{"id":63557,"date":"2022-09-20T11:45:14","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T16:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63557"},"modified":"2022-09-20T11:45:14","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T16:45:14","slug":"water-food-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63557","title":{"rendered":"Water. Food. Energy."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Water. Food. Energy.<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Unless you have spent the past summer under a rock on a remote island, you have probably heard about the severe droughts besetting Asia, Europe, and the United States. Rivers turning into mere trickles. Crops failing or delivering less than half of their usual yields. Power plants shutting down due to a lack of cooling or fuel. The less advertised side of the story is that we have mostly done this to ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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D<\/span>rought is a sure killer for civilizations. A few years, let alone decades of persistent drought, have forced\u00a0many civilization<\/a>\u00a0to their knees. The Akkadian Empire. The Mayans. The Tang Dynasty\u2026 The lack of water have forced people in the past to leave their settlements or die in trying to make a living where crops grew no longer.<\/p>\n

Our current version of agricultural civilization is no different in this regard either. We rely heavily on agriculture to grow food, which in turn relies heavily on predictable rainfall patterns and a nutrient rich soil to grow crops. The only reason there are this many of us on the planet at the moment is that we\u2019ve managed to break \u2014 or at least weaken \u2014 this link between land food and water, and the bond between locations where food is grown and where it\u2019s consumed.\u00a0At least, for a while.<\/em><\/p>\n

The magic ingredient \u2014 of course \u2014 was\u00a0energy<\/em><\/strong>, and in our current civilization\u2019s case this meant: fossil fuels. As I wrote many times, energy is the economy, but not only that: energy is agriculture. There is an intricate and inseparable connection between food, water and energy.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Water. Food. Energy. Unless you have spent the past summer under a rock on a remote island, you have probably heard about the severe droughts besetting Asia, Europe, and the United States. Rivers turning into mere trickles. Crops failing or delivering less than half of their usual yields. Power plants shutting down due to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[220,288,319,32578,866],"class_list":["post-63557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-drought","tag-extreme-weather","tag-food","tag-the-honest-sorcerer","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63558,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63557\/revisions\/63558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}