http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/envirofuture200804
Three Planetary Futures
The rapid pace of environmental change threatens to drastically
transform our world. What might the future look like? Alan Weisman,
best-selling author of The World Without Us, peers ahead 50 to 100 years
to construct plausible scenarios for three widely divergent ecosystems,
and the people who inhabit them.
by Alan Weisman WEB EXCLUSIVE April 21, 2008
I: Las Vegas, Nevada
By the late 2020s, something had to give, and it ended up being Las
Vegas. With rainfall and snowpack in the Rockies steadily dwindling in a
drying climate, the Lake Mead reservoir was no longer filling—meaning
that turbines weren’t spinning, electricity wasn’t generating, and some
25 million downstream users in places like California were howling for
what little precious water remained trapped behind the lower sections of
the Hoover Dam. Nevada’s last gasp was a plea for Denver’s Colorado
River allotment: Denver, it was argued, in turn could take the Nebraska
and Kansas share of the Platte River, because those states could
recharge their depleted Ogallala Aquifer by siphoning water from the
Mississippi, and so on ever eastward. But this grand cascade scheme
collapsed under dire predictions of astronomical engineering costs and
threats of internecine, even armed, water warfare among various states
jealously guarding whichever of the nation’s great drainage basins lay
beneath them.
So the Hoover’s spillways were opened, and what remained of the Colorado
trickled off to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Mexico (which had
sworn to cut off tributaries to the Rio Grande if it didn’t receive a
share). The glittering southern Nevada town named for its vegas—meadows
of sacaton grass that once grew around artesian springs burbling up from
surrounding mountains, until they were pumped dry—had also tried piping
in water from ranches as far as 250 miles to the north. But those wells,
too, succumbed to deepening drought. Finally, by the mid-2030s, what had
been America’s fastest-growing city at the turn of the 21st century just
gave up.
The verdant lawns surrounding the Garden of the Gods at Caesars Palace
have now reverted to desert crust. After the drip irrigators ceased
delivering, the once immaculately trimmed laurels and Italian cypresses
withered. They have been supplanted by rough Mojave shrubs like creosote
and bursage, which dot the grounds amidst tall tufts of red brome grass.
An aggressive European interloper carelessly introduced by ranchers,
brome grass sprouts early, snatching what little spring rain falls
before native species have a chance. With ornamental hotel flower beds
shriveled and gone, the most vivid color comes from another hardy
invader, Sahara mustard, otherwise known as rapeseed, an escapee from
cattle feed. Its pungent yellow blooms are pollinated by yet another
spreading immigrant: Africanized bees.
The plastered walls of empty casinos crack and exfoliate, shedding ever
larger patches of stucco in desert heat that now regularly reaches 130
degrees Fahrenheit in July and August. (Although the city is abandoned,
the pavement of Las Vegas still acts like a heat island, its concrete
retaining enough warmth by night to keep daytime temperatures
consistently several degrees hotter than the surrounding desert.)
Without crowds of people, whiptail lizards, desert iguanas, and stout
chuckwallas abound. Plodding desert tortoises, once tragically
vulnerable to speeding motorists, are also enjoying a comeback. Hotel
rooms have become habitats to thrifty kangaroo rats that live on seeds
and minuscule amounts of moisture. As the number of seed-producing
plants has declined, so has the kangaroo rat’s population, but the
species survives.
Except for that most adaptable quadruped, the ever tough coyote, large
animals have suffered severely from the lack of water. Bighorn sheep are
nearly gone from Mount Charleston, rising north of town, as are
pronghorn antelope in the flats, and the number of mountain lions, which
prey on both, has accordingly dropped. Horses and burros—equines that
originated in the Americas and were re-introduced into the New World by
Spanish conquistadors—had established substantial feral herds in Nevada
and Utah’s Great Basin during the 19th and 20th centuries, but as
drought persisted, increasingly they depended on artificial guzzlers set
up by well-meaning people—animal lovers who are now gone.
