More Valuable than Oil

[sidecross]

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet

October 11, 2007

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."

We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.

But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.

As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.

We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.

The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.

What's gone wrong?

As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe's resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions.

Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world's supply by over 50 percent.

The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops.

This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.

Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. "Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge," wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water.

The Ogallala aquifer -- the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota -- is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, "California's Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today," add Clarke and Barlow.

Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities.

The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa.

As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in "economic liberalism," which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public.

In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."

It has oft been expressed that the next resource wars will not be over oil -- or energy at all -- but over water. As the idea of neoliberalism, proliferated by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, spread, the public sector has become dangerously privatized. And it may not be the wealth of nations on the line -- but the wealth of corporations.

A senior executive at a subsidiary of Vivendi, the world's largest water controller summed it up, "Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is an equally powerful ingredient for profitable manufacturing companies."

But when private companies control water resources, people's needs for survival are pushed aside in place of the bottom line. In Africa, an estimated 5 million people die each year for lack of safe drinking water. And yet Africa, with its many cash-strapped countries, is targeted by multinationals that force governments to turn over their public water systems in exchange for promises of debt relief.

When corporations control water, rates go up, services go down, and those who can't afford to pay are forced to drink unsafe water, risking their lives. This has happened across the world -- in South Africa, in Bolivia, in the United States.

This same philosophy of corporate control drives the construction of dams, which have displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide. In India alone, over 4,000 dams have submerged 37,500 square kilometers of land and forced 42 million people from their homes.

Multinationals looking to cash in on the water business have also made giant inroads in selling bottled water in richer countries. Expensive marketing campaigns convince people that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Then, companies like Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal tap water and others like Nestle pilfer spring water from rural communities and resell it at huge profits.

The water crisis may be growing, but so is resistance to privatization as communities are fighting back against the corporate control of the world's most vital resource.

How we can fix it

We need water to survive, not just as individuals, but as communities. Author John Thorson put it perfectly when he said, "Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other."

Just ask the people of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They've experienced water wars for the last hundred years that have pitted neighbor against neighbor and tribal member against farmer.

Native American tribes in the region -- the Klamath, Hoopa, Karuk, and Yaruk -- with priority rights to water, have struggled with farmers over limited water resources. Nature has been unable to deliver as much water as the government has promised to farmers and tribal members, as well as downstream fishermen. With not enough water in the river, either crops have failed or fish have died, creating community strife and economic hardship.

But in the last year, things have begun to change. These groups have formed a coalition to save the river they all depend on for survival. They are sitting at the same table and finally beginning to hear from each other about the needs of farmers, the value of subsistence economies, the history of families on the river, the ceremony that comes with the salmon runs, the rights of nature.

Together, this unlikely alliance is taking on PacifiCorp, one of the largest multinational power companies, whose out-of-date dams are threatening the ecosystem and the economy of the region.

And just over the peak of Mount Shasta another community and tribe are battling to save their spring water from Nestle, which hopes to tap the community's greatest asset for its own wealth.

The people of the small town of McCloud and the Winnemem Wintu tribe are fighting back, and they are not alone. Across the country a backlash to the bottled-water business is gaining steam. Fancy restaurants like California's Chez Panisse, Incanto, and Poggio and New York's Del Posto have gotten on board. San Francisco has also led the way among municipalities that are beginning to cancel their bottled water contracts, understanding the great harm the industry does to the environment and communities.

It is not just bottled water that has posed a problem, but private companies buying out municipal water systems and then raising rates and lowering services. One the best examples is Stockton, Calif., which went private in the largest "public-private partnership" in the West. Since 2001 the people of Stockton have been fighting for control of their water against a multinational consortium.

The case gained international attention when it was featured in the film and book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The public finally won out in July, when the city council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract and send the corporation packing.

The citizen groups that have been working to defend their communities are being supported by many national and international groups pushing back against corporate control and empowering people -- groups like Tony Clarke's Polaris Institute in Canada, which has focused on public education and research around issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water security and bottled water.

In the United States, Corporate Accountability International is encouraging people to drink tap water over bottled water with their "Think Outside the Bottle Campaign." They are working to educate the public, as well as city governments and businesses, with great success.

And today, on the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, Food & Water Watch, is sponsoring a National Call-In Day for action on clean water to urge representatives to support the creation of a clean water trust fund, "which is a long-term, sustainable, and reliable source of funding to upgrade and improve our public water systems." The organization has been working to protect public water systems from private takeover and to help fund municipal water so that all residents have clean, safe and affordable water.

The movement extends across the country and the world as people are also rebelling against the corporate takeover of their municipal water systems -- in California, in Ghana, in Brazil, in Canada, in France, in Indonesia -- and the list goes on.

Opposition to corporate control is rooted in the belief that water is part of the commons. Everyone should have access to clean water, regardless of their level of income or their country's international standing.

In order to ensure that all people have access to clean, affordable water, we need to make some changes.

Some see technology as the necessary fix -- or at least a step in the right direction. As the BBC reports:


New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.


Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.


Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used -- and drunk -- several times over.


Desalinization makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.

But many warn against relying on a "techno-fix" to solve our problems.

