Simply unsustainable

Climate’s so fierce, there’s no telling where the money went.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an 1887 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov. From left to right are Death, Famine, War, and Conquest; the Lamb is at the top.

As dubbed by Gaia Vince in her excellent book Nomad Century, the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene are:

• Drought

• Fire

• Flood

• Heat

A post to contemplate recent news exemplifying each.

DROUGHT

NYT: Barren Fields and Empty Stomachs: Afghanistan’s Long, Punishing Drought

The gist from the subtitle:

In a country especially vulnerable to climate change, a drought has displaced entire villages and left millions of children malnourished.

Straddling the upper edge of my Middle Earth (30 degrees north and south of the equator), Afghanis are abandoning lands that no longer support wheat — or much of anything else.

Mohammed Khan Musazai, 40, had bought cattle on loan, but they were swept away in a flood — when rain comes, it comes erratically, and it has caused catastrophic flooding. The lenders took his land and also wanted his daughter, who was just 4 at the time.

That devastating combination of drought and floods is emptying villages, sending people to cities that cannot support them, or to the next country over (here, Iran, suffering its own water issues).

So people resort to desperate measures to survive and keep families intact. That 4 year-old girl was spared from being bartered because her mother gave up one of her kidneys:

Nazdana, a 25-year-old who is one of his two wives and is the girl’s mother, offered to sell her own kidney instead — an illegal practice that has become so common that some have taken to referring to the Herat encampment as the “one-kidney village.”

Think a 30 foot wall is going to stop these people when they decide to hear North in search of a less harsh clime?