An anti-nuclear protestor in Japan gets creative.Photo: Matthias Lambrecht

Last Monday, Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, defended the Japanese government’s response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, insisting that the plant complex is in “a stable situation, relatively speaking.” That’s somewhat like the official description of 11,500 tons of water purposely dumped into the ocean waters off Fukushima as “low-level radioactive” or “lightly radioactive.” It is, of course, only “lightly” so in comparison to the even more radioactive water being stored at the plant in its place. But that’s the thing with descriptive words: they can leave so much to the eye of the beholder — and the Japanese government hasn’t been significantly more eager than the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which runs the complex, to behold all that much when it comes to Fukushima.

On Tuesday, the government finally raised the Fukushima alert level on the International Nuclear Event scale from 5 to 7 — “a major accident” — the highest category possible, only previously used for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster (which resulted in a 15,000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Ukraine). Though government officials rushed to play down the Chernobyl comparison, a Tepco official offered this ominously bet-hedging comment: “Our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it.”

In fact, on our punch-drunk planet, we’ve never seen anything like what’s underway at Fukushima — not one but four adjacent nuclear reactors, three of which seem to have suffered partial meltdowns, and several containment pools for “spent” fuel (which, in terms of radioactivity, is anything but spent) in various states of distress. Meanwhile, talk about the weeks needed to bring the situation under control has faded into perilous months, years, decades, even a century of cleanup and recovery. There is speculation that some of the core of at least one reactor has already “leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of [its] containment structure” — and every action to bring the complex under some kind of control only seems to create, or threatens to create, other unexpected problems (like that “lightly radioactive” water).

Meanwhile, amid further giant aftershocks from the 9.0 earthquake of March 11 (with possibly years more of them to come), the Japanese government has been slowly widening the 12-mile “evacuation zone” (recently described by a visitor as an eerie “death zone … like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After — an apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age”) around the complex. Just this week, it began warning pregnant women and children to stay out of certain areas up to 18 miles away from the plant. That’s not surprising, considering that in a small number of soil tests taken outside that 18-mile zone — in one case 25 miles from Fukushima — cesium-137 (half-life 30 years) has been found at levels that exceed those which, at Chernobyl, forced residents to move away. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who once lived in these areas (and if things get worse, beyond them) may never go home.

Whatever happens at Fukushima, could there be a more striking warning that we humans have been overreaching and that our planet has a way of offering penalties for such hubris? And keep in mind, the Japanese are hardly in this alone. After all, in the United States, at least five nuclear reactors are situated in “in earthquake-prone seismic zones,” according to a recent report, which doesn’t even include the Indian Point nuclear reactor built on an earthquake fault only 30 miles from downtown New York City, my hometown.

Perhaps it’s time to recalibrate when it comes to the way we’re treating planet Earth — before it’s too late.

Let’s hope the future doesn’t hold this.

“Not as bad as Chernobyl”? It might be better to describe the situation at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant as “remarkably unlike Chernobyl” in rural Ukraine, where, almost 25 years ago, a single uncontained nuclear reactor with a graphite core blew. 

We now contemplate the possibility of multiple reactors accompanied by multiple containment pools for what is euphemistically called “spent” fuel (when it isn’t “spent” at all) — at least 11,195 such rods, 1760 metric tons of them — self-destructing in a highly industrialized country smaller than California with the third largest economy on the planet. In a situation we’ve never faced before, to talk about “safety” and offer “reassurance” should ring oddly indeed.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m no scientist and have no scientific basis for assessing what’s going to happen in Japan, but after days reading the news copiously and watching endless TV reports, I do know a cultural taboo when I see one. In case you hadn’t noticed, while each morning’s screaming headlines contain terrible words — “dire,” “catastrophic,” “ever worsening,” “racing against the clock” — along with terrifying descriptions and ever-extending timelines for the crisis, few (not even, it seems, most anti-nuclear writers and groups) can bring themselves to speculate publicly about what might actually happen, no less ask the single scariest question: What’s the worst that might happen?

