ideological fashion forces some of them to insist otherwise.
In any case… This may sound terrible, and that’s fine, but climate change activism seems to me to be among the most useless concerns of the environmental movement, along with “invasive species.” Both amount to “Nature is changing in a way we don’t like, and we think that we have both the right and the power to force it not to.” Regarding invasive species, I once worked on a BLM invasive species project in coastal Oregon. Our job was to walk several miles of Oregon beach and remove every Scotch broom or European beach grass that we found. The problem with the beach grass, as I understand it, is that it grows upward in place, and dies on itself. Eventually it produces heaps of compost, that become soil beds for coastal trees like shore pines. The shore pines provide habitat for predators like foxes, cats, and racoons, which eat all of the snowy plovers, which are now disappearing from the region.
To be clear, the problem the project is trying to solve isn’t that there won’t be any trees, grass, birds or predatory land mammals. It’s that there will be the *wrong kind* of trees, grass, birds and land mammals, according to an ideology which claims that any species not present in an environment before some arbitrary Date X is “unnatural” or “invasive.” (This is similar to claims that so-called “indigenous people”– those that conquered a given territory before some arbitrary Date X– have more of a right to it than those who conquered it after that date.)
At the time, that seemed a bit silly to me. On reflection it seems more or less criminal, given that it was funded with taxpayer dollars, as well as insane. The belief here is that a small group of technocrats– government agencies and academics– have both the right and ability to re-shape nature according to their will.
While I’m aware of the role of industrial pollution in climate change, the claim still seems similar. I don’t honestly care whether there are deserts in California, prairies in Canada, or temperate rainforests in Alaska. There are deserts, prairies, and temperate rain forests in North America now. Yes, the displacement of people may result in suffering, but suffering is a fairly normal human condition. What’s more, I’m also fairly sure we are living in an age wherein the world is being deliberately remade, and by more-than-human hands. When I did live in California, I used to visit a nature preserve in which the dominant trees were live oaks, Australian Eucalyptus, and palms from the Canary island. If you come back to North America in 2,000 years, you might find a similar mixed forest where Anchorage is now– and you might see ostriches, tigers and emus under the branches, with no one living then aware that those animals were originally brought here for farms and zoos.
Of course, getting there might not be fun. But this is Earth after all– the place variously known in the world’s spiritual teachings as the vale of tears, the world of shadows, or the Kether of the Qliphoth. (Hell’s Rooftop Garden, is how I think of it.) Things tend not to be very fun here."
Ben
"@ Bridge – Russia may benefit form climate change over the next century, but it has a few problems that will, I think, prevent it from being a long term ‘superpower’
1 – the population is in free fall and might drop below 100 million by 2050. I’ve seen no data indicating that trend is stopping or slowing
2 – Russia is situated north of a lot of countries that have huge populations, and are, right now, running out of water (India, China, and the ‘Stans’ to name just a few).
3 – much of Russia’s ‘wealth’ is tied up in resource extraction, rather than a dynamic economy. Combine that with a security-state rooted elite, and you have a recipe for long term decline.
My guess, and it is just that, is that Russia will lose control of all its lands east of the Urals, sometime after 2100 or so. I doubt it will ever recover those territories. Most of their expansion east took place over the 18th and early 19th century, so that land hasn’t really been ‘Russia’ for very long. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the central question of Russian statecraft over the second half of this century will revolve around whether, and how, to keep control of Siberia and the Far East. Beyond 2100, as petroleum-fueled economies permanently fail, my guess is that the Russian state as we know it, will collapse along with every other industrial state.
China MAY be the ‘last man standing’, but my guess is that as the Yangtse river valley becomes the Gulf of Yangtse, hundreds of millions of Chinese will move north. The Yellow River will become the southern border of whatever dynasty replaces the current Red Dynasty, errr… PRC, and the Amur River and Lake Baikal will lay at the heartland of the next great Chinese culture.
Working my way back towards Russia, the Ob River will probably become the homeland of all the Muslim refugees from central Asia and the India, and will form something of a buffer state between the Urals and the neo-Chinese. They may even form a great culture of their own, as they may be the heirs to Islamic culture.
As for European Russia, it will fragment into a number of Slavic successor states. Eventually, along the banks of the Volga and/or the Don, a new, Slavic culture will emerge. They will probably speak a descendant language, made up mostly of the eastern Slavic language (Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian), with what we currently recognize as modern Russian becoming a ceremonial language (much the way I expect modern English will here in North America).
By 3000 or so, I would guess that either the Don or Volga culture will have conquered the other, and formed a ‘universal state’, which will probably look back to Tsarist Russia, and maybe even the Soviet Union, as a long lost golden age."
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