Reading with renewed skepticism

While reading a recent new book, Enlightenment Now, I now read with renewed skepticism and critical analysis of their assumptions, arguments and conclusions (inferences). Enlightenment Now will resurface on Kestrel once completed, but it already has altered my thinking patterns some.

With that background, a recent article in Grist on world food insecurity deserves mention – both for the data presented, which is alarming, and the reasoning / root problem causality.

First, the data.

One in 11 people worldwide went hungry last year, while one in three struggled to afford a healthy diet. 

Grist

If that doesn’t get you, how about this.

Of the 733 million or so people who went hungry last year, there were roughly 152 million more facing chronic undernourishment than were recorded in 2019. (All told, around 2.8 billion people could not afford a healthy diet.) This is comparable to what was seen in 2008 and 2009, a period widely considered the last major global food crisis, and effectively sets the goal of equitable food access back 15 years.

Grist

Food insecurity is a huge global problem; I do not think anybody will argue that point. But, here’s where Grist seems to attribute absolute causality to climate change. While a contributing factor, and a huge catalyst, attributing the root cause to climate change is an unsupported inference that ignores all the other contributing factors – e.g., state policies, logistics, and conflicts.

Climate change is second only to conflict in having the greatest impact on global hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, according to the FAO. That’s because planetary warming does more than disrupt food production and supply chains through extreme weather events like droughts. It promotes the spread of diseases and pests, which affects livestock and crop yields. And it increasingly causes people to migrate as they flee areas ravaged by rising seas and devastating storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict that then drives more migration in a vicious cycle. 

Grist

That reasoning is sound, except that the entire human action side of the equation is ignored – humans could act differently and mitigate those issues. Climate change is certainly creating food chain challenges, no doubt; but is that really the root cause of human food insecurity and suffering? I say ‘no!’. Communally we seem bound and determined to make decisions that protect some’s largess while increasing food deficits for others.

While climate change seems a logical root cause for increasing food insecurity, that reasoning avoids putting humans as the crisis cause, only how humans are impacted by it. Is it not human inactivity – the failure to act – that is root cause of the suffering? Grist’s reasoning falsely claims climate as root cause and eliminates human inaction – both, imho! To correct the situation both elements need to be addressed: earth’s polluted climate and corrective human actions.