22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers

7. MIKE DAVIS: “We need to become a planet of gardeners . . . to make our cities function as integral parts of nature”

◆ ◆ ◆ 111 7 “We need to become a planet of gardeners . . . to make our cities function as integral parts of nature” MIKE DAVIS in conversation with Joe Day Mike Davis is a distinguished professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. He received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998. Astalwart of the American left, Mike Davis is not known for pulling punches, and he does not hold back in a wide-ranging discussion that covers population growth, urban decay, the end of U.S. hegemony, and the need for utopian thinking. In connecting the proverbial dots between many of the existential problems facing the world, he argues that they create synergies among themselves. Throughout, Davis’s contention is that many of the ideas, models, and even technologies needed to address our various crises already exist but have often been forgotten, marginalized, or co-opted in the interests of profit and power. Davis suggests that the world’s population problem, for instance, is not about population numbers in and of themselves but rather about the spatial, political, and economic constraints placed on people and the means Photo courtesy of Mike Davis. 112 ◆ ◆ ◆ Recognize Everyone is Responsible for the Environment of feeding and employing them. An expert on cities and urban spaces, Davis discusses issues as diverse as transnational migrant communities , the failures and opportunities of city renewal, and the (often racial) dynamics of crisis and American suburbia. Finally, he turns his attention to the role of the United States in the world and paints a picture of an aging empire, one increasingly illiberal domestically and decreasingly influential globally, and clinging to global dominance more due to the inertia of globalization than to sound policymaking. This interview aims to call the reader to think of and work toward a better tomorrow. JD: How would you rank the major threats facing humanity at present? MD: Threats obviously cannot be weighed in isolation; rather we must focus on their convergence. The future, to say the least, will be overdetermined by some very vicious circles. Let me start with probable synergies between population growth, climate change, and food security, then briefly explore their connection to cities and unemployment. Our children, it is almost certain, will participate in the biological climacteric of our species, sometime between 2060 and 2090, when global population peaks around 10 billion. To feed this future humanity, food production must almost double. But for the first time in history it is doubtful whether global arable area can be significantly increased in the face of rampant urbanization and conversion of high-quality agricultural land. The technological and scientific intensification of agriculture, meanwhile, must contend with chaotic changes in crop geography and soil productivity as a result both of global warming and groundwater depletion. Climate models consistently predict that a vast belt of the northern subtropics from Mexico to the Indus Valley will face epic drought as a new weather normal, while the great megadelta regions of Asia simultaneously fight life-and-death battles against rising sea levels and supercyclones . In addition, the continued mining of groundwater in South and East Asia (made possible by the millions of tube wells drilled since the 1960s) portends agricultural decline or even collapse in some of the most productive irrigated food belts. In several recent white papers, Mike Davis ◆ ◆ ◆ 113 Columbia University water researchers have pointed to the cases of the Punjab and Gujarat, where the abandonment of farmland due to groundwater depletion is already happening on an alarming scale. Present-day water storage, irrigation, and flood-control infrastructures are therefore unlikely to sustain current levels of agriculture output to midcentury, much less support a dramatic expansion of production. Hydrological chaos and desertification, moreover, will require that people or water (or both) be moved hundreds, even thousands of miles. It’s difficult to imagine how these transfers can be accomplished without catastrophe as long as national frontiers and rivalries prevent the planning of water resources and population resettlement on semicontinental scales. JD: Are there factors that might stem this tide? MD: Some pundits, of course, will argue that such bleak predictions underestimate the revolution in plant genomics (the creation of superdrought -resistant crop varieties, for instance) as well as allied advances in precision irrigation. But the successful application of the new sciences presupposes an unprecedented global agricultural adjustment program, prioritizing grains over meat...