Water experts argue that we need to reduce consumption on individual and community levels. Author Tony Clarke advises working with those closest to the problems, such as helping farmers to develop a more sustainable agriculture system. And the same goes for industry. Looking to the folks who have been on the land longest, like indigenous and traditional cultures, will also help us learn how an ecosystem works.

And experts say that we also need to start developing a comprehensive water policy that goes from the regional to international level. The World Bank and United Nations have the capability to change the designation of water from a human need to a human right, ensuring that corporations can't exploit this resource for economic gain, as Clarke and Barlow advocate for in Blue Gold.

Governments should be investing in their people, in conservation and in the infrastructure that we depend on to access clean, affordable water.

It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?" wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. "And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?"

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.


http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/64948

[willoweyes]

I still believe we must try to look on the brite cide, Pollyana-ish as this sounds.

Meantime, each of us can do a lot to save water--front-loading washing machines--hanging out clothes to air rather than automatically throwing them in the hamper--use of three dishpans to wash dishes (without running the water)-- graywater piped to garden--proper toilet protocol--of course no aimless and lazy running of water while we soap our hands or brush our teeth.

My husband purchased fairly cheaply two used plastic 1200-gallon cisterns to attach to our gutters to collect rainwater--we use this for watering, etc. An even better system would be concrete cisterns, as the plastic degrades in sunshine, not to mention that all plastic is Satan's spawn, and has a bad effect on the karma of the water.

A stint camping, or living in a house without running water, will rapidly sensitize people to water's weight.

Here is a line from the article Sidecross shared with us yesterday:

"Big Branch Creek, the headwater stream that flows from the mountains through her property, is now termed a "National Pollution Discharge Elimination System" stream by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP)."

When our environmental protection agency renames creeks "National Pollution Discharge Elimination systems" all in the name of cheap energy, we are in deep trouble, that even a front-end loading washing machine cannot correct.

[sidecross]

I also read that if you run the water while you brush your teeth, you not only waste the water, but the energy needed to collect the drain water and retreat it for safe use is equal to running a 100 watt bulb for every second the water is on.

[Isaiah Mpski]

I lived in Antigua(pronounced ga) for awhile and it was literally cheaper to buy alcohol than drinking water.

[suebee]

who in gods name on this board is still running water while they brush their teeth?

[craazyman]

and I hate to see all that toothpaste and saliva floating in the sink like a clogged toilet. It makes me nauseous.

[suebee]

youre pulling my leg, arent you craazyman? :p :p

[craazyman]

I work the faucet with my left hand and the toothbrush with my right, skillfully using only the water necessary to rinse the brush.

I also bend down and put my mouth under the faucet when I need to rinse. Filling my mouth with only the amount of water necessary to expel the used toothpaste and saliva and whatever small food particles are suspended in the nauseous drool. I spit this down the drain with my eyes closed.

I have very good coordination and I work out with free weights, so muscle tone and athletic ability are non-issues for me in this context. It's a piece of cake.

But the most fun I have is doing this: turning the water flow down really really low until there's only a very thin thread of water descending from the faucet, then taking a comb and running it through my hair and putting it next to the water. Due to the principles of static electricity, the comb pulls the water stream toward it like gravity. I never get tired of that little trick. I feel like Isaac Newton.

[bopes]

didn't you know that the energy used to perform the Isaac Newton trick and de-static-electrify it for safe use is equal to running a flourescent bulb for every second the comb is running through the hair? :)

[drew hempel]

The secret magic is near-baldness! haha.

[willoweyes]

I know you all can read the news for yourselves, but I thought this was such an extraordinary article that I had to share it. Just in case.

Today's NYTimes on the southern US drought conditions:

Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices
By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.

In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley asked residents Monday to stop using water for any purpose “not essential to public health and safety.” He warned that he would soon have to declare a state of emergency if voluntary efforts fell short.

“Now I don’t want to have to use these powers,” Mr. Easley told a meeting of mayors and other city officials. “As leaders of your communities, you know what works best at the local level. I am asking for your help.”

Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.

The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly.

Last week, Mayor Charles L. Turner of Siler City declared a water shortage emergency and ordered each “household, business and industry” to reduce water use by 50 percent. Penalties for not complying range from stiff fines to the termination of water service.

“It’s really alarming,” said Janice Terry, co-owner of the Best Foods cafeteria in Siler City. To curtail water use, Best Foods has swapped its dishes for paper plates and foam cups.

Most controversially, it has stopped offering tap water to customers, making them buy 69-cent bottles of water instead. “We’ve had people walk out,” Ms. Terry said. “They get mad when they can’t get a free glass of water.”

For the better part of 18 months, cloudless blue skies and high temperatures have shriveled crops and bronzed lawns from North Carolina to Alabama, quietly creating what David E. Stooksbury, the state climatologist of Georgia, has dubbed “the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters,” a reference to that comedian’s repeated lament that he got “no respect.”

“People pay attention to hurricanes,” Mr. Stooksbury said. “They pay attention to tornadoes and earthquakes. But a drought will sneak up on you.”

The situation has gotten so bad that by all of Mr. Stooksbury’s measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.

Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, at a news conference last week, begged people in her city to conserve water. “Please, please, please do not use water unnecessarily,” Ms. Franklin said. “This is not a test.”

