Drought Related Quotes

Guan Zhong explains (as the fourth-century-BC Guanzi attests) that management of water is the key to maintaining social order. There are ‘five harmful influences’ in nature, he says, including drought and pestilence – but floods are the worst. Uncontrolled water has a symbolic as well as a pragmatic impact: it leads to the breakdown of filial piety and disintegration of social relations.

You wouldn’t recognize this land back then. Over thousands of years, the plants and animals worked with wind and fire until the land was covered in a sea of grass that was home to many relatives. The bison gave us everything, from thadó, our meat, to our clothing and thípi hides. His dung fertilized the soil. The prairie dogs opened up tunnels that brought air and water deep into the earth. Grasses that were as tall as a man set long roots that could withstand drought. When my grandfather was a boy, he woke each morning to the song of the meadowlark. The prairie showed us for many generations how to live and work together as one family. “And then the settlers came with their plows and destroyed the prairie in a single lifetime,” my father said. What I remember most, now, is his voice shaking with rage, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling as they held a hand-rolled cigarette, the way he drew smoke deep into his lungs.

The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice – that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If she was lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.

There are several kinds of poverty. Third-and first-world poverty are entirely different in character because of the great difference in their historical and economic settings. The gruel-ling problems faced by the third world’s poor relate to bare survival, to the basic task of getting water and food. Their plight is often further complicated by war, corruption, flood or drought. Third-world poverty is life on the margins of existence, a tough and unforgiving struggle, dedicated to the present moment and having room in it for only two feelings: despair and hope.

There are probably less than 15,000 Kahars spread across Godda, Banka and Bhagalpur. They scrape out a living in brick kilns, earth works, harvesting—but always in seasonal occupations. No one has ever bothered to make a systematic count of their actual number. Official data relating to them seem to be flawed. ‘They don’t count us because we don’t count,’ says Jagdev Laiya.

The definition of teachers or gurus was unknown to everyone including the teachers in the campus. So the people present in the school campus weren’t teachers at all, he thought. They were just people supposed to act like robots and cram things related to the subjects in the brains of their students. A bit of general imparting of knowledge wasn’t allowed and was considered as impudence. With this brief recap of his past, the wandering mind of Mr. Patil came back to the present.

The definition of teachers or gurus was unknown to everyone including the teachers in the campus. So the people present in the school campus weren’t teachers at all, he thought. They were just people supposed to act like robots and cram things related to the subjects in the brains of their students. A bit of general imparting of knowledge wasn’t allowed and was considered as impudence. With this brief recap of his past, the wandering mind of Mr. Patil came back to the present.

Suppose boredom is a backstairs to liberation — insignificant, and so often overlooked. No one who has not known its higher degrees can claim to have lived. Not the Relative Boredom of long waiting at junctions for railway connections on the way to visit friends—or the rashly accepted week-end with acquaintances—the reviewing of a dull book. In such Relative Boredom the "wasting-of-time"-feeling only heightens the enjoyment of the coming escape, the anticipation of which sustains us meanwhile. Absolute Boredom is rather the pain of nausea, it is the loss of one's livelihood as for the pianist who loses his hands, the unsatiable desire for what we know makes us sick, it is the Great Drought, the "Carnal physic for the sick soul", the Dark Night of the Soul after the climbing of Mount Carmel, it is the pillar of salt, the exile from the land which is no more, the Sin against the Holy Ghost, the break-up of patterns, the horror that waits alone in the night, the entry into the desert where Death mocks by serving one one's daily food and one cannot bear hut to keep the darkness of one's own shadow before one for the very brightness of the light that reveals the universal emptiness. Do not try to turn back now — here in the desert perhaps there are doors open—in the cool woods they are overgrown, and in the busy cities they have built over them.