In mainstream news reports everywhere, you can feel the urge not to tumble into the irradiated zone of the nuclear imagination. And so one of the strangest aspects of the massive coverage of the Fukushima catastrophe — wrapped as it is inside an earthquake/tsunami double-disaster — has been the lack of reporting on or exploration of what the worst human and environmental consequences might be. It’s as if those who report on and assess reality for us had been shoved to the edge of some cliff and none of them could bear to look down or try to describe what might be below.

And yet the question unspoken isn’t necessarily the question unasked, or else tens of thousands of Japanese outside the danger zone, including many residents of Tokyo, a city of 13 million that lies only 150 miles away, wouldn’t be turning themselves into “nuclear refugees,” despite the stated advice of their government. And Americans, thousands of miles away, wouldn’t be rushing to clear pharmacies of iodide pills, again despite the clear reassurances of top government officials and leading experts.

So what’s the worst that can happen? Obviously, I don’t know. We certainly know that, in the wake of Chernobyl, 15,000 square miles of Ukraine — an expanse the size of Switzerland — was designated a “contaminated area,” including the “ghost town” of Pripyat a mile from that plant where 50,000 people once lived. Ukraine’s uninhabitable areas exist inside what is still officially known as an “Alienation Zone.” We also know that, with spent fuel rods and one reactor core at Fukushima containing plutonium, an element with a half-life of 24,000 years (some of which will still be around nearly half a million years from now), damage could be long-lasting. Assumedly, the reactors themselves will have to be entombed in some fashion for all future history.

But what about irradiated zones? If the worst happens, what about “dead zones” of “hundreds of square miles,” no less 15,000 of them, on the heavily urbanized main island of Japan? Or worse: What about the possibility that a city of 13 million inhabitants could become essentially uninhabitable? Small towns in Ukraine are one thing, but great cities, the very essence of modern civilization? What about that? What then? What in the world would that — or worse — mean in such a small, highly industrialized land? And what in the world would it mean for the rest of us?

Calling on the nuclear apocalyptic imagination

Right now, the experts and the media have barely raised the most expectable of possibilities in a situation that began with the thoroughly unexpected, a 9.0 earthquake, followed by a tsunami so powerful that it breached or topped defensive coastal walls and, in some places, swept six miles inland, leading to a nuclear disaster the likes of which has never been faced and for which no preparations seem to have been made.

Does this really give us confidence that the same event will somehow end within the bounds of the expectable? Is it better for governments to consistently underplay or lie about present and possible future realities, to offer ordinary citizens nothing but not the truth, lest they be “panicked” — and for the media, however half-consciously, to similarly shy off possibilities that might truly frighten?

After all, we’re talking about atomic power — about, that is, the primordial forces of nature. So why shouldn’t we raise primordial questions that remind us of the powers we insist, most of the time, on handling so blithely? As Jonathan Schell wrote recently, “a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom … The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more.” Understandably, for all sorts of reasons, including venality and simple fear, governments (and those who write about them) have the urge to try to tame the atom even as it threatens us, to turn Fukushima into a garden-variety 24/7 story, which it isn’t. 

It’s important, however, to ask about the worst, even in a purely speculative manner, since it lurks just below the surface anyway. The belief that panic will be less if we say nothing about what most of us are thinking is probably untrue. And should some unpredicted worst never happen, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and consider whether we really want to face such worsts the next time around, whether this is actually how we want to live on this planet. 

Consider one irony: from almost the moment they happened, the 9/11 attacks in New York City were treated as if a nuclear strike had occurred. (Hence, the instantaneous name for the site where the World Trade Towers once stood, Ground Zero, a term previously reserved for the place where an atomic explosion took place.) Ever since then, this nation has been convulsed by, and has discussed ad nauseum, various worst-case possibilities and potentially apocalyptic dangers from terrorism, which remains a relatively minor threat on our planet and has, since 9/11, posed few real dangers for Americans.