(More at NYTimes.com)

[sidecross]

We Face Worldwide Drought with No Contingency Plan

By Tom Engelhardt, The Nation

Georgia's on my mind. Atlanta, Georgia. It's a city in trouble in a state in trouble in a region in trouble. Water trouble. Trouble big enough that the state government's moving fast. Just this week, backed up by a choir singing "Amazing Grace," accompanied by three Protestant ministers, and twenty demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought Society, Sonny Perdue, Georgia's Baptist governor, led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain.

"We've come together here," he said, "simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm." It seems, however, that the Almighty was otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued to threaten Atlanta, a metropolis of 5 million people (and growing fast), with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as eighty days or as much as a year, if the rains don't come. Here's a little summary of the situation today:


Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15 to 30 percent. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5 percent of their capacity.

Oops, that's not Atlanta, or even the Southeastern US. That's Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.

Sorry, let's try that again. Imagine this scenario:

Over the last decade, 15 to 20 percent decreases in precipitation have been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in -- of the hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows and mirrors by hand.

Sound familiar? As it happens, that's not the American Southeast either; that's a description of what's come to be called "The Big Dry" -- the unprecedented drought that has swept huge parts of Australia, the worst in at least a century on an already notoriously dry continent, but also part of the world's breadbasket, where crops are now failing regularly and farms closing down.

In fact, on my way along the parched path toward Atlanta, Georgia, I found myself taking any number of drought-stricken detours. There's Moldova. (If you're like me, odds are you don't even know where that small, former Soviet republic falls on a map.)

Like much of southern Europe, it experienced baking temperatures this summer, exceptionally low precipitation, sometimes far less than 50 percent of expected rainfall, failing crops and farms, and spreading wildfires. (The same was true, to one degree or another, of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, and -- with its 100-year record scorching of Biblical proportions -- Greece which lost 10 percent of its forest cover in a month-long fiery apocalypse, leaving "large tracts of countryside...at risk of depopulation.")

Or how about Morocco, across the Mediterranean, which experienced 50 percent less rainfall than normal? Or the Canary Islands, those Spanish vacation spots in the Atlantic Ocean known to millions of visitors for their year-around mild climate which, this summer, morphed into 104-degree days, strong winds, and fierce wildfires. Eighty-six thousand acres were burnt to a crisp, engulfing some of the islands in flames and smoke that drove out thousands of tourists?

Or what about Mexico's Tehuacán Valley, where, thousands of years ago, corn was first domesticated as an agricultural crop. Even today, asking for "un Tehuacán" in a restaurant in Mexico still means getting the best bottled mineral water in the country. Unfortunately, the area hasn't had a good rain since 2003, and the ensuing drought conditions have made subsistence farming next to impossible, sending desperate locals northwards and across the border as illegal immigrants -- some into Southern California, itself just swept by monstrous Santa Ana-driven wildfires, fanned by prolonged drought conditions and fed tinder by new communities built deep into the wild lands where the fires gestate.

And Tehuacán is but one disaster zone in a growing Mexican catastrophe. As Mike Davis has written, "Abandoned ranchitos and near-ghost towns throughout Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora testify to the relentless succession of dry years -- beginning in the 1980s but assuming truly catastrophic intensity in the late 1990s -- that has pushed hundreds of thousands of poor rural people toward the sweatshops of Ciudad Juarez and the barrios of Los Angeles."

According to the How Dry I Am chart of "livability expert" Bert Sperling, four cities in Southern California, not parched Atlanta, top the national drought ratings: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, and Riverside. In addition, Pasadena has had the dubious honor, through September, of experiencing its driest year in history.

Resource Wars in the Homeland

"Resource wars" are things that happen elsewhere. We don't usually think of our country as water poor or imagine that "resource wars" might be applied as a description to various state and local governments in the Southwest, Southeast, or upper Midwest now fighting tooth and nail for previously shared water. And yet, "war" may not be a bad metaphor for what's on the horizon.

According to the National Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43 percent of the contiguous US to be in "moderate to extreme drought." Already, Sonny Perdue of Georgia is embroiled in an ever more bitter conflict -- a "water war," as the headlines say -- with the governors of Florida and Alabama, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, over the flow of water into and out of the Atlanta area.

He's hardly alone. After all, the Southwest is in the grips of what, according to Davis, some climatologists are terming a "'mega-drought,' even the 'worst in 500 years.' " More shockingly, he writes, such conditions may actually represent the region's new "normal weather."

The upper Midwest is also in rainfall-shortage mode, with water levels at all the Great Lakes dropping unnervingly. The water level of Lake Superior, for instance, has fallen to the "lowest point on record for this time of year." (Notice, by the way, how many "records" are being set nationally and globally in these drought years; how many places are already beginning to push beyond history, which means beyond any reference point we have.)

And then there's the Southeast, 26 percent of which, according to the National Weather Service, is in a state of "exceptional" drought, its most extreme category, and 78 percent of which is "drought-affected." We're talking here about a region normally considered rich in water resources setting a bevy of records for dryness. It has been the driest year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, for instance, while eighteen months of blue skies have led Georgia to break every historical record, whether measured by "the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, [or] inches of rain."

