Connect the dots: piles of snow and the ISIS killings.

            Today the sun came out for a few hours and the temperature rose to thirty-six degrees.  The snow around my house began to melt for the first time in weeks.  The seven-foot high piles are now only five feet high, the twenty-foot piles seem about the same.  The dripping off the icicles of mass destruction was constant.  Of course, now that the sun is setting, and the temperature is dropped, everything with freeze solid.

            As anyone who has paid any attention to any media knows, this has been an historic winter here in New England.  And it shows no sign of getting easier.  It will be very cold tomorrow, and more snow will come on Wednesday.

            Last winter did not have as much snow, but the cold came very early, before Thanksgiving and it stayed very cold until the middle of March.  This year seemed as if it was going to be an easy winter until the middle of January, but then everything changed.

            During this time there has been a group of religious zealots who say they are trying to bring about the end of the world.  Their stated goal is to incite a holy war between Muslim extremists, and the rest of the world, a war that will result in total destruction.  This kind of disruptive, oppositional thinking has attracted a following of people who seem to be either fed-up or frightened about things that are happening in the world today, including globalization, exploitation, multiculturalism, allowing women to think and mostly, worshiping the wrong God.

            For a while these were just two different things that upset me, and then I read the article in the February issue of Scientific American by Michael E. Webber that explains the interactive dependence of the availability of water, food and energy.  He shows clearly how the abundance of one of those can help create an abundance of all of them, and how a scarcity of any one of them can lead to the scarcity of the others.

            I also remember reading a few years ago (sorry, but I can’t cite the source right now) about how climate change has lead to the drought in Sudan and how that was large contributing factor in the civil war that broke out in that country.  It is also true that there has been a drought for the last few years in Syria, and that drought lead, as Dr. Webber ‘s thinking would predict, to a rise in food prices, which was a large part of why, after many years of being able to tolerate a repressive government in Syria, there was a revolt among the hungry and dissatisfied people. 

            That civil war has been going on for three years now, and has ruined the country.  Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and millions have been injured, displaced and traumatized.  That kind of chaos and instability easily spread to the neighboring counties that were already full of conflict and turmoil, and that allowed ISIS to rise and attract followers.

I believe that it is the same forces that has changed the climate and lead to a drought in Sudan and Syria that has lead to the long period of cold and heavy snows here in New England. There will not be a drought in New England this year; we will have too much water for a while, including some flooding.  But the states in the Western part of the U.S. are still in a continuing drought and there will be many struggles for water; water for crops, water for drinking, water for the fountains at the hotels in Las Vegas.

            This will lead to uncertainty, discontentment and anger.  I don’t think it will lead to a revolution.  But people will blame the government, the immigrants, and the corporations.

            How many people will realize that the world is now linked and interdependent in many complex ways?  Probably more than just me.

            But how many people are ready to make the significant changes?  Probably more than before, and hopefully enough to make a difference, but that remains to be seen. 

            When there is scarcity there is fear, and when there is fear most people worry most about themselves and their own families.  It’s hard to put it all in context when your livelihood is threatened.