In those years, in fact, no apocalyptic fantasies about terror seemed too far out to raise publicly or too unlikely to grip a nation ready to be scared to death. To take but one example, in a 2008 presidential debate among four Democratic candidates, ABC’s Charlie Gibson devoted the first 15 minutes to “what is generally agreed to be the greatest threat to the United States today”: “a nuclear attack on an American city” by al-Qaeda. This was quite typical of American discourse for the last decade, despite no evidence whatsoever that al Qaeda had such a bomb or access to one or was capable of transporting it to, and setting it off in, an American city.

Isn’t it strange, then, that faced with an actual unprecedented nuclear event following on natural disasters that verged on the locally apocalyptic, so few can bring themselves to discuss possibilities? Perhaps it’s time for our news outlets to call instead on Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road {change link}, and so on the nuclear apocalyptic imagination to give the experts a hand and remind us of the nature of Alienation Zones.

[Note for readers: In the couple of days since I first drafted this piece, a small number of articles speculating about worst-case possibilities have begun to appear, though generally not in the mainstream. Among them, the always sharp Justin Elliott over at Salon.com wrote "Japan's Nuclear Danger Explained," and at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard interviewed expert Robert Alvarez, who suggested that, under the worst conditions, an area "as large as several northeastern states" could become uninhabitable. In the mainstream, 11 days after the Fukushima incident began, pieces have begun sidling up to worst-case scenarios mainly via descriptions of what happened at Chernobyl almost a quarter-century ago and through scattered Chernobyl references ("If the accident becomes bigger, like Chernobyl ... ").] 

It turns out that you don’t want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain.

As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It’s already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. “The great drying,” Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery calls it. At its epicenter, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever this month at a sweltering 115.5 degrees, while temperatures soared even higher in the surrounding countryside. After more than a decade of drought, followed by the lowest rainfall on record, the eucalyptus forests are now burning. To be exact, they are now pouring vast quantities of stored carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas considered largely responsible for global warming, into the atmosphere.

In fact, everything’s been burning there. Huge sheets of flame, possibly aided and abetted by arsonists, tore through whole towns. More than 180 people are dead and thousands homeless. Flannery, who has written eloquently about global warming, drove through the fire belt, and reported:

It was as if a great cremation had taken place … I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself… I had not appreciated the difference a degree or two of extra heat and a dry soil can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was different from anything seen before.

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.

Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80 percent below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95 percent of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown. Many of those workers, who left the countryside for China’s booming cities (and remitted parts of their paychecks to rural areas), may now be headed home jobless to potential disaster. A Wall Street Journal report concludes, “Some scientists warn China could face more frequent droughts as a result of global warming and changes in farming patterns.”

Globe-jumping to the Middle East, Iraq, which makes the news these days mainly for spectacular suicide bombings or the politics of American withdrawal, turns out to be another country in severe drought. Americans may think of Iraq as largely desert, but (as we were all taught in high school) the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are considered the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.

Well, not so fertile these days, it seems. The worst drought in at least a decade and possibly a farming lifetime is expected to reduce wheat production by at least half; while the country’s vast marshlands, once believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden, have been turned into endless expanses of baked mud. That region, purposely drained by dictator Saddam Hussein to tame rebellious “Marsh Arabs,” is now experiencing the draining power of nature.

Nor is Iraq’s drought a localized event. Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel where this January was reported to have been the hottest and driest in 60 years. “With less than 2 months of winter left,” Daniel Pedersen has written at the environmental website Green Prophet, “the region has received only 6 percent-50 percent of the annual average rainfall, with the desert areas getting 30 percent or less.”

Leaping continents, in Latin America, Argentina is experiencing “the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years,” according to Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society. One of the world’s largest grain exporters, it has already lost five billion dollars to the drought. Its soybeans — the country is the third largest producer of them — are wilting in the fields; its corn — Argentina is the world’s second largest producer — and wheat crops are in trouble; and its famed grass-fed herds of cattle are dying — 1.5 million head of them since October with no end in sight.