Atlanta is hardly the only city or town in the region with a dwindling water supply. According to David Bracken of Raleigh's News & Observer, "17 North Carolina water systems, including Raleigh and Durham, have 100 or fewer days of water supply remaining before they reach the dregs." Rock Spring, South Carolina, "has been without water for a month. Farmers are hauling water by pickup truck to keep their cattle alive." The same is true for the tiny town of Orme, Tennessee, where the mayor turns on the water for only three hours a day.

And then, there's Atlanta, its metropolitan area "watered" mainly by a 1950s man-made reservoir, Lake Lanier, which, in dramatic photos, is turning into baked mud. Already with a population of five million and known for its uncontrolled growth (as well as lack of water planning), the city is expected to house another two million inhabitants by 2030. And yet, depending on which article you read, Atlanta will essentially run out of water by New Year's eve, in eighty days, in 120 days, or, according to the Army Corps of Engineers -- which seems to find this reassuring -- in 375 days, if the drought continues (as it may well do).

Okay, so let's try again:

Across the region, fountains sit "bone dry"; in small towns, "full-soak" baptisms have been stopped; car washes and laundromats are cutting hours or shutting down. Golf courses have resorted to watering only tees and greens. Campfires, stoves, and grills are banned in some national parks. The boats have left Lake Lanier and the metal detectors have arrived.

This is the verdant Southeastern United States, which, thanks in part to a developing La Niña effect in the Pacific Ocean, now faces the likelihood of a drier than ever winter. And, to put this in context, keep in mind that 2007 "to date has been the warmest on record for land [and]... the seventh warmest year so far over the oceans, working out to the fourth warmest overall worldwide." Oh, and up in the Arctic sea, the ice pack reached its lowest level this September since satellite measurements were begun in 1979.

And Then?

And then, there's that question which has been nagging at me ever since this story first caught my attention in early October as it headed out of the regional press and slowly made its way toward the top of the nightly TV news and the front pages of national newspapers; it's the question I've been waiting patiently for some environmental reporter(s) somewhere in the mainstream media to address; the question that seems to me so obvious I find it hard to believe everyone isn't thinking about it; the one you would automatically want to have answered -- or at least gnawed on by thoughtful, expert reporters and knowledgeable pundits. Every day for the last month or more I've waited, as each piece on Atlanta ends at more or less the same point -- with the dire possibility that the city's water will soon be gone -- as though hitting a brick wall.

Not that there hasn't been some fine reportage -- on the extremity of the situation, the overbuilding and overpopulating of the metropolitan region, the utter heedlessness that went with it, and the resource wars that have since engulfed it. Still, I've Googled around, read scores of pieces on the subject, and they all -- even the one whose first paragraph asked, "What if Atlanta's faucets really do go dry?" -- seem to end just where my question begins. It's as if, in each piece, the reporter had reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look, lest we all go over.

Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush Administration hasn't the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top Administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn't somebody be asking? Shouldn't somebody check out what's actually down there?

So let me ask it this way: And then?

And then what exactly can we expect? If the Southeastern drought is already off the charts in Georgia, then, whether it's 80 days or 800 days, isn't there a possibility that Atlanta may one day in the not-so-distant future be without water? And what then? Okay, they're trucking water into waterless Orme, Tennessee, but the town's mayor, Tony Reames, put the matter well, worrying about Atlanta. "We can survive. We're 145 people but you've got 4.5 million there. What are they going to do?"

What indeed? Has water ever been trucked in to so many people before? And what about industry including, in the case of Atlanta, Coca-Cola, which is, after all, a business based on water? What about restaurants that need to wash their plates or doctors in hospitals who need to wash their hands?

Let's face it, with water, you're down to the basics. And if, as some say, we've passed the point not of "peak oil," but of "peak water" (and cheap water) on significant parts of the planet ... well, what then? I mean, I'm hardly an expert on this, but what exactly are we talking about here? Someday in the reasonably near future could Atlanta, or Phoenix, which in winter 2005-2006, went 143 days without a bit of rain, or Las Vegas become a Katrina minus the storm? Are we talking here about a new trail of tears? What exactly would happen to the poor of Atlanta? To Atlanta itself?

Certainly, you've seen the articles about what global warming might do in the future to fragile or low-lying areas of the world. Such pieces usually mention the possibility of enormous migrations of the poor and desperate. But we don't usually think about that in the "homeland."

Maybe we should.

Or maybe, for all I know, if the drought continues, parts of the region will burn to a frizzle first, à la parts of Southern California, before they can even experience the complete loss of water? Will we have hundred-year fire records in the South, without a Santa Ana wind in sight? And what then?

Mass Migrations?

Okay, excuse a terrible, even tasteless, sports analogy, but think of this as a major bowl game, and they've sent one of the water boys -- me -- to man the press booth. I mean, please. Why am I the one asking this?

Where's the media's first team?

In my own admittedly limited search of the mainstream, I found only one vivid, thoughtful recent piece on this subject: "The Future Is Drying Up," by Jon Gertner, written for The New York Times Magazine. It focused on the Southwestern drought and began to explore some of the "and thens," as in this brief passage on Colorado in which Gertner quotes Roger Pulwarty, a "highly regarded climatologist" at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:


The worst outcome...would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado's largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime.

