Map of current water scarcities (brown) from the NYT.
What happens when you just run out of something essential for life?
This
is what happened during the ice ages. We ran out of food. The age of
simple gatherer-hunter cultures immediately came to an end. The result
was the invention of what Richard Manning in Against the Grain calls catastrophic agriculture
-- burning or flooding large tracts of land to harvest the hardy
monoculture grains that appeared first as the land recovered. The
process was so arduous, unreliable and miserable that we had to invent
slavery and civilization to coerce people to stick with it. We do what
we must, and when the ice froze us out, we had to do something radical.
So we did.
Today we seem to believe that, if we run out, the
answer is to import more. Simple. Run out of wood or metals? Just
destabilize a bunch of faraway nations, bribe the officials, enslave
the locals, poison the environment, and get the cheap wood and metals
you need. Run out of oil? Just invade the Middle East and steal theirs.
Run out of cheap labour? Import some, or offshore the work. Run out of
money? Just print some more, and convince people it's worth something.
The
problem is, none of these 'solutions' is sustainable. We've run out of
countries to rip off for their wood, metals and oil. We're past the Oil
Peak anyway. We've run out of third world labour to exploit, even we
could still afford to ship stuff from them at $160/barrel oil. All of
these quick fixes merely ratchet up the fragility of our economy and
our planet, leave us less room to maneuver when our bandaid fix comes
unsprung. Jim Kunstler's book The Long Emergency
tells us what will happen when we run out of oil, even with
ecologically disastrous substitutes -- massive tar sands mining, coal
burning, and farms of nukes. It's a horrific portrait.
But while
some places (like the Northern US) are going to face devastating
disruption when oil runs out, other places (like the Southern US,
China, India and much of the Middle East) are going to face another
crisis, even earlier -- the End of Water.
Robert Sanford is a
hydrologist who's studied the growing water scarcity in Southwestern
Canada. It's not even on the map (above) as a water crisis site -- yet.
Even worse, the Southwestern US is counting on the glaciers of
Southwestern Canada to solve their growing water crisis. In a recent
interview on CBC radio, Sanford said there won't be any to share.
The
glaciers, which provide most of the fresh water in half the continent,
are disappearing at an astonishing rate, thanks to global warming.
Farmers alone have 'claims' on more river water in Southwestern Canada
-- a semi-desert at the best of times -- than there is water. If all
the farmers licenced to do so took out their quota, the cities of
Southwestern Canada (like Calgary) would have none left. None. No water
for people to drink and shower and flush. No water for industry. No
water for lawns. No water for the voracious Alberta Tar Sands that will
soon need ten times as much water as it already uses (plus all the
natural gas in the Arctic plus energy from a farm of new nukes). None.
The
consequence of simply running out of water seems unfathomable to us, in
this age of hydro engineering. The problem is, we've already dammed up
the rivers as much as we can. More fragility. There is no slack in the
system. If Las Vegas and California's cities can't get fresh water,
what will they do? Stop irrigating, so the foods that much of North
America depends on can no longer be grown. Stop watering lawns and
gardens, so dust and desert and massive wildfires will return. Stop all
industrial and commercial activity, so the economy is plunged into
prolonged recession. The situation is as bad in the Southeastern US,
where Atlanta and thousand of square miles for states around, which
usually get a lot of rain, are facing the worst drought in a century,
leaving reservoirs dangerously low, in some cases with only days' worth
of reserves left.
In every such case, and in China (where the
water table is dropping so quickly -- eight to eighteen feet per year
-- that farmers are killing neighbours who dig wells deeper than
theirs) and India and the Middle East, you cannot solve the problem by
just 'importing' water from somewhere else. Towing ice floes is the
stuff of fantasy. Desalination is extremely expensive (it would make
water more expensive than oil) and ecologically destructive. And if you
built aqueducts, where would run them to? No one has a surplus of
water. Even the Great Lakes' polluted waters are dropping at an
astonishing rate.
If there is no water, you have two choices.
Leave. Or die. This is what farmers did during the Great Depression,
the Dust Bowl. This is what farmers by the million are doing in China
and India already. This is what the people of Atlanta may soon have to
do. Sooner. Or later.
Why can't we get our heads around this?
The people in the suburbs of Atlanta, we hear, are perpetuating the
Tragedy of the Commons problem by refusing to stop watering their
lawns. Industry is rationing, but nowhere near enough. Everyone is just
waiting, hoping that rain will solve the problem. There is no Plan B.
Imagine
a refugee emigration from the Southern US ten times what Katrina
produced. With no hope of resettlement. Imagine Las Vegas, that
extravagance, as a desert ghost town. Imagine the impact on the
economy. Imagine the Alberta Tar Sands, the great Western hope for a
brief respite from the End of Oil, abandoned because there simply
wasn't enough water. Imagine fires burning in California as steadily,
endlessly as they do in Brasil, leaving millions homeless.
This of course is our problem: We can't imagine. And we refuse to let the lessons of history, and of other nations, teach us how to imagine, what if...?
Until it ceases to be a matter of what if? and becomes a question of now what?
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MADE IN CANADA
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