Dust Bowl economics

In our own backyard, much of the state of Texas — 97.4 percent to be exact — is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. According to the New York Times, “Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting.” Since 2004, in fact, the state has yoyo-ed between the extremities of flood and drought.

Meanwhile, scientists predict that, as global warming strengthens, the American southwest, parts of which have struggled with varying levels of drought conditions for years, could fall into “a possibly perm
anent state of drought.” We’re talking potential future “dust bowl” here. A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”

And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don’t forget northern California which “produces 50 percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes.” Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85 percent.

Observers are predicting that it may prove to be the worst drought in the history of a region “already reeling from housing foreclosures, the credit crisis, and a plunge in construction and manufacturing jobs.” January, normally California’s wettest month, has been wretchedly dry and the snowpack in the northern Sierra Mountains, crucial to the state’s water supplies and its agricultural health, is at less than half normal levels.

Northern California, in fact, offers a glimpse of the havoc that the extreme weather conditions scientists associate with climate change could cause, especially when combined with other crises. In a Los Angeles Times interview, new Secretary of Energy Steven Chu offered an eye-popping warning (of a sort top government officials simply don’t give) about what a global-warming future might hold in store for California, his home state. Interviewer Jim Tankersley summed up Chu’s thoughts this way:

California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming… In a worst case… up to 90 percent of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture. ‘I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,’ [Chu] said. ‘We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.’ And, he added, ‘I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going’ either.

As for East Africa and the Horn of Africa, under the pressure of rising temperatures, drought has become a tenacious long-term visitor. For East Africa, the drought years of 2005-2006 were particularly horrific and now Kenya, with the region’s biggest economy, a country recently wracked by political disorder and ethnic violence, is experiencing crop failures. An estimated 10 million Kenyans may face hunger, even starvation, this year in the wake of a poor harvest, lack of rainfall, and rising food prices; if you include the drought-plagued Horn of Africa, 20 million people may be endangered, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Recently, climatologist David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, published a study in Science magazine on the effect of extreme heat on crops. They concluded, based on recent climate models and a study of past extreme heat waves, that there was “a 90 percent chance that, by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.” According to the British Guardian, under such circumstances Battisti and Naylor believe “[h]alf of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops… Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20 percent and 40 percent as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics.”

Not surprisingly, it’s hard to imagine — perhaps I mean swallow — such an extreme world, and so most of us, the mainstream media included, don’t bother to. That means certain potentially burning questions go not just unanswered but unasked.

The grapes of wrath (updated)

Mind you, what you’ve read thus far represents an amateur’s eye view of drought on our planet at this moment. It’s hardly comprehensive. To give but one example, Afghanistan has only recently begun to emerge from an eight-year drought involving severe food shortages — and, as journalist Christian Parenti writes, it would need another “five years worth of regular snowfall just to replenish its aquifers.” Parenti adds: “As snow packs in the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ranges continue to recede, the rivers flowing from them will diminish and the economic situation in all of Central Asia will deteriorate badly.”

Nor is this piece meant to be authoritative, exactly because I know so relatively little. Think of it as a reflection of my own frustration with work not done elsewhere — and, by the way, thank heavens for Google University. Yes, Googling leaves you on your own, can be time-consuming, and tends to lead to cul-de-sacs (“Nuggets end 17-year drought in Orlando”), but what would we do without it? Thanks to good ol’ G.U., anyone can, for instance, check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Information Center or its U.S. Drought Monitor, or the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center and begin a self-education.

Now let me explain why I even bothered to write this piece. It’s true that, if you’re reading the mainstream press, each of the droughts mentioned above has gotten at least some attention, several of them a fair amount of attention (as well as some fine reporting), and the Australian firestorms have been headlines globally for weeks. The problem is that (the professional literature, the science magazines, and a few environmental websites and blogs aside) no one in the mainstream media seems to have thought to connect these dots or blots of aridity in any way. And yet it seems a no-brainer that mainstream reporters should be doing just that.

