Traffic jams ---> Trophic jams

We live in State College, PA, a small university town.  Well, it isn’t nearly as small as it was when we moved here in 1985; Penn State enrollment has gone from around 30,000 when we got here to something like 50,000, and the town has grown to keep up.

How did that happen?  In essence, by sacrificing farm fields, turning them into condo centers, fine suburban-style cardboard ‘mansions’ with big grassy lots, 2-3 car garages (so everyone could drive a few miles to the nearest grocery), and so on. Even in this fairly small town, during the day, there are cars going through most intersections most of the time, even in the residential tracts.

To get from here to anywhere you need to get on I-80 or I-95, or some other throughway, where there is an endless chain of nearly stationary cars and trucks, hour after hour, mile after mile after mile.  Even when not obstructed by an accident or construction, the traffic is so heavy that it’s not at all unusual for very slow, or creeping, or stopped traffic jams  tolitter the route.

The global traffic jam….
This same situation is happening all over the country, all over Europe, all over Japan and much of India and China.  It is even happening in parts of Africa and Australia.  This is 24/7.  The endless rivers of steel, rubber, and petrochemicals is like a river, and as Heraclitus said you can’t step into it twice:  in no two moments is this same stream actually the same.  The cars and people and their arrangement are different–and, of course, we are never using the same gasoline twice: once used, it is burped into the atmosphere.

When you’ve been around more than a few decades, you’ll start to realize that the current situation isn’t ‘normal’.  In a decade or two, or three, you’ll think today was good and you were used to it, but that what has become normal, the jam of all jams, is what’s really intolerable.

The traffic jam is, of course, due to the unconstrained growth of population, and its per capita consumption.  And this traffic jam, in turn, will have its longterm side effects in terms of the resources it uses up.  And that is going to lead to another kind of jam.

The global trophic jam
As we pave and build condos and shopping malls over what has for  millions of years been millions of acres of fertile land, we reduce the potential food production for us and other creatures, plant or animal.  Our sewage and waste claims more in water and land areas.  And we seem unable to prevent there always being more of us.  That means more paving, more building, and altered climate.  This means less fertile land for growing food–a trophic jam.

Climate is changing, and at least some of this is due to human-induced global warming.  Ostrich-like deniers, note: Climate change is happening regardless of why!  This will moisten some arid lands, and even more it will dry out currently fertile lands, in large amounts.  It will raise water levels on coasts and in rivers.  Since before the industrial age, settlements–now cities–were built on waterways for trade and so on, many or even most major cities will be threatened by water rise.  This will drive people inland, to cover over even more arable land.  Those living inland should realize that they will not be able to keep this inrush out.

Some areas, like Northern Canada perhaps, will become wetter.  But hardly anybody lives there.  Other areas, the rich farmlands, will become drier and likely many will become arid.  Nations that rely on food for their people or for trade, will have to look elsewhere–and if all of human history is any guide, this trophic jam will inevitably lead to attempts at military conquest.  If the breadbasket has shifted, say, from the US to Canada, and there’s real food pressure, does anyone doubt that military expeditions won’t head northward?

Our relentless, unconstrained traffic jams are irritating, especially to the impatient (like me) or those who want to spend time with their families, or bowling, rather than sitting in traffic.  But these headaches may be dooming us to stomach aches–the kind one gets when there isn’t enough food.

One can be a climate denying ostrich, or a rosy believer in science and engineering, but if what we here and many others who know much more than we do are making these warnings, they are not all Chicken Littles.  Yet, like the swarm of lemmings, we are headed for the cliffs.

Apparently, today at least, we can’t tell, or don’t care to tell, the connections between traffic and trophic jams.