Its population soaring, Egypt is facing a food-supply crisis. Can the government make a desert bloom?
CAIRO—El Obour market, on the northeastern fringe of this megacity of 20 million, is the souk that never sleeps. Busy from before sunrise, when the first fruit trucks roll in, the cavernous warehouses are soon packed to the rafters, and the area echoes to the cries of vendors hawking their wares.
"Eggplants here. Fresh from Sharqiya,” one stallholder shouts, barely stifling a yawn after making a predawn trek from the Nile Delta’s eastern edge. “Mangoes, mangoes, mangoes,” a competing businessman barks, seeking to lure in potential customers. “Just look: I swear to God they’re fresh."
Amid the hustle and near constant parade of pickups and flatbed trucks laden with produce, it’s hard to imagine the country being in the midst of a domestic food shortage. But away from El Obour’s agricultural riches, this mostly desert nation must grapple with a looming crisis: Scarce agricultural land is rapidly succumbing to urban expansion. To address the problem, the government is launching headlong into an ambitious desert farming program, drilling 1,300 wells and building several towns in the Sahara. By adding as many as 4 million acres of farmland, officials aim to soon have the capacity to meet food production needs.
Experts are unconvinced that the government can succeed. A massive hike in groundwater pumping in the Western Desert could quickly drain the aquifer beneath it, and agricultural projects of this magnitude in the region have failed spectacularly. Why, ordinary Egyptians are asking, will this time be any different?
When the competitive season ends for the University of Warwick’s rowing team, they enjoy their time off. The teammates sip iced tea by a twinkling swimming pool, play croquet, and frolic in lush green meadows—all while naked, of course.
The Warwick Rowers of Coventry, England, stripped down for their annual fund-raising calendar, and they offered their fans a peek at new images from the upcoming 2016 calendar this week.
The earth’s surface is only 30 percent land; 70 percent is ocean.
Jeffrey Linn, a Seattle urban planner, is using digital cartography to imagine worlds that are even more watery.
You don’t need a starship to visit them, although a time machine would be useful. That’s because Linn’s maps depict what some cities would like if sea levels went up by 80 meters, or 264 feet.
New York City. (Map: Courtesy Spatialities.com)
For sea levels to rise this much, all the major ice caps and sheets would need to melt, which would send the water they store on land flowing into the world’s ocean.
Linn pulled the number from a study made by the United States Geological Survey.
He points out that even in future climate scenarios where we do little or nothing to curb the worst impacts of global warming, that kind of flooding would take centuries if not millennia to come about.
“I’m not trying to be a doomsayer,” Linn said. “The fascinating thing for me is the landforms, the islands, bays, and seas that emerge when you do this modeling.”
But our failure to act fast on climate change is accelerating the process. So if these visions of Seattle; Montreal; Vancouver, British Columbia; and other cities reduced to archipelagoes—or submerged completely underwater—got people thinking harder about climate change, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
London. (Map: Courtesy Spatialities.com)
Linn made his first drowned city map, “Islands of Seattle,” about a year and a half ago, he said. He was inspired in part by Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which the novelist created a “future anthropology” of California. “The book includes a couple maps of the California Central Valley and how it looks after the sea levels have risen,” said Linn. “That got me thinking, ‘How would the world around me look once all the world’s ice sheets were to melt?’ ”
The maps are studded with in-jokes for locals, “clever place names, to temper the horror of what could actually happen with a bit of humor,” Linn said. “Gallows humor, I suppose.”
A drowned New York City becomes N.Y. Sea, where an underwater Central Park is now called Central Shark. On the other coast, a protected bay near Hollywood is named Los Atlantis.
Linn sent a poster of his map of drowned Portland, Oregon, titled “Islands of Portland,” to Le Guin, who lives there—and whose 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven is set in a climate-changed future Portland. “I got a very nice note back,” he said. “She really appreciated it.”
Linn hopes to publish a book of sea-level-rise maps, a sort of atlas of a drowned world. In the meantime he’s put posters of his maps for sale on his website, spatialities.com.
Linn is also contributing maps to Dreams of a Low Carbon Future, a graphic novel about global warming in the United Kingdom cities of York and Leeds. A group at the University of Leeds is producing the book, which is set 200 years in the future.
SEE BELOW FOR THE 1001STTIME THE REITERATION OF DEMAND PAYMENT OF RETIREMENT PAY WHICH SHELL REFUSED TO HONOR IN THE PRESENCE AND DEEMED APPROVAL OF THE HONORABLE MAGISTRATES OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE PHILIPPINES