Mass migrations, exfiltrations ... Stop a sec and take in that possibility and what exactly it might mean. After all, we do have some small idea, having, in recent years, lost one American city, New Orleans, at least temporarily.

Or consider another "and then" prediction: What if the prolonged drought in the Southwest turns out, as Mike Davis wrote in The Nation magazine, to be "on the scale of the medieval catastrophes that contributed to the notorious collapse of the complex Anasazi societies at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde during the twelfth century"?

What if, indeed.

I'm not simply being apocalyptic here. I'm just asking. It's not even that I expect answers. I'd just like to see a crew of folks with the necessary skills explore the "and then" question for the rest of us. Try to connect a few dots, or tell us if they don't connect, or just explain where the dots really are.

As the World Burns

Okay, since I'm griping on the subject, let me toss in another complaint. As this piece has indicated, the Southeastern drought, unlike the famed cheese of childhood song, does not exactly stand alone. Such conditions, often involving record or near record temperatures, and record or near record wildfires, can be observed at numerous places across the planet. So why is it that, except at relatively obscure websites, you can hardly find a mainstream piece that mentions more than one drought at a time?

An honorable exception would be a recent Seattle Times column by Neal Peirce that brought together the Southwestern and Southeastern droughts, as well as the Western "flame zone," where "mega-fires" are increasingly the norm, in the context of global warming, in order to consider our seemingly willful "myopia about the future."

But you'd be hard-pressed to find many pieces in our major newspapers (or on the TV news) that put all (or even a number) of the extreme drought spots on the global map together in order to ask a simple question (even if its answer may prove complex indeed): Do they have anything in common? And if so, what? And if so, what then? To find even tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a "world on fire." Flannery offered the following observation:


It's not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that's almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We're just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It's a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it's really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what's happening.

I know answers to the "and then" question are not easy or necessarily simple. But if drought -- or call it "desertification" -- becomes more widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole regions no longer have the necessary water, how many trails of tears, how many of those mass migrations or civilizational collapses are possible? How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to experience? And what then?

These are questions I can't answer; that the Bush Administration is guaranteed to be desperately unwilling and unprepared to face; and that, as yet, the media has largely refused to consider in a serious way. And if the media can't face this and begin to connect some dots, why shouldn't Americans be in denial, too?

It's not that no one is thinking about, or doing work on, drought. I know that scientists have been asking the "and then" questions (or perhaps far more relevant ones that I can't even formulate); that somewhere people have been exploring, studying, writing about them. But how am I to find out?

Of course, all of us can wander the Internet; we can visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has just set up a new website to help encourage drought coverage; we can drop in at blogs like RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress.org, which make a habit of keeping up with, or ahead of, such stories; or even, for instance, the Georgia Drought website of the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; or we can keep an eye on a new organization of journalists (well covered recently on the NPR show "On the Media"), Circle of Blue, who are planning to concentrate on water issues. But, believe me, even when you get to some of these sites, you may find yourself in an unknown landscape with no obvious water holes in view and no guides to lead you there.

In the meantime, there may be no trail of tears out of Atlanta; there may even be rain in the city's near future for all any of us know; but it's clear enough that, globally and possibly nationally, tragedy awaits. It's time to call in the first team to ask some questions. Honestly, I don't demand answers. Just a little investigation, some thought, and a glimpse or two over that precipice as the world turns... and bakes and burns.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.


http://www.alternet.org/environment/68498/

[Isaiah Mpski]

Out of all the states,which has the most shoreline of lakes.
You guessed it.Oklahoma.

[sidecross]

How Water Has Become a National Security Issue

By Maude Barlow, YES! Magazine

It's a colossal failure of political foresight that water has not emerged as an important issue in the U.S. Presidential campaign. The links between oil, war, and U.S. foreign policy are well known. But water -- whether we treat it as a public good or as a commodity that can be bought and sold -- will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous.

Americans use water even more wastefully than oil. The U.S relies on non-renewable groundwater for 50 percent of its daily use, and 36 states now face serious water shortages, some verging on crisis.

Meanwhile, dwindling freshwater supplies around the world, inequitable access to water, and corporate control of water, together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, have created a life-or-death situation across the planet. Both Democrats and Republicans have emphasized loosening U.S. dependence on nonrenewable energy resources in their platforms, but neither party gives significant air time to the threats posed by water shortages.

This is not to say that no one is paying attention. In fact, water has become a key strategic security and foreign policy priority for the United States government.

Cut Deals, Carry Water

Corporate interests have pursued schemes to privatize, commodify, and export water for decades. We have seen how this plays out in Canada. For instance, in the late 1990s, Sun Belt Water, Inc., sued the Canadian government under NAFTA because British Columbia banned water exports, preventing a deal that would have sent B.C. water to California.

Corporations have also made attempts to ship Canadian water as far as Asia and the Middle East, proposals that fizzled after fierce opposition from public citizens who were beginning to understand the dangers of permanently removing water from local ecosystems and placing it under corporate control.

Now the Pentagon, as well as various U.S. security think tanks, have decided that water supplies, like energy supplies, must be secured if the United States is to maintain its current economic and military power in the world. And the United States is exerting pressure to access Canadian water, despite Canada's own shortages.

