Millennial doomsdayists have had ten years to make good on their prophecies of environmental destruction, resource exhaustion and species extinction. One such forecast is that of the fate of the common Cavendish banana, the causus causans of the ice cream sundae and cash crop agriculture, will soon be unviable for commercial production. Whether owing to the machinations of geneticists or simply millennia of human cultivation, Cavendishes lack the genetic diversity crucial to a species’ health. What can befoul one banana, then, can befoul all: a blight riddling one plantation could roil millions, leaving supermarket shelves empty and hapless farmers empty-handed.
So what if the fruit disappears forever? It’s worth noting we’ve already bid adieu to the banana: until the mid-60s, the Gros Michel strain was au choix in the Americas and Europe. When a variant of Dutch Elm swept through the tropics, yields of the banana bated. The episode destroyed millions of acres of rainforest and bankrupted banana barons and smallholder farmers alike as growers frantically shifted crops to unoccupied lands at massive financial and environmental expense.
On the subject of international business, the $30 barrel of oil is another species-at-risk. By most accounts, there’s no shortage of oil just yet; at present, so much of the slick stuff can be pumped from the planet that the current price of about $30 per barrel would sag if not for the OPEC cartel. Though oil aplenty means, for now, a relatively low cost, slaking the world’s oil avarice is getting tougher all the time. Old sources can’t be relied upon anymore; oil companies are thus braving high human and economic costs in a dramatic search for new supplies, one that will ultimately climax and denouement. Some foresee Hollywood-worthy consequences: shortages, spikes, stagflation, and a desperate and destructive clawing at “unconventional” sources such as tar sands, coal, and shale.
We’ll make do without, you might say. Soft sweet bananas and cheap oil are amenities, and our McSociety could stand to be a bit more Spartan. But doesn’t a world suddenly shorn of these ‘frills’ signal something much more malign? Part-time augur and full-time author Margaret Atwood wrote an in a Guardian op-ed late last week that we ignore the current decline in bird populations at our peril. There is a clear connection between productive, healthy ecosystems and a hale human population- consider the “canary in the coal mine” which, upon keeling over dead, warned miners of imminent danger from methane poisoning. Sure, we could whip out the wartime pragmatism, exercise some austerity, and say goodbye to these ‘superfluities’ with a stiff upper lip. But can we afford to be so sparing?
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