I write these words in May of 2011, the week after a huge outbreak of tornadoes killed hundreds across the American South; it was the second recent wave of twisters of unprecedented size and intensity. In Texas, a drought worse than the Dust Bowl has set huge parts of the state ablaze. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is moving explosives into place to blow up a levee along the Mississippi River, swollen by the the third “100-year-flood” in the last twenty years—though as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration noted at the end of 2010, “the term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” That’s because 2010 was the warmest year recorded, a year when 19 nations set new all-time high temperature records. The Arctic melted apace; Russia suffered a heat wave so epic that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world; and nations from Australia to Pakistan suffered flooding so astonishing that by year’s end the world’s biggest insurance company, Munich Re, issued this statement: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.” And that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that on April 6, the U.S. House of Representatives was presented with the following resolution: “Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” The final vote on the resolution? 184 in favor, 240 against. When some future Gibbon limns the decline and fall of our particular civilization, this may be one of the moments he cites.

It’s common in the middle of a drought . . . to forget that rain is the norm. Or in the middle of a flood to forget that floods rarely happen. Or when bad news comes from the doctor to forget that, for most of us, this comes after many years of relatively good health.

People were selling pyramids of oranges from wooden carts. Powdered milk and sacks of grain sat on the shelves of the little stores we passed, the very food that little girl had needed to eat. It didn’t seem to make any sense, but famines are caused by shocks to the food distribution system, not necessarily by poverty per se. There was still plenty of food in Somalia; it was just relatively expensive because of the drought and the rise in global food prices.

Social change takes time. Communities are built on the practice of patience and imagination - the belief that we are here for the duration and will take care of our relations in times of both drought and abundance. These are the blood and flesh gestures of commitment.

My Golden Earth (The Sonnet) O my golden earth, I am but your stupid lover. The flute of your dazzling fragrance, Makes my agonies disappear. Whenever your sky is cloudy, My heart drowns in drought. Whenever your oceans quiver, With tears my eyes get fraught. Whenever you giggle in prosperity, It pours honey into my ears. Whenever you shine with festivals, Light and love erase my historic fears. You are my home o my golden earth. All your children are my sisters and brothers.

City leaders pour resources into beautiful spectacles for political reasons, rather than providing good roads, functioning sewers, relatively safe marketplaces, and other basic amenities of urban life. As a result, cities may look awe-inspiring but aren't particularly resilient against disasters like storm floods and drought. And the more a city suffers from the onslaughts of nature, the more contentious its political situation becomes. Then it's even harder to repair shattered dams and homes. This vicious cycle has haunted cities for as long as they've existed. Sometimes the cycle ends with urban revitalization, but often it ends in death.

Here is what I believe to be the bottom line on economic cycles: The output of an economy is the product of hours worked and output per hour; thus the long-term growth of an economy is determined primarily by fundamental factors like birth rate and the rate of gain in productivity (but also by other changes in society and environment). These factors usually change relatively little from year to year, and only gradually from decade to decade. Thus the average rate of growth is rather steady over long periods of time. Only in the longest of time frames does the secular growth rate of an economy significantly speed up or slow down. But it does. Given the relative stability of underlying secular growth, one might be tempted to expect that the performance of economies would be consistent from year to year. However, a number of factors are subject to variability, causing economic growth—even as it follows the underlying trendline on average—to also exhibit annual variability. These factors can perhaps be viewed as follows: Endogenous—Annual economic performance can be influenced by variation in decisions made by economic units: for consumers to spend or save, for example, or for businesses to expand or contract, to add to inventories (calling for increased production) or sell from inventories (reducing production relative to what it might otherwise have been). Often these decisions are influenced by the state of mind of economic actors, such as consumers or the managers of businesses. Exogenous—Annual performance can also be influenced by (a) man-made events that are not strictly economic, such as the occurrence of war; government decisions to change tax rates or adjust trade barriers; or changes caused by cartels in the price of commodities, or (b) natural events that occur without the involvement of people, such as droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. Long-term economic growth is steady for long periods of time but subject to change pursuant to long-term cycles. Short-term economic growth follows the long-term trend on average, but it oscillates around that trendline from year to year. People try hard to predict annual variation as a source of potential investing profit. And on average they’re close to the truth most of the time. But few people do it right consistently; few do it that much better than everyone else; and few correctly predict the major deviations from trend.