Under the name, "North American Future 2025 Project," the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) brought together high level government officials and business executives from Canada, the United States, and Mexico for a series of six meetings to discuss a wide range of issues related to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a controversial and tightly guarded set of negotiations to expand NAFTA. [See related story .]

"As ... globalization continues and the balance of power potentially shifts, and risks to global security evolve, it is only prudent for Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. policymakers to contemplate a North American security architecture that could effectively deal with security threats that can be foreseen in 2025," said a leaked copy of a CSIS backgrounder. On the agenda for one of two meetings in Calgary were, "water consumption, water transfers, and artificial diversions of bulk water" with the aim of achieving "joint optimum utilization of the available water."

The water and security connection deepens with the fact that Sandia National Laboratories, a vital partner with CSIS in its Global Water Futures Project, also plays a major role in military security in the United States. While Sandia is technically owned by the U.S. government, and reports to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, its management is contracted out to Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons manufacturer. Ralph Pentland, water consultant and primary author of the Canadian government's Federal Water Policy in 1987, believes that the purpose of these cross-border discussions is to secure sufficient water for Alberta tar sands production in order to ensure uninterrupted oil supplies to the United States.

Energy extraction would be far more attractive if a new source of water -- potentially from northern Canada -- could be brought to the tar sands through pipelines or other diversions. As long as the water doesn't cross the international border, it is within Alberta's power to do this.These schemes to displace water from one ecosystem to another in the service of corporate profit are an environmental problem for the entire planet, which is another reason why water must form a crucial part of any progressive discussion around U.S. dependence on foreign energy resources.

Corporate interests understand the connection and are using it to make their case for private solutions to the water crisis. In language that will be familiar to critics who argued that the United States invaded Iraq not for democracy but for access to oil and profits for corporations, a 2005 report from CSIS's Global Water Futures project had this to say about water: "Water issues are critical to U.S. national security and integral to upholding American values of humanitarianism and democratic development. Moreover, engagement with international water issues guarantees business opportunity for the U.S. private sector, which is well positioned to contribute to development and reap economic reward."

Water for All

Clearly, the powers that be in the United States have decided that water is not a public good but a private resource that must be secured by whatever means. But there are alternatives. North Americans must learn to live within our means, by conserving water in agriculture and in the home. We could learn from the many examples here and beyond our borders -- from the New Mexican "Acequia" system that uses an ancient natural ditch irrigation tradition to distribute water in arid lands to the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance in Geneva, that works globally to promote sustainable rainwater harvesting programs.

Conservation strategies would undermine the massive investment now going into corporate technological and infrastructure solutions, such as desalination, wastewater reuse, and water transfer projects. And conservation would be many times cheaper, a boon to the public but not to the corporate interests that are currently driving international water agreements.

At the grassroots, a global water justice movement is demanding a change in international law to settle once and for all the question of who controls water, and whether responses to the water crisis will ensure water for the public or profits for corporations.

Ricardo Petrella has led a movement in Italy to recognize access to water as a basic human right, which has support among politicians at every level. The Coalition in Defense of Public Water in Ecuador is demanding that the government amend the constitution to recognize the right to water. The Coalition Against Water Privatization in South Africa is challenging the practice of water metering before the Johannesburg High Court on the basis that it violates the human rights of Soweto's citizens. Dozens of groups in Mexico have joined COMDA, the Coalition of Mexican Organizations for the Right to Water, a national campaign for a constitutional guarantee of water for the public.

The U.S. and Canada are the only two countries actively blocking international attempts to recognize water as a human right. But movements in both countries are working to change that. A large network of human rights, faith-based, labor, and environmental groups in Canada has formed Canadian Friends of the Right to Water to get the Canadian government to support a U.N. right-to-water covenant. And a network in the United States led by Food and Water Watch is calling for a national water trust to ensure safekeeping of the nation's water assets and a change of government policy on the right to water.

Such campaigns may have a fight ahead of them, but the vision is within reach: a United Nations covenant that recognizes the right of the Earth and other species to clean water, pledges to protect and conserve the world's water supplies, and forms an agreement between those countries who have water and those who don't to work toward local -- not corporate -- control of water. We must acknowledge water as a fundamental human right for all.

Maude Barlow wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Maude is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

http://www.alternet.org/water/87224/

[suebee]

how much do you think obama could really do (about the 50,000 issues facing us)?

[sidecross]

how much do you think obama could really do (about the 50,000 issues facing us)?

The real question is what 'we the people' are going to do?

[suebee]

well i dont want to sound like im in a rut or negative or anything but come on, are you serious? have you looked at "we the people" lately? the "people" will demand cheaper gas and someone will deliver a 50 cent reduction and all will be forgotten. the people havent even begun to be aware of water issues except when they cant wash their cars. no sidey we are on our own. that is how im viewing it anyway and if it turns out better than that, then hooray. if not, ive done what i can for twenty five years. im not giving up on everyone else, but does connecticut raise any red flags?

lord i better stop posting....if you cant say anything nice......

[sidecross]

well i dont want to sound like im in a rut or negative or anything but come on, are you serious? have you looked at "we the people" lately? the "people" will demand cheaper gas and someone will deliver a 50 cent reduction and all will be forgotten. the people havent even begun to be aware of water issues except when they cant wash their cars. no sidey we are on our own. that is how im viewing it anyway and if it turns out better than that, then hooray. if not, ive done what i can for twenty five years. im not giving up on everyone else, but does connecticut raise any red flags?

lord i better stop posting....if you cant say anything nice......


