This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
If you want a headline to set you back a little when it comes to our planet and our future, try this one from the British Guardian: "Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years." Yes, new studies show that crucial heavily populated areas of the world, including Europe, are increasingly at risk. As New York Times climate reporter Somini Sengupta wrote recently, "Ten countries, including the United States and China, produce nearly three-fourths of the world's most irrigated crops, including sugar, wheat, and cotton. Two-thirds of these crops face what the World Resources Institute called 'high to extremely high levels of water stress.'" And with the weather growing ever more extreme globally, thanks to climate change, all of this is only expected to worsen significantly in the decades to come. In fact, by the middle of this century, it's predicted that up to half of all food production could be at risk.
Of course, it's been known for years that, on a planet growing ever hotter, countries that are home to one quarter of the global population will be at increasing risk of running out of needed water supplies. And mind you, that growing reality goes with a world of increasingly extreme water events, including both fierce droughts and sudden, massive downpours that can lead, as in Europe recently, or in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton here in the United States, to extreme flooding events made twice as likely by the overheating of this planet.
In that context, let TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino consider the rural world she now inhabits, an America whose farms have fallen from 6.8 million in 1935 to just over two million today, even as, until recently, farm output had tripled. However, under ever greater pressure from extreme weather events like Helene and Milton, farm yields are finally beginning to fall and store prices of foods, as every politician in America knows, have risen. In fact, thanks to extreme weather, from oranges in the U.S. to olives in Europe to rice in China, crops have begun to fail and, if the latest studies are accurate, all of this (and store food prices, too) will, in the years to come only worsen as the planet grows warmer yet. Now, let Mazzarino take you to an increasingly imperiled rural America on a planet growing hotter by the year. Tom
How Long Before This Storm Turns Political?
What's at Stake in 2024 -- from (My) Rural America
Images of homes that collapsed under mudslides or falling trees, waterlogged farms, and debris-filled roads drove home (yes, home!) to me recently the impact of Hurricane Helene on rural areas in the southeastern United States. That hurricane and the no-less-devastating Hurricane Milton that followed it only exacerbated already existing underlying problems for rural America. Those would include federal insurance programs that prioritize rising sea levels over flooding from heavy rainfall, deepening poverty, and unequal access to private home insurance -- issues, in other words, faced by poor inland farming communities. And for millions of rural Americans impacted by Helene, don't forget limited access to healthcare services, widespread electricity outages, and of course, difficulty getting to the ballot box. Case in point: some 80% of North Carolinians under major disaster declarations live in rural areas.
Given that Helene's human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm's devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don't have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we're funding Israeli healthcare and housing -- a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel's military in its war in Gaza and beyond.
Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it's possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!
All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were "hunting FEMA."
Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn't surprised to hear New York Times "The Daily" host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: "How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?"
How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we're living in isn't Helene's or Milton's but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.
The Complex Identity of Rural America
At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans -- especially rural ones -- vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.
It's well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