Especially did his [Seth Jones] intense belief in the efficacy of the “Prayer of Faith” produce a deep impression—partly due to this unquestioned fact: During a distressing drought (I think near Sackett’s Harbor, N.Y.) an assemblage of farmers in open field expressed in his presence utter hopelessness with regard to rain, saying that a single day more would ruin every crop. “If you would pray for rain with Faith it would come,” he said. “But we have no faith! Will not you exercise it for us?” Whereupon he knelt down upon a stump and prayed mightily for three hours, while (it was related) copious showers fell from the eyes of his hearers. When he descended , the first great drops of a “glorious rain” were dashing down. At eighty-three he presided over a Universalist convention…” ~ Amanda Jones

Society, not nature: this is the death sentence for multitudes. Vulnerability, Wisner et al. contended, is really a function of unequal ownership of resources. Instead of viewing disasters as chance events or 'acts of God' that irrupt into ordinary life, they should be seen as the starkest truth about that life, whose inner structure they bring to life. This is the cardinal idea of critical vulnerability theory, elaborated in countless case studies: during a drought in northern Nigeria, to take one classic example, rich households stood the test thanks to the large size of their cattle herds and other assets, whereas the poorer ones bit the dust, meaning that the drought itself was at most 'a catalyst' of selective pressure inhering in the property relations. Some owned the means for survival, others did not.

The Rot is a byproduct of the deal your father made with Roderick Mierel expiring.” Ash’s brows lowered as he rested an arm on the nicked table. “That has nothing to do with the deal, Sera.” Shock rippled through me, rocking me to my very core. “I don’t understand. It started after I was born. It appeared then, and the weather started to change. The droughts and the ice that falls from the sky. The winters—” “The deal did have an expiration date because what my father did to the climate wasn’t natural. It couldn’t continue that way forever.” Ash’s gaze searched mine. “But all that meant was that the climate would return to its original state—more seasonal conditions like in some areas of the mortal realm. Of course, I doubt it will ever get as cold as Irelone, not where Lasania is located, but nothing too severe.” My heart sped up. There was a buzzing in my ears. I barely heard Saion when he said, “The weather has been affected by what Kolis did. That’s why the mortal realm is seeing more extreme weather like droughts and storms. It’s a symptom of the destabilization of the balance.” “The deal has nothing to do with the Rot?” I whispered, and Ash shook his head. I…I wanted to deny what he was saying. Believe that this was some sort of trick. “Did you think the two things were related?” Ash asked. A tremor started in my legs. “We knew the deal expired with my birth. That’s when the Rot showed. That’s what we’d been told, generation after generation. That the deal would end, and things would return to as they were.

The Communists were evil, or at least that’s what most people were saying. But it was hard to tell. Many in Chinatown had forgotten what China was like: starvation, drought, pestilence, no opportunities. When Mao said, “Everybody works so everybody eats,” Fong See, who may have been considered a landlord but had grown up as a peasant, recognized the irrefutable logic to those words. When relatives wrote that daughters of not very well-to-do families were being recruited to become orthodontists, doctors, and engineers, it was another sign—a woman could be something more than just a servant. But no one wanted to say these things aloud.

that in a healthy soil the relatively low levels of nitrogen encourage microbes to produce glomalins and other glues, which boost soil aggregation and help to create a more resilient soil that is better able to cope with drought and flooding. The research showed that the shift from the use of carbon-rich manures to artificial fertilisers high in nitrogen and phosphorus changed the way microbes used nutrients. They produced less glue, which meant that soil structures changed, with fewer pores and less oxygen.