After all, cumulatively these drought hotspots, places now experiencing record or near-record aridity,
could be thought of as representing so many burning questions for our planet. And yet you can search far and wide without stumbling across a mainstream American overview of drought in our world at this moment. This seems, politely put, puzzling, especially at a time when University College London’s Global Drought Monitor claims that 104 million people are now living under “exceptional drought conditions.”

Scientists generally agree that, as climate change accelerates throughout this century (and no matter what happens from here on in, nothing will evidently stop some form of acceleration), extreme weather of every sort, including drought, will become ever more the planetary norm. In fact, experts are suggesting that, as the Washington Post reported recently, “The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems.”

Now, no one can claim beyond all doubt that global warming is the cause of any specific drought, or certainly the only cause anyway. As with the Texas drought, a La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific is often mentioned as a key causal factor right now. But the crucial point is what the present can tell us about the impact of a global pattern of extreme weather, especially extreme drought, on what will surely be a more extreme planet in the relatively near future.

If global temperatures are on the rise and more heat means lower crop yields, then you’re talking about more Kenyas, and not just in Africa either. You’re probably also talking about desperation, upheaval, resource conflicts, and mass out-migrations of populations, even — if scientists are right — from the American Southwest. (And in case you don’t think such a thing can happen here, remember Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or think of any of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos of the “Okies” fleeing the American dustbowl of the 1930s.)

Burning questions

Right now, the global economic meltdown has massively depressed fuel prices (key to farming, processing, and transporting most crops to market) and commodity prices have generally fallen as well, including food prices. Whatever the future economic weather, however, that is not likely to last.

So here’s a burning question on my mind:

We’re now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad “weather” in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Nonetheless, from the White House to the media, speculation about “the road to recovery” is already underway. The stimulus package, for instance, had been dubbed the “recovery bill,” aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the question of when we’ll hit bottom and when — 2010, 2011, 2012 — a real recovery will begin is certainly in the air.

Recently, in a speech in Singapore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested that the “world’s advanced economies” — the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan — were “already in depression,” and the “worst cannot be ruled out.” This got little attention here, but President Obama’s comment at his first press conference that delay on his stimulus package could lead to a “lost decade,” as in Japan in the 1990s (or, though it went unmentioned, the U.S. in the 1930s), made the headlines.

If, indeed, this is “the big one,” and does result in a “lost decade” or more, here’s what I wonder: Could the sort of “recovery” that everyone assumes lies just over a recessive or depressive horizon not be there? What if our lost decade lasts long enough to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather — drought and flood, hurricanes, typhoons, and firestorms of unprecedented magnitude — possibly in some of the breadbasket regions of the planet? What will happen if the rising fuel prices likely to come with the beginning of any economic “recovery” were to meet the soaring food prices of environmental disaster? What kind of human tsunami might that result in?

Once we start connecting some of today’s drought dots, wouldn’t it make sense to try to connect a few of the prospective dots as well? After all, if you begin to imagine what the worst might look like, you can also begin to think about what might be done to mitigate it. Isn’t that more sensible than looking the other way?

If the kinds of hits regional agriculture is now taking from record-setting drought became the future norm, wouldn’t we then be bereft of our most reassuring formulations in bad times? For example, the president spoke at that press conference of our present moment as “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” On an extreme planet, no such comforting “since the…” would be available, nor would there be any historical road map for what was coming at us, not if we had already run out of history.

Maybe the world we knew but scarce months ago is already, in some sense, long gone. What if, after a lost decade, we were to find ourselves living on another planet?

Feel free, of course, to ignore my burning questions. After all, I’m only an amateur with the flimsiest of credentials from Google U. Still, I do keep wondering when the media pros will finally pitch in, and what they’ll tell us is on that distant horizon, the one with the red glow.