The Mississippi River is in crisis this year. It's been running at record low levels for some time now.
This has been pushing up barge prices for shipping goods out of the region it serves as a major shipping channel. This has been pushing up pricess on food in an already inflationary period.
As the crisis has deepened, it has become a more serious supply chain issue. They are dredging it to keep it functional as a shipping at all, but there is de facto a bottleneck on goods coming out of that region.
More recently, the US Army Corps of Engineers has begun building an additional underwater levee to try to prevent salt water from the Gulf of New Mexico from encroaching further upstream than usual and ruining local drinking water supplies.
These are all very serious issues and part of why it is so bad is because economies are so global at this point. Historically, a lot of food that was grown was consumed locally and often families grew some portion of their own food.
Now we have commercial farms and they ship their goods out and it's often a single crop they grow. It wouldn't be feasible for locals to live on, say, just soybeans even if they wanted to do so.
I'm not against a global economy and big cities and all that. But it's gone too far. Local economies no longer work at all at the local scale and it's problematic.
We don't have enough functional small towns and villages that are more or less self sustaining yet connected to and a part of a larger world. The local has been nearly obliterated.
I don't know how to reverse this but most people seem disinterested in even trying. They seem to not recognize it as an issue.
Our global economy has created a lot of tech that would allow small communities and rural peoples to have a lot of modern amenities. You can potentially have a lot of the comforts of city life -- electricity, clean and reliable water supplies, internet, sewer treatment, etc -- just about anywhere.
We have the tech to supply such things off grid. In the 1920s, if you weren't in a city, you likely didn't have electricity. Rural electrification was one of the big projects of the federal government during The Great Depression.
I don't know how to get traction to promote certain ideas. People seem to see it as political to try to talk about solutions rather than helpful.
But I think we really need to find some means to create stability by strengthening small communities and rural life. The fact that people go the big city because that's where the jobs are has destabilized our economy and contributes to the terrible wealth gap we currently have.
It wasn't always like that. It doesn't have to be like that.
We can rebuild this world. We can make it better. We have the technology.
This has been pushing up barge prices for shipping goods out of the region it serves as a major shipping channel. This has been pushing up pricess on food in an already inflationary period.
As the crisis has deepened, it has become a more serious supply chain issue. They are dredging it to keep it functional as a shipping at all, but there is de facto a bottleneck on goods coming out of that region.
More recently, the US Army Corps of Engineers has begun building an additional underwater levee to try to prevent salt water from the Gulf of New Mexico from encroaching further upstream than usual and ruining local drinking water supplies.
These are all very serious issues and part of why it is so bad is because economies are so global at this point. Historically, a lot of food that was grown was consumed locally and often families grew some portion of their own food.
Now we have commercial farms and they ship their goods out and it's often a single crop they grow. It wouldn't be feasible for locals to live on, say, just soybeans even if they wanted to do so.
I'm not against a global economy and big cities and all that. But it's gone too far. Local economies no longer work at all at the local scale and it's problematic.
We don't have enough functional small towns and villages that are more or less self sustaining yet connected to and a part of a larger world. The local has been nearly obliterated.
I don't know how to reverse this but most people seem disinterested in even trying. They seem to not recognize it as an issue.
Our global economy has created a lot of tech that would allow small communities and rural peoples to have a lot of modern amenities. You can potentially have a lot of the comforts of city life -- electricity, clean and reliable water supplies, internet, sewer treatment, etc -- just about anywhere.
We have the tech to supply such things off grid. In the 1920s, if you weren't in a city, you likely didn't have electricity. Rural electrification was one of the big projects of the federal government during The Great Depression.
I don't know how to get traction to promote certain ideas. People seem to see it as political to try to talk about solutions rather than helpful.
But I think we really need to find some means to create stability by strengthening small communities and rural life. The fact that people go the big city because that's where the jobs are has destabilized our economy and contributes to the terrible wealth gap we currently have.
It wasn't always like that. It doesn't have to be like that.
We can rebuild this world. We can make it better. We have the technology.