Quotes About Drought

Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, perhaps ever. Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, causing drought and forest fires and impacting human health.

There's no sugar coating it: drought isn't sexy. Nobody wants to hear about it, and many of us who live an urban existence don't know much about it, if we're honest.

In 2011, I was in Hollywood peddling 'Sicario' to constant and resounding 'no's. Texas was suffering the worst drought on record. Wildfires spread across West Texas, burning some 4 million acres and 3,000 homes. While the urban centers in Texas were experiencing an economic boom, West Texas was collapsing under the weight of drought and fires.

You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.

The fire raged across the Desert after starting in scrubland. There are a thousand ways for such a blaze to begin: sun shining through to a scatter of dried plants; sparks from a passing vehicle; Sometimes it's intentional. On a landscape fried dry by terrible drought and baked day after day by a merciless sun. The fire was a demon that stalked from place to place, searching for where to settle its blazing roots.

The drought was in its fourth year, and it was the worst in at least a generation's time. But long dry periods were as much a part of the Great Plains as the grass itself. What was different in 1935 was that the land was naked. If the prairie had been held in place by adequate ground cover—grass, or even the matted sprouts of wheat emerging from winter dormancy—the land could never have peeled away as it did, with great strips of earth thrown to the sky.

Sitting Bull had predicted the land would get its revenge on whites who forced the Indians off the grasslands. He saw doom from the sky. During this drought, his nephew, One Bull, tried to reverse Sitting Bull's prophecy.

Today green pastureland has dried up and turned to sandy plains, and the land provides little support to the herders, who can barely scratch out an existence in the semi-arid climate. Each day is a test of their survival.

days slow as cattle grazing in a parched summer field.

I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.

You know, it never occurred to me until afterwards that everybody in these books is a refugee. But everyone is running from drought or flood or civil war. I do think a lot about them. You know, not far from here is a road where refugees of all kinds line the roads, and people go there to pick up a plumber or carpenter or something. This isn't an official thing, you know, but there they are. A friend of mine goes there when she wants anything. They are all very skilled people.

Our fish, our recreation, our irrigation and all our uses of the Missouri River are threatened if the drought continues and the Corps of Engineers decisions aren't changed.

You know what they want in the Central Valley? They want water.

But no work, no home, no health care, no hope--that's the everyday life of millions, billions of people. To me, that's the threat. And climate change is the threat. And war, and drought and famine... OK, so we need security. A secure future. No! We need to be free from corporate control that runs the world for the few and ruins it for the rest of us.

The way he understood hozho was hard to put into words. "I'll use an example. Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried out. No water. The Hopi, or the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable.

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable." - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993

Farming was a risky proposition under even the best of circumstances. Folks who toiled in the dirt could do everything right and a drought or an early freeze could come and wipe them out.

Our farmers and ranchers have never faced as many problems as they do today with drought, range fires, high gas prices and an ever tightening budget on agriculture subsidies.

hot and dry early that year, and by the Fourth of July the grass was parched and brown and stubby. The young Teddy Roosevelt, traveling through the north part of Dakota Territory on the way to his ranches near Medora, told a newspaper reporter in mid-July that "Between the drouth, the

In a flood the water goes everywhere, you don't have to think about it. In a drought, if you want water, you have to direct it carefully along each inch of its path.

If there's one thing Arizona is best in the nation at, it's water.

And Texas. Well, as they say: "everything's bigger in Texas." Including the depth and breath of their stupidity. If, during a drought, your governor appeals to the citizenry to pray for rain, and a mob doesn't show up to physically remove him from office for being too goddamn dumb to govern, you leave yourself open to ridicule. As you do if you try to put creationism on equal footing with evolution in your school textbooks.

Searching in an ancient rain-fed lake in northern India, paleoclimatologists using radiocarbon dating have discovered that 4,100 years ago, the summer monsoons began a rapid decline. They did not return to normal for two centuries. For an unimaginable two hundred years, the Harappan region saw hardly any rain. Around the same time in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, the three other earliest-known civilizations also were lost to the dry sands of history.

Floods will become more serious and frequent in the Indo-Gangetic plains. Drought induced food and water scarcity will become more acute. South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the small islands will be the worst victims.