Yes I am serious.

Breaking Open the Head is only a beginning; it is what you do after that really counts.

Terrance McKenna often said the problem is not seeking the ‘truth’, but rather it is facing the ‘truth’.

In the end what will really be important is not what ‘leaders’ do, but what each of us do.

As a species, we are at a point where we may actually fumble and ‘drop the ball’; not in 100,000 years have our species been so close to either fumble or succeed.

[suebee]

im completely full of s--- sidey, please ignore me. :cry:

you and i have touted our water usage here. i will continue on in my habits... and my hopes that obama will be able to get the rest of the mass i no longer feel connected to on board.

every day i figure out a way to give up a little bit more of something. the result seems to be that i now feel more kinship with the plant kingdom than with humans. you are far ahead of me, do you feel the same?

[sidecross]

Hang in there suebee, we are all just a thought away from the next step.

A rearview mirror look will not pilot the future; we must begin to use our wits and not only intelligence.

To quote John Lilly again, “…“in the providence of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the providence of the mind there are no limits.”

[drew hempel]

"Sidey" you raise some interesting points. Gregory Bateson also did "dolphin" psychology research -- for the CIA. Was John Lilly funded by the CIA?

Anyway who needs real water when we have Blackwater:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/04/9456/

As for "we the people" -- I've been working in activism since 1988 and I've organized numerous campaigns with success plus done a slew of activist support work, including research, etc.

Here's the skinny Sidecross:

The nonprofit activist organizations in the U.S. are dependent on Rockefeller funding -- through, for example, the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have researched this a lot and there's a new book on "how the revolution will not be funded" or some title like that.

Secondly people are completely mind-controlled by WHITE colonial WESTERN culture -- and this includes every thing from defining reality by phonetic-based language to relying on symmetric-based mathematics to being raised in patriarchal families dependent on a cash economy, etc.

The West is parasitical and has raped the planet. We have about 10 years left as the West completes its accelerating spread around the globe.

In fact the real question is What can we BE -- not do. The answer is we can be the truth -- what I call "female formless awareness" -- pure consciousness -- not based on humanism nor democracy - but achieved through nonwestern harmonics relying on logical inference.

The Revolution is NOW and it's not based on doing but being in natural resonance with complementary opposite harmonics, creating "love-light." This revolution goes the exact opposite of linear-based time with its accelerating contraction of symmetric-based space.

Will this revolution be opposed -- even by the hippy-punk-druggie-alternative-progressive culture of the world?

YES. Because that "save the world" culture is still based on the philosophy that humans can do anything at all! Only pure consciousness as "female formless awareness" does anything and we just resonate with it. That's the truth based on logical inference, the source of the I-thought.

http://springforestqigong.com

[sidecross]

Drew, I was born in 1943 and I am the first born American of socialist parents one from St Petersburg Russia and the other from Poland or Germany depending on who was keeping score of the borders. One of my grandparents was shot and left for dead, and my father left St. Petersburg at the age of 10 or 11 just before the Revolution when 5 million people died from starvation. What I have written above is the only known history of my family; they all went to their grave giving no further information.

You may have been a working activist since ’86, but by that time I had realized ‘activism’ is a dead end, and you of all people should know that. The CIA, FBI, computers, and ‘Homeland Security’ can infiltrate any organized group.

What the government will never be able to control is an individual’s own mind, if they are willing to main control of their own mind.

As for John Lilly, I could careless if he was funded by the CIA because he was never controlled by the CIA or the government. John Lilly was a true explorer and frontiersman that no one could control.

[suebee]

i think you two are saying the same thing - we have to be the change we envision... sometimes its just hard to see, much less envision. and lots of people never even get a vision of anything different.

[drew hempel]

Wow so you're like 62? Anyway check this out:

http://www.wireheading.com/robert-heath.html

[suebee]

drew i thought math was one of your strong points. :p

[drew hempel]

I would never guess YOUR age Suebee! You're getting younger with every post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMRz_M3iVkk

[suebee]

is that a compliment.... hmmmm....:hmm::skeptic: ?
actually today im officially one year older!
i love the video.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Happy birthday Sue Bee.I hope you have many more and they are all filled with joy.

[drew hempel]

What's YOUR video gift?

[willoweyes]

June 8th was my 55th! What a day. My partner "Doublecross" bought himself a backhoe for our birthday, and was riding it for 19 of the past 48 hours.

Look out Mother Nature! If you could just see the damage he's done with a chainsaw. . . .

our septic system has developed "problems" (ie --you don't want to know) Double wanted to dig it up and install a new one--but i think i've talked him into trying out the "humanure" solution.

our present system of dealing w/crap is beyond ridiculous and absurd and Monty-Pythonish--it is simply inconceivable to any rational being that we would have one million toilets in Las Vegas, flushed w/five gallons of TREATED water a pee-pee.

this humanure is really quite simple and "elegant" (if such a word can dare be applied to anything involving baba). Someone recently pointed out that humans can be differentiated from the rest of the "animals" by the way they reverance their dead--i say it is by the way they reverance their crap.