Some donkeys and mustangs have managed to survive, however, because with
no more human beings around to pump groundwater, oddly enough Las
Vegas’s original historic water source has modestly returned: sporadic
rains in the mountains around the city have gradually replenished the
old artesian springs. Nearly a century earlier, they had vanished
beneath Fremont Street, site of downtown Las Vegas’s early grand casinos
like the Golden Nugget. Now they are again welling to the surface,
breaching cracked pavement and creating pressure fissures that cause
parts of the nearby I-15 and U.S. 95 highway interchange to buckle and
collapse. That’s where buses making the day trip from Los Angeles must
stop to disgorge tourists, who, out of nostalgia or ghoulishness, still
come to Vegas—no longer to gamble, but to gawk at this postmodern
Western ghost town. Water bottles in hand, slathered in sunscreen, they
trudge through gusts of sand down Las Vegas Boulevard to the city’s last
functioning structure: a bare-bones visitors’ center at the base of the
Eiffel Tower replica, which they can ascend to take photographs of the
once lavish tourism mecca.
Devoid of flashing marquees and imported tropical foliage, in the
desiccated glare Las Vegas now resembles not so much its former
neon-hued glory, but the biblical claimants to the name that it once
dared to officially call itself: Sin City. The wrath that destroyed
Sodom and Gomorrah couldn’t have left a sorrier ruin than this one.
Cairo a century hence
Cairo, a century hence: driven by ecological disaster, refugees flood
the city by the millions, some from sub-Saharan Africa. Photo
illustration by John Blackford.
II: Cairo, Egypt
The ancient name of Egypt’s first Arab capital, Misr al-Fustat, means
“City of Tents”—and in 2108, Cairo has come full circle. A century
earlier, it was already a city of 17 million residents piled atop one
another in high-rises crammed into the narrow floodplain of the Nile, at
the point just before the river’s huge delta begins to spread northward
to the Mediterranean. Now, the capacity of those high-rises has been
overwhelmed by the greatest influx of refugees in human history. Most of
the 40 million or so people pressing against the pyramids will never
leave here. With Egypt’s housing authority effectively stymied,
so-called temporary shelters of heat-reflective polymer sheeting
provided by U.N.H.C.R.—the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees, lately the world’s most thinly stretched bureaucracy—will be
their permanent fate.
Long before a century of rising temperatures begat streams that turned
into torrents of humans pouring in from ruined farmlands,
Cairo—U.N.H.C.R.’s major processing center in North Africa—was already a
magnet for displaced people. Besides Palestinians, Eritreans,
Ethiopians, Iraqis, and thousands of Sudanese and Somalis fleeing civil
war or worse, beleaguered immigrants arrived here from as far away as
West Africa’s Ivory Coast and Liberia, gambling that the U.N. would
bless them with legal refugee status and make them eligible for
resettlement programs.
Usually that proved a dashed hope, but Egypt, despite its own
impoverished hordes, was far wealthier than most other African
countries, so the refugees dissolved into Cairo’s tenement warrens,
which somehow always seemed able to absorb more. That wealth, however,
derived mainly from the enormous, fan-shaped Nile Delta, spanning 150
miles where it met the sea—that is, until the sea started creeping
inland. Once, the delta produced more food than anywhere else on the
continent, and was one of the planet’s most densely populated
agricultural areas, home to 35 million people, mostly rural fellahin.
But by 2108, the Mediterranean has already encroached nearly 10 miles
south of its former shoreline, leaving the seaport of Alexandria, at the
delta’s western edge, perched at the end of a dike-enclosed peninsula.
Yet just as frightening as that re-drawn geography is the menace
advancing annually beneath the surface, through the water table.
