The Genius of Diop

I found a post on the Bro-log on climate change that caught my attention and made me think of some of Diop's work. The post highlights an article in the New Scientist. A couple of things stood out in that article that made me think of Diop:

In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution. "We are locked into a mindset that each country has to be self-sustaining in food, water and energy," Cox says. "We need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are, and then plan the population, food and energy production around that. If aliens came to Earth they'd think it was crazy that some of the driest parts of the world, such as Pakistan and Egypt, grow some of the thirstiest crops for export, like rice."

The thing is that for those of us who are Pan-Africanists we've already come to this conclusion. If we take a look at Diop's Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State, we find in part 3:The Industrialization of Black Africa in which Diop lays out how Africa can be seen has having 8 natural zones of development. Diop discusses how each zone could specialize in certain types of industries rather than each of the 53 states attempting to do all industries within their own borders.

In terms of energy production the New Scientist article points out:

Supplying energy to our cities will also require some adventurous thinking. Much of it could be covered by a giant solar belt, a vast array of solar collectors that would run across north Africa, the Middle East and the southern US. Last December, David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC calculated that a 110,000-square-kilometre area of solar panels across Jordan, Libya and Morocco would be "sufficient to meet 50 to 70 per cent of worldwide electricity production, or about three times [today's] power consumption in Europe". High-voltage direct current transmission lines could relay this power to the cities, or it could be stored and transported in hydrogen - after using solar energy to split water to provide hydrogen for fuel cells.

Again, we saw that Dr. Diop as prescient in his discussion of Solar power in Africa (though due to cost he was more inclined to Hydro-electric and nuclear. I'm sure that if his treatise was written in this current time he would not be so favorable of nuclear and would definitely be more bullish on solar power.

One thing we must understand is that Africa is not the source of much of these emissions. Yet due to it's geographic location, under the scenarios presented in the New Scientist article, Africans stand to lose a great deal if much of it becomes desert.

Some other interesting issues in the New Scientist article is the proposition of moving large portions of the world population to the newly greened northern and southern poles. Given that a vast majority of the people who will be adversely affected by global warming and whom had played the least part in it's occurrence will be subject to moving the most, I wonder what kind of sociological issues will arise with this crush of "colored' non-western peoples who will have to inhabit lands long void of non-Europeans (in the case of northern regions). There undoubtedly be serious friction where people of very divergent customs and values are forced to live in the same geographic location and under the same government.

Things to ponder.