Joel Garreau of the Washington Post reports on the Russian pundit Igor Panarin, who is forecasting that “the United States will break into six parts in June or July of 2010.”
He notes that
Panarin’s disintegration divination comes complete with a map. In it, Alaska goes to Russia. Hawaii goes to Japan or China. “The California Republic” — the West from Utah and Arizona to the Pacific — goes to China. “The Texas Republic” — the South from New Mexico to Florida — goes to Mexico. “Atlantic America” — the Northeast from Tennessee and South Carolina up to Maine — joins the European Union. And “The Central North-American Republic” — the Plains from Ohio to Montana — goes to Canada.
Garreau suggests that Russians may be happily projecting their own past experiences — or future worries — onto the US. And, in fact, Russia is more likely to lose parts than is the US.
Overall, the likelihood of secession in the US seems low. This is the FutureAtlas.com estimate:
And, as Garreau and others point out, Panarin’s divisions are oddly chosen. A more likely division might look something like this:
The most plausible fracture line is the “red-blue” one, as the largest font of true extremism in the US comes from the so-called “Christian right.” One can imagine a scenario in which the Republican Party or a Christan-right splinter of it can no longer win national elections, turns radical, and seeks a split, taking the South, the Great Plains, and the northern Rockies. (Or it might just involve the South, if the Republicans become a regional, Southern party.)
Overall, though, this is unlikely, as American national identity is strong, all parts of the country are somewhat ideologically mixed, and all but the most extreme evangelical Christians seem to understand the realities of living in pluralist, diverse America.
(Who knows what Alaska might do in this circumstance? It might stay in the US, join the red secession, or opt for independence. It would not revert to Russia however.)
Graphics copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link
Somali pirates seizing ships on the high seas and militias driving hundreds of thousands from their homes in the Congo are prime examples of what happens when there is too little government to manage even basic control of a country.
FutureAtlas has a new issue page examining just this issue; see the page for a larger version of this map.
Government effectiveness is crucial because many key 21st century issues — from climate change and intellectual property theft to human rights and terrorism — are decisively affected by it.
In the issue that comes out next week, Foreign Policy magazine will cover some work I did at the consulting firm Social Technologies on mapping the speed of change.
Foreign Policy writes:
How swiftly or slowly life changes in particular countries is the subject of the Speed of Change Index, which measures changes in urbanization, literacy, GDP per capita, civil liberties, and access to a telephone, TV, and the Internet in countries during the last 15 years…. The index reveals where citizens’ needs are rapidly changing, new markets are opening, and the risk of instability runs high.
Image courtesy Social Technologies.
Future Atlas has a new map of an aspect of dyschronicity, the distance in time between places measured by culture, technology, or some other characteristic.
In this case, the map shows approximate distance between one place and the rest of the world in the area of values and attitudes.
The reference country in this map is Sweden, as it is notably further along in a number of social trends that many countries are now undergoing. The map is essentially an estimation of how long ago Sweden was like that place in its values and attitudes.
This kind of dyschronicity can illuminate some culturally-rooted issues. For instance:
- There is some logic in finding Denmark at the heart of the cartoon controversy of last year: it is centuries out of sync with most of the Muslim world at the cultural level.
- Turkey and Western Europe are at best decades apart at this level, helping to drive European reluctance to bring Turkey into the European Union.
- Western Europe and the US are also partially living in different times, with Europeans viewing Americans as backward on issues such as the death penalty, health care, and environmentalism.
For more, see this Future Atlas page.
The National Arbor Day Foundation has produced a series of maps that shows how climate zones are on the move due to warming. About half the US has undergone a full “hardiness zone” change, meaning that plants are dealing with significant change in their environment.
Rapid climate change has the potential to outrun the ability of ecosystems to shift and plants to adapt, potentially causing large-scale disruption and even extinction.
(Via Social Technologies)
The BBC has created an interactive map of world urbanization from 1955 to 2015, including all megacities of 5 million or more.
The 2005 map reveals that we are approaching the tipping point at which, for the first time ever, more people will live in cities than in rural areas.
By 2015, 52% of the world’s population (3.8 billion people) is projected to be living in cities.
Effects will be profound and numerous. For instance:
- Cultural flows will speed up as more people are exposed to cosmopolitan urban culture.
- Information will speed up, as cities tend to be far more wired.
- In future conflicts, controlling contries will mean controlling megacities, a difficult challenge that tends to nullify the high-tech advantages enjoyed by the US and a few other countries.
[Via Social Technologies]
A Google Maps-powered mash up depicts the effects of up to 14 meters of sea-level rise.
Users can select the region at different scales, choose 1 to 14 meters of rise, and see the results in map or satellite image form.
As expected, many regions — such as Florida, the Netherlands, and Bangladesh — do not do well in many scenarios.
A new study examines future risk of mammalian extinction, mapped here by Nature. Human population growth is one of the chief future threats.