Thank you for sharing this eloquent and well-researched essay, Raunaq! You are a gifted, thoughtful writer who deserves to be widely read, on account of your eloquence, scientific precision, and moral clarity. Your essay left me sick at heart because I know you are absolutely right about this--in Madagascar and elsewhere the Great Die-off has already begun--and all the rest of us are in line for it.

The only place where I differ in your proposals is your call for "increased availability of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and irrigation equipment." While providing temporary relief for those worst affected, these measures will only make things worse thereafter, because they are unsustainable; they further deplete the topsoil, and they all depend on continued exploitation of fossil fuels for both processing and transportation.

A longer-term solution is therefore massive investment at the grassroots level in Permaculture and other related forms of regenerative, topsoil-building, carbon sequestering, and water-retaining methods for growing food. In this respect, the fact that Madagascar consists mainly of small subsistence farmers is actually an advantage, for these regenerative methods are labor intensive, and work best on smallholdings. So I recommend that you look up the outstanding works of the pioneers of Permaculture design, including Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, Toby Hemenway, Rosemary Morrow, and Andrew Millison...and many others. Permaculture is, as I see it, our last, best hope for surviving the global collapse of industrial civilization, even if we cannot prevent it, and sowing the seeds of a sustainable, relocalized future. I think of it as our best bet for spontaneous remission of the (fossil fuel-driven) Cancer of the Earth.