Anybody out there for a new round of predictions for the next year?
Sure, JWFITZ, I'll play. I'd also very much like to hear more about the potential connection between proximal ocean surface temperatures and rainfall/weather in Puna and Kona, too, now that your computer is working again -whenever you can make time to explain the linkages as you perceive them.
My predictions for 2009:
In the next year I'd predict very little will stand out as being all that much different than in the year previous or in each of the several years before, the overall trend being more significant than particular events in this regard.
This coming year will, however, probably have the look and feel of improvement ("Hope and Change have come!") largely thanks to the NDOS (New Deal On Steroids) stimulus package -and particularly if Obama's administration can deliver on those entirely praiseworthy assertions in his speech "health care reform cannot wait another year" then the lot of the most marginalized and economically pinched working poor Americans will seem to ease and improve a bit. New contracts for domestic infrastructure development increasing (while ruinously excessive military spending overseas decreases), local jobs not lost where job loss was feared, keeping the family house when default was feared, and medical care not totally bankrupting the family if a medical need arises ...these factors will soothe and ease people's minds somewhat.
Unfortunately, this look and feel of improvement will probably do little to change the larger trends.
In the next year --as in each of the several years previous-- severe storm events and droughts will increase in frequency, severity, and geographic distribution. These will result in rising frequency and severity of economic damage from destroyed housing and infrastructure (as from flooding and forest fires), increased shortages and price hikes in scarce materials (from Portland cement to steel to lumber) as well as displaced and unemployed populations.
Less dramatic but more significant than severe storms, 2009's shifts in weather will impact crops with subsequent failures impacting supply and price in commodities from walnuts and almonds to staple cereal grains. Some items will be available at a higher price; some may not be available at an affordable price.
The price of oil (and therefore, gas) will continue to yoyo up and down on world markets but the overall trend will be toward slowly rising, not declining, energy prices not because supply does not increase (supply will increase) but because of inflationary pressures reducing the purchasing power of the dollar and other currencies.
In the next year people will not be as worried as last year --when it was uncertain who would succeed the smirking C-student in the White House-- but consumer confidence and spending will not return to previous levels, nor will the value of savings and overall real wealth increase either, this due to the declining valuation of currencies, stocks, bonds, and similar paper financial instruments as well as in large portions of the real estate market.
Gold, precious and strategic metals, some gems, and durable rare collectibles will retain their value and increase in price over the next year.
Except in the overbuilt small spec house sector and overbuilt multi-million dollar Kona estate sector (both of which have farther to fall), unless there is an eruption or a hurricane hits Puna --knocking down thousands of structures held together by termite spit and tearing the roofs off many of the rest-- Big Island real estate values in general and Puna/Waimaia real estate values in particular will hold and maybe climb slightly as realizations of drought realities begin to set in throughout broad areas of the US. People (the smarter ones, anyway) in drought regions will unload estates previously valued at $1-$2 million for whatever they can get and then immediately turn around and sink that capital into smaller homes and farming infrastructure (e.g., a greenhouse with raised beds and perhaps an aquaponics system) on one-acre and larger Puna lots with a garden, chicken coop, and the abundant water here.
More folks in Puna and on the Big Island generally will start gardening and maintaining poultry while paying closer attention to the lore of soils, sustainability, and permaculture. Guinea fowl will become more common as effective roving garden pest control and intruder alarms. Ducks will become more common as effective roving garden slug control.
Some forward-thinking people on the Big Island in general and on the East Side in particular, especially in the Waipao Valley and on the more fertile hillsides and little valleys with richer soils and abundant water along the Hamakua Coast, will increasingly start coming together as groups to learn, discuss, and implement germplasm (seed) conservation and plant breeding practices maintaining and selecting for cultivars and strains which do well locally. Bringing rice cultivation back to the Big Island will be the main focus of one of these groups (...I feel confident in making this prediction because I intend to set up an organizational face-to-face meeting in August-September and a full-fledged active community meeting --complete with a speaker experienced in rice-growing techniques and handing out viable rice seed and sprouted rice seedlings to anyone who is interested-- in November-December).
...and finally, my last --but not least!-- prediction for 2009:
Rat populations will decline as anti-rat measures of many different sorts from rat traps to placing broad metal collars on avos and fruit trees (to deprive rats of access to food while it is ripening and so more effectively drive them toward baited traps) are increasingly used, this increase in rat control efforts resulting as public education efforts make it clear that one of the best methods Puna has to reduce incidence of rat lungworm disease is to specifically target and routinely eliminate as many rats as possible on an ongoing basis.
Puna is so advantageously positioned, so blessed, in so many regards. These quotes following come from an article (link, below) which I think highlights just how very good Puna has it in almost every regard.
How to Build Resilient Communities in a Chaotic World
by Chip Ward
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175039/c...n_security
Food and security may not be a twosome that comes quickly to mind, but experts know that our food supply is particularly vulnerable. We're familiar with the hardships that follow spikes in the price of gas or the freezing of credit lines, but few of us in the U.S. have experienced the panic and privation of a broken food chain -- so far. That's going to change in the decades ahead. Count on it, even if it seems as unlikely today as, for most of us, an economic meltdown did just one short year ago.
Our industrialized and globalized food production and distribution system is a wonder, bringing us exotic eats from distant places at mostly affordable prices. Those mangos from Mexico and kiwis from New Zealand are certainly a treat, but the understandable pleasure we take in them hides a great risk. If you're thinking about what the greening of homeland security might actually mean, look no further than our food supply.
The typical American meal travels, on average, 1,000 miles to get to your plate. The wheat in your burger bun may be from Canada, the beef from Argentina, and the tomato from Chile. Food shipped from that far away is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions -- a calamitous storm that hits a food-growing center; spikes in the price of fuel for fertilizer, farm machinery, and trucking; internecine strife or regional wars that shut down harvests or block trade routes; national policies to hoard food as prices spike or scarcities set in; not to speak of the usual droughts, floods, and crop failures that have always plagued humankind and are intensifying in a globally warming world.
An interruption of food supplies from afar is only tolerable if we've planned ahead and so can fill in with locally grown food. Sadly, for those of us who live outside of California and Florida, local food remains seasonal, limited, and anything but diverse. And don't forget, local food has been weakened in this country by the reasonably thorough job we've done of wiping out all those less-than-superprofitable family farms. U.S. agriculture is now strikingly consolidated into massive, industrial-style operations. So chickens come from vast chicken farms in Arkansas, hogs from humongous hog outfits in Georgia, corn from the mono-crop Midwestern "cornbelt," and so on.
The future -- the sustainable future where we survive -- will not be created by those who invented the world we have just lost and are reluctantly giving it up, while salvaging as much of their privilege from the ruins as they can. It will be invented by people who have only each other to lose and understand that, in the coming era of chaos, collapse, and reconstruction, we will find support, security, comfort, and solutions within the context of communities -- on the ground, online, overlapping, and emerging. While Washington salvages the past, citizens in unlikely places like Detroit and Moab, Utah, are building the future. "Think globally, act locally" has never rung truer. "Think security, act locally" will also be true and real security will be homegrown, not "homeland."
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A pleasant slideshow:
http://www.thejoymovie.com
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