[sidecross]

Here is a good book on the subject of composting human manure.


http://www.amazon.com/Humanure-Handbook-Guide-Composting-Manure/dp/0964425831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213114128&sr=1-1

[suebee]

by the way they "deny" their crap is more like it - flush. las vegas is in a huge drought. we are as well. i hope the governator declares water rationing here now before it gets ridiculous. 'get the people on board.' my new mantra. meanwhile my otherwise without reproach mom continues to let her phoenix kitchen water run and run....i guess my spartan ways make up for hers?

[bopes]

hmm ... that book might receive a warm reception here (http://www.poopreport.com/).

Wait a sec, looks like they did (http://www.poopreport.com/Techniques/Content/Humanure/humanure.html)receive it warmly!

[Isaiah Mpski]

When my Mom was alive,she cooled most of the south side of Tucson SB.
God love her.

That is what money will do for you CM.It alters your ability to change things.No matter what age you are in.

I like O'bama's idea of sending bi-annual bonuses to people making less than 150 k per year.

Maybe then,he'll get really wise and start a foreign Legion of sorts to give the 2.3 million Americans locked up in our jails and prisons hope.

[drew hempel]

Yeah I recycle my crap up through my head -- so I have to constantly spray anti-septic into my head. I'm not joking. Civilization IS crap --- the food, the thinking, etc. So I just shoot it back out -- recycle it. Free energy.

[craazyman]

yeah I recycle myself through beer and wine. God love it. The water of myself and the water of life. into the ground and sky and clouds, like the ancestors on high. I always was amazed at the Hopi (I think) conception of clouds as their ancestors. How right they were. The decomposition of all things, the evaporation of the bones.

I think big changes are coming. I am hopeful about Obama and wonder just how radical he can be, though. There is something that wants to be borne and the people feel it in an inarticulate way, something like a New Deal but, frankly lest we get too sentimental, not as radical. More a fine tuning, a readjustment. Maybe it will all boil down to higher taxes on rich folks. That could be all of it like, the Romans, the pendulum from Plebe to Senator and back again. It's time for the plebes to assert a moral order. It will be interesting to see the American Experiment contend with all this. The people want more, but they don't know quite "of what". Obamas debates with McCain could be quite siginificant. Not quite as much as Lincoln/Douglas but maybe more so than they have been in decades. Who are we and where are we going? Where is the manifest destiny.

[drew hempel]

PN -- first you state -- don't make me bring up how much I trashed Beelzebub before. Now you WANT to bring up the details on Bennet about Beelzebub. Go read J.R. Bennet's books. I quoted from it already -- you can just search this forum if you want. Obviously I'm not relying on it -- he's quoting Gurdjieff so there's no room for contention.

As I've pointed out Gurdjieff gets misunderstood because he uses diatonic measurements -- 5/4 and 9/8 which already are based on a "divide and average" symmetric, Western math, whereas the Law of Harmonics -- negative, positive, and neutral -- is based on complementary opposite harmonics -- 2/3 as postive, 3/4 as negative and 1/2 as neutral. This is obvious in the fact that the alchemical chart of octaves is based on fifths, just as in Taoism it's based on yang (as two-thirds). Gurdjieff emphasizes that the law of seven and the enneagram are built from the law of threes -- again this is the complementary opposites. Gurdjieff emphasizes that the West is not based on the law of three -- again the West is based on symmetric, divide and average math. So the confusion is that 5/4 and 9/8 are used by Gurdjieff since their derived from the Law of Three (3/2 x 4/3 = 9/8 and 5/4 is the cube root of two while 9/8 cubed is the square root of two, etc.).

My whole blogbook http://mothershiplanding.blogspot.com and accompanying comments and articles gives the technical analysis on this. The West -- Ouspensky, Bennet, Orage and all the deriatives continue to interpret the enneagram and law of octaves, etc., in terms of western divide and average harmonics. In fact the TAOIST YOGA trans. by Charles Luk book is the same as Gurdjieff's circulation of energy excercise -- whereby the 12 notes of the scale, derived from 2/3 turning into 3/4 -- are the harmonics along the outside of the body-mind. This is the small universe practice and leads to the full-lotus (a tetrahedron made up of eight 2-3-4 triangles or 4 equilateral triangles). http://springforestqigong.com gives the c.d.s to practice this.

[willoweyes]

there is a pond on our place i call the Eye of God. It is in a depression in the earth, and so reflects back the sky truly. I call it the Eye of God for other reasons as well, which i won't go into now [unless someone positively BEGS me. . .]

i drank two liters of that pond water on a bet last week, and i felt great afterwards. to swim in it is beyond belief.

drew, i am sorry to say you are kidding yourself if you think you can make something potable out of the devil's urine.* It will only take you down, son. That spraying antiseptic in your head is against life.

*isn't "urine" a funnuy word?
______________________
"if you hate your father, you hate god, but if you hate your mother, you hate life itself." {stated by some effing poison psychiatrist,\\; i can't think of his name. Maybe he lives inside of me.

[willoweyes]

is thar true

[Isaiah Mpski]

Speaking of words what about being "deposed" or diagnosed, much less words like honor and Noble.