The wife of a migrant farmer in California, 1938. She had six children and told photographer Dorothea Lange, "People just can't make it back there [in Texas] with drought, hailstorms, windstorms, duststorms, insects. They'll all be here in another year or two. People exist here and they can't do that there. You can make it here if you sleep late and eat little, but it's pretty tough--there's so many people"
That was then.
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Coming soon to an earth near you...Global warming
Human-caused global warming is fueling longer droughts and extreme weather events that are posing problems to communities around the world. Scientists say Mexico City, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 22 million people and one of the world's biggest cities, may be just months away from "day zero" — when the taps run dry for huge swaths of the city. Experts say this comes as a result of several years of abnormally low rainfall, longer dry periods and high temperatures that have added stress to a water system already straining to cope with increased demand. In the coming weeks, Mexican authorities are expected to introduce significant restrictions on the water pumped from reservoirs ahead of the intense summer months. -------------------- As posted on CNN 2.26.24 https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/25/climate/mexico-city-water-crisis-climate-intl/index.html -------------------------- I immediately thought of how the migrants wanting to get into Texas across the Mexican border are already being turned away at gunpoint. There's not much hope for them to get to California either, like the woman shown in Dorthea Lange's photo. Are you starting to get the point? We're in this together, and it's not going to get better. It's history repeating itself on a global scale. Yes it's daunting. But it does need to give everyone everywhere a wake-up call. This time there's no California on the horizon to save us. ----------------------- And celebrate a bit today as the birth anniversary of... "the novelist John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California (1902). He's best known for his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), about the "Dust Bowl" farmers who had to migrate to California after a drought had destroyed their land. To research the book, he bought a an old bakery truck, filled it with blankets, food, and cooking utensils, and joined the migration himself, so that he could meet and talk to people without being conspicuous. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1940 and Steinbeck went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962." Thanks Writer's Almanac |
