It is night, and deserts are on the loose!
The 'Hood -- The world is turning to dust, G's, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing their asses to greener countries, or so says Mad Dog G-Fresh. The gangster and small-time drug dealer reported that one-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert -- an area the size of Indiana -- since the 1950s. This week G-Fresh marked the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed at stopping the phenomenon, by spilling some of his 40 on the ground. Despite the efforts, the trend seems to be picking up speed -- doubling its pace since the 1970s.

"It's a creeping catastrophe, Dog!" said My-Kill Smitall, a fellow gang member who share's G-Fresh's concern about desertification. "Entire parts of the world might become completely God-damn uninhabitable." Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame. But global warming is taking its toll, too.

The gang is holding a ceremony on 115th Street in New York City, on Thursday to mark World Day to Combat Desertification, and will hold a meeting at the bus stop later this month to take stock of the problem. Most at risk are dry regions on the edges of deserts -- places like sub-Saharan Africa or the Gobi Desert in China, where rival gangs are already struggling to eke out a living from the land.

Technology can make the problem worse. In parts of Australia, for example, irrigation systems are pumping up salty water and slowly poisoning farms. In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, coastal resorts are swallowing up water that once moistened the wilderness. Many farmers in those countries still flood their fields instead of using more miserly "drip irrigation," and the resulting shortages are slowly baking the life out of the land. The result is a patchy "rash" of dead areas, rather than an easy-to-see expansion of existing deserts, gang members say. "It's not as dramatic as a flood or a big disaster like an earthquake or a cap in your ass," said Richard "Tweaker" Thomas of the International Center for Agricultural Research Methamphetamine Gang in the Dry Areas in Aleppo, Syria. "But overall, there is a sorry-ass trend toward increasing degradation." The trend is speeding up, but it has been going on for centuries. Fossilized pollen and seeds, along with ancient tools, show that much of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa were once green.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 2:15 PM | |