Today is the World Day to Combat Desertification, a United Nations observance, and as I write these words a slow mass death at the hands of drought is occuring in Niger. Due to poor rainfall, the African nation, located in the Sahel, that region between the Sahara desert to the north and the greener savannas to the south, is experiencing a severe shortfall in food production. This is the human cost of ecological disasters. However innocuous droughts might appear, the toll they take on real human beings can be immense