Worldwide Droughts – Preparing Ahead for Mass Migrations

There’s supposed to be water, water everywhere in Brazil but today there’s hardly a drop to drink in the country’s biggest city, Sao Paulo. And it looks like there’s more than just a drought to blame. (REUTERS/Nacho Doce)

Absolutely no one enjoys thinking of the kinds of changes that drive people to flee their lives and homes. However that does not change the realities that millions are now facing in San Paulo Brazil and in California, which are both facing the end of life, as they once knew it, because the water is running out. California has one year left of water (population of 40 million) and San Paulo has until June when water will run out for over six million people.

If one is standing on a street corner, and sees a bus coming down the block out of control the normal person would run for their life. However when it is our home and life involved we are slow to move aside. There is just too much to lose.

These past years have seen large amounts of people leaving the Middle East and North Africa and the new government in Greece is threatening the rest of Europe with an invasion of displaced people that are already on their soil. The United States and Europe are directly responsible for creating the conditions for these migrations with their wars of disruption in Libya, Iraq and Syria, where massive amounts of people have left their homes.

National Geographic writes about San Paulo saying, “It’s indisputable that São Paulo, the economic heartbeat of Brazil, is in trouble. The megacity of 20 million people is suffering its worst drought in eight decades. The five reservoirs in the Cantareira system, which provides nearly half the city’s drinking water, are at a dangerously low 13 percent of capacity. That’s up from even lower levels thanks to some recent rains, and while more precipitation could arrive in the coming weeks, historically the driest period of the year is April through September, just around the corner.”

Common Dreams writes, “Six million people in Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo, may at some point find themselves without water. The February rains did not ward off the risk and could even aggravate it by postponing rationing measures which hydrologists have been demanding for the last six months.”

(Photo: Marlene Bergamo)

And it’s not just households that are feeling the pinch in San Paulo:Courts are canceling sessions, big farms are scaling back operationsand schools and businessesare cutting time. A sea of people are fighting for water in Sao Paulo.

The Guardian writes, “As California experiences the fourth year of one of the most severe droughts in its history, a senior NASA scientist has warned that the state has about one year of water left. In an LA Times editorial published last week, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti called for a more “forward-looking process” to deal with the state’s dwindling water supply. “California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” Famiglietti wrote.

California Is Turning Back into a Desert and There Are No Contingency Plans is the title of an essay from Economic Collapse. The entire United States is very heavily dependent on the fruits and vegetables grown in California.  The following numbers represent California’s contribution to our overall production,

-99 percent of the artichokes

-44 percent of asparagus

-66 percent of carrots

-50 percent of bell peppers

-89 percent of cauliflower

-94 percent of broccoli

-95 percent of celery

-90 percent of the leaf lettuce

-83 percent of Romaine lettuce

-83 percent of fresh spinach

-33 percent of the fresh tomatoes

-86 percent of lemons

-90 percent of avocados

-84 percent of peaches

-88 percent of fresh strawberries

-97 percent of fresh plums

Across the globe, reports reveal huge areas in crisis today as reservoirs and aquifers dry up. More than a billion individuals – one in seven people on the planet – now lack access to safe drinking water.

There are many reasons people move: for work, for love, for the draw of the big city or the quiet of nature. However, as the world continues to cool, it is expected that global climate change will become another factor driving people to move.

In the past, as in the present, religion is yet another cause of mass migrations and the most terrible migration in history happened in India after they gained independence from English rule. Back in 1947 the Guardian published, “The mass migration and exchange of populations in the Punjab – Moslems moving west into Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs trekking east into India – have now reached a scale unprecedented in history. Accurate statistics are impossible to obtain, but it is reasonable to estimate that no fewer than four million people are now on the move both ways. What this means in terms of human misery and hardship can be neither imagined nor described. Within the past few weeks, the conditions over a wide area of Northern India, including the whole of the Indus Valley and part of the Gangetic Plain, have deteriorated steadily. It is no exaggeration to say that throughout the North-west Frontier Provinces, in the West Punjab, the East Punjab, and the Western part of the United Provinces the minority communities live in a state of insecurity often amounting to panic.’

In San Paulo, few are moving yet and in California, few people are calculating their futures because they are both running out of water and have front row seats to the continuing radiation from Fukushima. In addition, along the more northern reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, where record snow and cold are being experienced, even fewer can conceive of the need to escape to the south as the next mini ice age begins. The press lies about just about everything so do not look to the mass media for guidance.

Special Personal Note: I escaped the United States 23 years ago and have been living happily in Brazil ever since. I would like to offer a consultation service, as I do for people with health concerns, to formulate plans to anyone who might want to migrate to Brazil. The strong dollar just made retiring abroad a lot cheaper. Whether to move to the Northeast Coast and continue to live in civilization or a total escape into the interior to be associated with my Sanctuary, where we have our own construction company and land to grow food, I could be of strategic assistance. At Sanctuary, we are surrounded on three sides by two rivers (that you can drink from) that meet only 100 meters below our still under construction retreat center.

What is coming is what some people call a Fourth Turning, “a time when people suddenly feel that no one is in control and that enormous events are overtaking their society which no one of leadership age has any idea how to confront or how to manage.”

It is only time before the world blows up in everyone’s face forcing changes and moves we would not make or take under any normal situation.