Each year, rising salinity leaves more formerly rich delta bottomland
useless for the wheat, rice, bananas, cotton, corn, lentils, melons,
tomatoes, and vegetables that once abounded here. In fields covered with
a glaze of evaporated brine, agricultural agencies now plant
salt-tolerant pickleweed. Although pickleweed is edible, neither humans
nor goats have embraced the chewy succulent as a steady diet, and it has
not become a cash crop. So annually, more delta families head upstream
toward burgeoning Cairo; at the same time, more refugees stagger in from
the opposite direction, as Africa’s parched Sahel succumbs to Sahara
dunes advancing up to six miles in a single year.
On top of these arrivals, Egypt’s population has doubled from 80 to 160
million since the beginning of the 21st century, a rate of reproduction
that relentlessly climbs despite frequent waves of cholera and other
lethal epidemics. With the delta dying, the only place left to grow food
is the slender strip along the Nile south of Cairo: a green ribbon
cutting between bleached plateaus so dry that tombs only a few hundred
yards from the floodplain hold mummified remains that have spent the
past 4,000 years virtually moisture-free. But even with the former pride
of Egyptian agriculture—extra-long-staple cotton—now uprooted to make
way for more grains to feed the masses, there is simply no more land
left to cultivate. As U.N.H.C.R.’s struggle against starvation turns
bleaker, an Egyptian conundrum nearly 150 years old is coming to a head.
Back in the distant past—1960—an infusion of Soviet money changed
Egyptian history and ecology and the character of the Nile River by
building the Aswan High Dam, some 500 miles upstream from Cairo. Until
then, the Nile had flooded every summer, depositing millions of tons of
sediment that renewed the soil for the year’s plantings and literally
built the delta. With the Nile’s flow tamed, fields and settlements were
protected from floodwaters, but the trade-off was the loss of all the
nutrients borne by river silt, which stayed trapped in Lake Nasser, the
vast reservoir behind the dam.
This proved a bonanza for hawkers of artificial fertilizer, upon which
all Egyptian agriculture henceforth depended. But now, nearly a century
and a half later, U.N. and Egyptian officials are increasingly unable to
afford enough chemical soil additives to feed an increasingly
uncontrollable, hungry rabble. They are at the brink of deciding to tear
down Aswan Dam, before people rise up to do it themselves.
Already, refugee leaders are declaring themselves sick of subsisting on
flatbread and U.N.H.C.R. rations, warmed in aluminum solar ovens because
firewood is long gone and there’s barely any other fuel, and are tired
of fighting over pickleweed, hydroponic vegetables, and
mini-mushroom-farms-in-a-box because there is no more available arable
land. They are demanding that the river roar forth again, to restore the
alluvium and deposit a new, fertile Nile Delta above the new, higher
Mediterranean shoreline. Let the unleashed Nile scour away the sewage
and foul pestilence accumulating around permanent refugee camps that all
the U.N.H.C.R. personnel on earth couldn’t haul away fast enough.
In doing so, of course, the homes of millions would be washed away. But,
after all, isn’t that what tents are for?
III: Nanisivik, Baffin Island
Back in 1993, when Canada agreed to divide its vast Northwest
Territories, which stretched from the Yukon to the Atlantic, to give the
Inuit their own semi-autonomous region called Nunavut, the move was
regarded as a huge gesture of reparations to aboriginal peoples, but not
a big deal to most other Canadians: who else wanted to live in treeless
Arctic tundra?
But nobody back then had any idea how quickly the summer Arctic sea ice
would disappear. From 2005 to 2007 alone, fully a quarter of North Polar
ice—once so solid it may as well have been a landmass like
Antarctica—simply vanished. What remained was barely five feet thick:
half what was normal. Just six years later—in 2013—the so-called Arctic
Grail that so many explorers famously froze to death trying to find had
become a reality: an ice-free Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia,
4,500 miles shorter than crossing via the Panama Canal.
