The ecological lessons of Lake Mead
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Posted on February 13, 2008
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
There are lessons in abundance from the new study showing that Lake Mead is shrinking and may not have the capacity to support the water needs of 22 million people within the next 13-15 years. Last night, I linked to the MSNBC article. Today, there is more coverage in newspapers, and below are a few additional links for more info.
The New York Times did their own story, a good one written by Felicity Barringer, and you can read it here. Sadly, given the seriousness of this looming crisis, the article only made it to page 14. This is a present, not a future crisis, as already the water is being used beyond its capacity to replenish. Why are we not alarmed as a nation about this? Why doesn’t this get the same hype, for example, as the Roger Clemens steroid/HGH hearings on Capitol Hill today? Someone tell me which of these issues has the greater implications for our society?
But, heck, we love our way of life. Why must we be confronted with its inevitable limits?
Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.
We, of course, have written about this many times: in the western United State, the problem of ecological overshoot, living beyond the means of the Earth to support our consumption and absorb our waste, reaches extremes of insanity. Las Vegas and other places in Nevada, cities and communities in northern Arizona, are completely dependent on Lake Mead, and remain among the fastest population growth areas in the U.S. It is nuts, it is dangerous, it is irresponsible to continue like this, to allow this growth to continue. And we are all going to pay a price.
Imagine these millions of people pouring out of the region as the water runs out. What becomes of all that infrastructure? What happens as real estate values plunge and many sprawling suburban, exurban, mountain and desert communities become uninhabitable?
Or will we attempt other insane things, like water pipelines from the Great Lakes, the northern three of which — Huron, Superior, and Michigan — are already receding due to global warming and the US Army Corps of Enigineers’ ecologically destructive dredging and canal-building on the St. Clair River?
The Washington Post, by way of contrast with the Times, only included a very short AP article, which is linked here. This one showed up in many other places. It concludes in rather dire terms:
Researchers said that if Lake Mead water levels drop below 1,000 feet, Nevada would lose access to all its river allocation, Arizona would lose much of the water that flows through the Central Arizona Project Canal, and power production would cease before the lake level reached bottom.
Is this a story deserving of more dramatic headlines, perhaps on the front page?
Another link, and then a brief reflection. This article, Lake Mead may go dry by 2021, comes by way of the Green Tech Blog on CNet News.com. A chilling excerpt:
The disappearance of the manmade lake would create a tidal wave of ill effects for the southwestern U.S. The lake provides water for large cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as for several agricultural interests. The power also keeps on the lights in that region of the country. Imagine Los Angeles on a summer day with sporadic air conditioning and only a trickle of water coming out of the faucet. Then imagine that goes for a week.
“We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us,” Barnett said in a statement. “Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest.”
“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” he added.
Well, friends, we could not get a better example of the wrong way we live on this planet. We are coming very late to realize that we must live in balance with the bioregions in which we live, that we must not live beyond the means of our bioregions to support us — take more water than can be replenished, cut down more forests than the ecosystems can withstand and remain intact, bulldoze more lands, forests, wetlands for our home and commercial developments than the Earth can handle, continue to break down ecosystems and think we can go on forever without a natural blowback for all the damage we have done.
But we have already done this, and now we are going to begin to pay the price. We have known for more than three decades that we had Earth carrying capacity problems. But here’s more evidence, this from a report from the United Nations Environment Program from last October. Humans living beyond Earth’s means, warns UN report. An excerpt from this article on the EurActiv.com website:
Among the issues that remain unresolved are climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population, which all, according to the report, “put humanity at risk”.
In addition to these persistent “harder-to-manage issues”, new ones are emerging, warns the report. These include the rapid rise of oxygen ‘dead zones’ in the oceans and the resurgence of new and old diseases partly linked to environmental degradation.
The UN report therefore aims to issue a serious warning. “We are living far beyond our means,” it states. The human population is now so large that “the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available”.
You see? We have a problem. You can read the UNEP GEO-4 report by going here.
Someday we will come to realize that we are creatures of this planet; it is not a creature of us and our cleverness. We are not over and above it; but embedded deeply within it. Ecological hope depends absolutely on our ‘getting’ this, and then altering our human life on this planet accordingly.
Technorati Tags: Lake Mead running dry, Colorado River, Earth carrying capacity, population growth in western united states, Great Lakes receding, St. Clair River, United Nations Environment Program, GEO-4
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Dr. Tim Barnett is doing vital work. Perhaps his splendid effort will help us see what is happening to our planetary home, that many too many people appear not to be seeing, I suppose.
Scientific evidence is springing up everywhere that indicates the massive and pernicious impact of the human species on the limited resources of Earth, its frangible ecosystems and life as we know it.
Guided by mountains of carefully and skillfully developed research regarding climate change, top rank scientists like Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Hans J. Schellnhuber and Dr. Christopher Rapley issued a Climate Code Red emergency declaration this month to leaders of governments and to the family of humanity proclaiming the necessity for open discussion and action by politicians and economic powerbrokers.
From my humble perspective, many leaders of the global political economy are turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and dangerously degrading the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.
Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be presented to humanity appear to so many fine scientists as human-induced, leaders have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, ready or not, like them or not.
Perhaps leadership in our time has too often chosen to ignore whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. It appears that too many leaders are content to hold tightly to widely shared and consensually validated specious thinking when it serves their personal interests.
Is humanity once again finding life as we know it dominated by a modern Tower of Babel called economic globalization? That is, has human thinking, judging and willing become so egregiously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy that we cannot speak intelligibly about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots?