Issue 1/4: Climate & Consumables

Beginning

Welcome to Issue 4. The Stockpiling Special last time got a very gratifying level of response, and a bunch of new subscribers - you're all very welcome.

One of the things I'm trying to avoid doing here is providing a constant barrage of "here are more signs of the coming apocalypse!". Because as I've noted before, I don't think it's going to be sudden, and I don't think it's going to be all bad; there will undoubtedly be positives to be found among the differences. However, it's also important to keep some track of the things that are happening. So let me do a bit of a roundup of recent news articles and other coverage, before I get into the chunk of thinking I want to poke at in this issue, concerning longer-term food security.

First up, the Washington Post with an article on greenhouse gases coming from Arctic lakes. This is one of the things which contributes to positive feedback in the warming process, aside from the possible dangers of the emissions themselves. There are, for what it's worth, some really good photographs in the article.

There's also an article in Nature about how sea-level rise will reshape population distribution in the United States (like many academic journals, you'll need to get past a paywall or have some sort of institutional access to read the whole thing). I note it here not so much for its own content as for the fact that the topic is being examined.

It's noted in a number of places that India could become too hot for humans to live in in the summer. And this is seen as being a trigger point. Similarly, but sooner, heat in Japan could be an issue for the 2020 Olympics.

Closer to home (for me), the UK Met Office notes that heatwaves are lasting twice as long now as they did 50 years ago. Given that heat waves are defined by lasting a certain period of time, that's pretty notable. And warnings are appearing, literally, in European rivers. The datum here is not really "this has happened before", it's "it was widely recognised how very bad this was when it happened before".

A piece in phys.org puts forward a case for rather more terrifying evidence pushing legislative change. But to be honest, I can't see it happening - the evidence is already perfectly strong, and all that's happening now is that the bad numbers are going up. If people - legislators - weren't convinced by evidence in the first place, scarier evidence is not going to do the trick. It'll come down to actual experience, and standing knee-deep in filthy water in the kitchens of their expensive coastal homes. Although for some people in places like the Carolinas, that has already begun.

Moving over into the core thinking of this newsletter - what to do in an era of change - the Atlantic examines South Africa's Cape Town, and the responses to reduced water supply there - including the politics around the mitigation strategies. And in Yorkshire, they're bringing in beavers, literally.

Middle

So, then. If the post-Brexit food shortages are worse than I expect, or last longer than I expect, this next chunk of thinking could be relevant sooner rather than later, at least at the local level. Otherwise it's going to be a gradual change, and it might - might - result in there being more food in the world than less. But I honestly think that's unlikely.

What I'm looking at here is a slow shift in climate, leading to changes in what can usefully be grown in a given place. The concept of "climate zones" is better understood in the US than in Europe (although there are European equivalents). These give a rough understanding, based on elements like latitude and elevation, of what grows where. And those bands, which have held more or less still during the 19th and 20th centuries, are going to start moving. Broadly, they'll move north. Because elevation is also important, they won't move north uniformly, and things like rain shadows from mountains will cause further complexity. But in the simplest terms: the places where we grow food and raise meat animals will not work in the same ways, and we will have to move that production elsewhere.

This will disrupt food supplies. It won't do so in the more or less predictable ways that Brexit is likely to, but but in odd and sometimes chaotic ways. Some crops will continue to grow in production areas when others fail, and the people growing both crops will give up on the ones that don't work anymore, and produce more of the other ones. And "don't work" will be subjective - it's not as though one particular crop will just plain fail to grow; it'll grow, but maybe not produce as well, or the edible parts of it won't be as large, or it won't fully ripen.

One of the major concerns, though, is in those plants that won't grow elsewhere - or rather, won't grow further north. The issue here is with the length of day (well - strictly speaking, the length of night), which to many plants is more important than the temperature or other growing conditions. That can be modified - with the night broken up by lighting - by artificial means, but that's expensive. Basil, for instance, just won't grow in periods of long nights. And further north, for the completely unchangeable reason of the position on the planet, has longer nights in winter. So the climate bands creeping northward isn't going just to be a change in the locales where the food is produced, but in what foods can be produced.

