Dry and Humid
The past weeks I've been gardening. My vegetable garden overlooks a medium sized quarry. Every summer I watch the level of water in the quarry to see an indicator of how my small watershed is faring. When the rocks in the middle appear, I begin to worry. The surface water is an imperfect gauge but I do see a decline. My other barometer of the aquifer is how quickly my plants begin to yellow in the sun. This tells me how hard the roots have to work to get water to survive. The rocks aren't yet prominent in the quarry but the soil in my garden is dust and the leaves that are suffering are curling at the edge of yellow with some brown. My plants required some deliberate watering. Meanwhile, the air has been off and on, uncharacteristically heavy with moisture that never comes to earth. The horizon is overcast, slightly yellowed and fogged in. The fog is fine. The yellow isn't. The horizontal yellow means ozone. The dry dusty soil is bad and the humidity is so oppressive that it's hard for me to work at anything. My Chronic Fatigue Syndrome gets aggravated and I struggle with vertigo.
As the economy worsens and conflict zones expand with dwindling resources, I wonder how we will all adapt: animal or vegetable. If I and others are going to return to truck farming to sustain ourselves but the air and soil stays dry, our sole source aquifer may not be sufficient to support this ecological corner, let along others. That is if climate change continues at the rate it is going and we continue to exhaust our global resources as we have been.
My money advisor tells me this is just cyclic. The economy will rise again because the nature of all markets is to find solutions that increase revenue. The trouble with that is that the economy, resources, the air, water and soil, and biological adaptability to climate change are all connected. I am not sure that the innovators of market revenue are tapped into that web of interdependence. if they were, it would be what some economists call a (potential) culture of abundance. Before lunch I am pessimistic. After lunch I am open-minded.