The Inuit who lived on barren Baffin Island, at the eastern end of the
Passage, wondered if they were about to get rich. To service the new
shipping corridor, the Canadian government announced plans for a
deep-water port on Baffin at Nanisivik, a former lead-zinc mine above
the Arctic Circle. To the 12,000 residents of this, the fifth largest
island on earth—more than twice the size of Great Britain—that news was
urgently welcome, because their livelihoods were melting right along
with the ice. The seals they traditionally hunted depended on a food
chain adapted to frigid conditions: a chain beginning with plankton and
algae that lived on the ice itself, linked to the small fish and
crustaceans that ate them, which in turn were eaten by polar cod, food
to the seals. The ice had been the chain’s anchor; without it, the seas
seemed as unrecognizable to the Inuit as the Caribbean.
Talk swirled of fueling facilities, a duty-free zone, international
banking centers, hotels, restaurants, and a population surge to fill new
jobs, which would mean a real-estate bonanza on a hitherto barely
populated island best known for long polar nights. Canada’s first
mistake, however, was to count on charging transit fees like those the
Panama and Suez Canals collect, worth up to $4 billion per year. The
rest of the world, however—Asia, Europe, Russia, and the neighboring
United States—unanimously considered the Northwest Passage to be
international waters, and proved unimpressed by a lone military base
across the Passage from Baffin Island, intended to ensure Canadian
sovereignty. After some costly years of negotiations, Canada had to
settle for a quarter of the expected amount.
Second mistake: officials in Ottawa failed to grasp how fast the Arctic
was changing. True, the unprecedented spreading boreal forest of spruce,
larch, and fir on a formerly treeless island enhanced Baffin’s scenery.
But that was merely a harbinger of unpredictable climate chaos. Roads
atop thawing permafrost crumpled in mid-construction. Despite expensive,
insulated pavement liners to keep permafrost frozen, within a few years
streets would sink anyway and need replacing. Sewer and water lines
regularly snapped. Pilings beneath docks lurched and warehouse
foundations sagged as ice-bound soil turned into a soggy sponge.
By 2050, the chronic cost of maintenance was exacerbated by water
shortages. Because of low evaporation, the cold Arctic is mostly a
desert, its annual precipitation usually not much more than the
Sahara’s. Countless northern lakes, formed thousands of years earlier as
receding glaciers dropped icebergs that melted into permafrost kettle
holes, now wicked away into thawed ground. Baffin Island’s caribou,
dependent on that fossil water and on moss and lichens bred to longer,
colder winters, had mostly starved, and the population of Arctic wolves
that preyed on them plummeted accordingly. The caribou’s other major
predators, mosquitoes and black flies, next focused on the most
available mammal around, Homo sapiens. Besieged humans attacked back
with pesticides, and the fragile Arctic environment declined further as
already precarious ptarmigan and gyrfalcons also succumbed to the
sprayed poisons. Hardier Canada geese prevailed in the skies, as did a
tough new recruit from the south: American crows.
Long before, though, eco-disaster had already become the rule. An
ice-free Northwest Passage wasn’t necessarily risk-free: along with
routine fouling of port waters as ships refueled, the first major oil
spill occurred in late September 2025, when an empty container ship
deadheading back to China from the U.S. east coast collided with a hunk
of ice moving in for winter. Now, in 2050, there is no more winter ice,
but plenty of other hydrocarbon messes abound, because for decades
Canada’s warming northern continental shelf has been open for gas- and
methane-hydrate exploration. The Arctic’s land rush turned out instead
to be a sea rush, as offshore-drilling leases went for more than
comparably sized real-estate parcels in downtown Toronto.
Taking cues from lessons learned by engineers from Alaska to Canada’s
Mackenzie River Delta, fighting to hold oil and gas pipelines together
atop thawing tundra, Nanisivik has become a petro-port. This economic
solution, fueled—literally—by the same carbon-based culprit that undid
Arctic ecology, will soon be accompanied by another boom, government and
industry officials assure Baffin Islanders. That will be carbon
sequestration: technology in which methane’s dirty carbon atoms are
separated from clean-burning hydrogen atoms and stored deep in the ground.
With permafrost now just a memory, drilling down there won’t be a problem.
Alan Weisman is the author of The World Without Us, published in July
2007 by Thomas Dunne Books.
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