We're not going to stop having basil, mind. But basil will probably become more expensive, and pesto will go with it, so that the end-of-the-pay-month meal of pesto pasta may become rather more of a luxury than it currently is.

Coastal areas being gradually flooded will also impact food supplies. A lot of the world's population lives near coasts, and while that is, for reasons of agriculture needing space more than location, not directly crop-producing, there are other things there, such as sea-ports for fishing vessels. A rise in sea level of anything more than a few centimetres will make those ports inoperable a few days a year, and if the rise is more than, say, 50cm, then some ports will have to give up and move to what was previously 'inland'. That costs money, of course, and therefore the price of seafood will go up. Shellfish in particular will be markedly more difficult to get hold of for some time, until the populations migrate - if they do.

So considering all of this, what can we do? Stockpiling isn't a long term solution, much as the American Prepper population would like it to be. Sooner or later, your stockpile runs out, and if the food supplies haven't recovered by then, you need to do something else. I see two broad possibilities here: home production of food, and adjustments in supplies.

Home production of food involves growing vegetables and fruits yourself, keeping chickens, ducks and other fowl, and maybe, if not having a pig yourself, coming to an arrangement with a neighbour to have a share in a pig. Unsurprisingly, all of these were occasional responses to the depressed economic climates of the 1980s, which are on the edge of memory for me; my parents were members of a coop which had pigs and chickens, and a great many of our neighbours and relatives had vegetable patches.

I've had a go at growing vegetables myself, and have come to the conclusion that in the current circumstances, it's not really worthwhile (although very satisfying, if you have the time). Soft fruit, on the other hand, strawberries and raspberries and such, are very much worth growing for yourself - the cost/benefit of a good strawberry patch can be honestly startling. And potatoes are a low-effort, high-yield crop, worth your time if you eat a lot of them - we currently don't.

That brings me to another thing that can be changed, though - what we eat now. While it may not be possible to predict exactly what changes will happen in the global food market, it's possible, more or less, to work out what foods can be produced in your area now. 'Your area' might be over several countries if you live in Belgium or the like, or limited to one if you're in the US or Central Germany. And it will more than likely reach into a few different climate bands, if not now, then in the reasonably near future. You can work out, with a bit of effort, which currently produced foodstuffs will remain available, which will become more newly available, and which will become more difficult to grow. And if you shift your dietary habits to the first two categories, you can encourage the market in your immediate area to start moving before the climate changes hit.

This second change is of no use for purely economic supply issues, like Brexit, or any future border control complications. The first, however, is both practical and very traditional within the UK. I can see the use of allotments and kitchen gardens and cooperative gardens expanding rapidly there within the next few years. Foraged food will probably move from being a bourgeois hobby into an actual element of food supply for some people. And there is nothing quite as persistent as someone growing actual food in working out what works in their particular microclimate, even and perhaps especially as that climate changes. It's also possible to make adjustments to small gardens that can't be done at the commercial crop level - putting up an extra fence or two, or reinforcing the ones that are there so that increased storms don't level your beans, for example, or covering over more sensitive plants when an unusual north-easterly dumps a metre of snow on you in March. Or a rain barrel or two to get you through a dry patch.

And thus, as change happens, and food supplies alter, and indeed, climate chaos has other impacts, I can see home food production becoming a major force again. Not that everyone will do so, but that more people will. My own specialist area of food history indicates that this has always been the case, and I strongly suspect that the late 20th and early 21st century tendency toward not doing so will later be seen as an odd anomaly.

So: make sure you have garden tools, or access to some. Eye up the available spaces. Talk to someone who has land, even if you don't. Consider guerilla gardening. Work out how your local climate is likely to change, and see what food production possibilities that opens up or closes off. You might not need to think about it for a few years yet, but getting the planning done early will never be a bad thing.

End

This issue brought to you by a piecemeal composition over weeks, the evenings drawing in, and a fairly steady supply of Coke Zero. Coffee would be so much authorial, but also untrue.