On The Origin and Future of Nomads - 2

The Hope of Nomads

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog concerns itself with issues that are described as "the peak" of this and "the peak" of that.

For example, we cited to a book "The Peak of Everything" in a past post concerning some "the peak" issues.

These peak concepts spring from the reality that the size of the Earth is finite, that is, the Earth is limited in size, so that anything located on the Earth as a resource is limited, that is, it is also finite.

The Earth is not as big as Jupiter, Saturn, or the Sun, so the Earth does not have as much "stuff" as they do.

As was explained recently in a post here (The Peak of The Oil Lies - 6) civilization here on Earth is going to run out of oil because it is finite, like the Earth is finite, and when it is used up it is gone and done with.

A new thing to run out of is the subject of today's post:

Wells are drying up and underwater tables falling so fast in the Middle East and parts of India, China and the US that food supplies are seriously threatened, one of the world's leading resource analysts has warned.

In a major new essay Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world's people, are now overpumping their underground water tables to the point – known as "peak water" – where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year.

The situation is most serious in the Middle East. According to Brown: "Among the countries whose water supply has peaked and begun to decline are Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By 2016 Saudi Arabia projects it will be importing some 15m tonnes of wheat, rice, corn and barley to feed its population of 30 million people. It is the first country to publicly project how aquifer depletion will shrink its grain harvest.

"The world is seeing the collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline.

(Peak Water, emphasis added; cf. Global Warming & Potable Water). Everything that depends on water is, therefore, also in the same boat.

Remember the Dredd Blog posts about the things that peak (e.g. The Peak of Health And The Peak of Oil, The Peak of Sanity - 3, A Peek At The Peak Oil Catastrophe, The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 7).

Then think about the fact that we are either cosmic nomads, or we should think about becoming cosmic nomads (The Tenets of Ecocosmology).

The previous post in this series is here.