We’ve all heard loads and loads of messages about sea turtles and polar bears as the atmospheric pressures are rising. These heart-wrenching PSAs are iconic for being just that, heart-wrenching. They dress up the issues in a cute little bow and then cover it in gory makeup. As meaningful as some of these messages have been, we never talk about the mundane parts of climate change. There is a map that calculates what parts of the world will be underwater after the atmosphere rises a given number of degrees, which people are using as they are moving houses and jobs. If you are landlocked, you are lucky, when you are an adult, your home schools and playgrounds won’t be drowning underwater, and you might even go and see your childhood home once a year. Some of us aren’t in a landlocked area, and our childhood relics will likely be washed to sea by the time we are settled into adulthood.
And we hear all about the oceans and the poles, but what about the desert? When there is no water to absorb heat, where does it go? It has nowhere to go but into the air. And because of the growth of that infamous ozone layer (think a fluffy carbon blanket that’s wrapping tighter and tighter around the earth, making sure we’re nice and toasty), it stays in our atmosphere until plants consume scalding hot oxygen. When temperatures rise above their comfort levels, typically above 96 to 104 degrees, plants start to show physical stress and essentially start to hibernate. Plants have special types of pores that help regulate water, and in this heat, those pores close and their water levels drop, causing wilting. For those of us that have minimal backyard gardens, others might relate as I’ve noticed our basil and thyme plants struggling the past couple of summers through the hot months, wilting and drying much quicker than expected. On a grander scale, no plant is immune from temperature, and when our climate inevitably rises, our foods pay the price. Writing this, I struggle to think of a world where fresh foods no longer dot the produce section of a grocery store. But with a few degrees, our planet will become a food desert. Now, America is no stranger to food deserts, about 19 million people live in food deserts, which is about five percent of the population. With the growth of plant-based diets, I can’t help but wonder how sustainable diets will change with the decrease of commercial plant production. During WWII, the government created an initiative for “victory gardens” to fix the loss of labor that made it more difficult to transport food across the country, and one in three Americans responded. But eighty years later, with the growth of urbanization, victory gardens seem like a tale of times past.
Greenhouses, perhaps then? Indeed greenhouses would help ensure plant productivity, but the commercial greenhouse world both consumes masses of energy with a very thin profit margin. And I don’t think it’s cynical of me to doubt the corporate world’s investment in low profit enterprises.
So, looking at the future of agriculture and climate change is certainly bleak, and I’m afraid I don’t have a pretty bow to tie this all up in. One of my teachers, however, during a class discussion on the situation in Ukraine, asked us to envision a day in which we walked into the grocery store to see bare shelves, reminiscent of early-pandemic toilet paper aisles and Depression era food lines. As extreme or out of place as those examples may seem to some, this reality exists for many right now, and will exist for many more in the years to come, unless we find solutions and interventions for current agricultural systems. Beyond the producers, as plants become harder to grow and the atmospheric temperatures rise, will there be a rise in veganism and vegetarianism, or a step away?
Food for a very long time was similar to money, and is only a relatively modern and especially western shift to treating food as simply fuel. In many of the ancient world empires, wealth and weight were almost synonymous, an idea that’s flipped on its head in the past fifty years. But when food is limited, how will our society change? Will food, monetarily or emotionally, gain value? The idea is almost post-apocalyptic, genetically manufactured, nutrient-rich, designed courses for every meal, the whims of lunch lines and buffets a luxury of the past of excess. I have no idea what it will look like, but I am only certain that our generation will be studied by future historians for years and years, trying to understand how our lives unfolded the way they did, no matter how they unfold.
Written so beautifully!