The ever-shrinking Lake Mead
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Posted on February 13, 2008
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Population growth, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Does this kind of information have an impact — that the water source for 22 million people out West is rapidly disappearing?
A new study shows that that’s exactly what could happen — that as soon as 2021, the fake, human-created Lake Mead, reservoir and water source for many in the Southwest, could go dry. Check out this article at MSNBC:
We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us…
said Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the scientists involved in the study.
We try on this blog to convince our visitors that we are headed for unprecedented challenges in the years ahead, that the combination of global warming, 
ecological overshoot (living beyond the means of the Earth to sustain our levels of consumption and waste), mal-development models (as in, living wherever we want even if the local ecosystems cannot support us), hubris and arrogance, are leading us headlong towards numerous disasters, one exacerbating the other.
We have said before that population growth in the arid West and Southwest is not sustainable, that the West was never meant to support human population on the scale of recent decades, that water in the Southwest is going to run out, and yet, despite what we know, the trends proceed apace — now clearly leading to disaster — by 2021, just 13 years from now.
We don’t want to believe this, that some miracle will make it all okay. But there is no miracle that will save us — only the miracle of a spiritual awakening that will stop unsustainable development and population growth in regions where the Earth does not have the carrying capacity to support it.
Lake Mead may run dry by 2021. This will happen as a combination of global warming and completely inappropriate development and population growth. We want this not to be true, but it is true.
We need to humbly accept our place in the ecosystems of our planet. Only there lies the possibility of ecological hope. As Barnett says, what the study shows is ‘no abstraction.’ It is real, imminent. We should be making plans for human populations out West accordingly. The Colorado River cannot sustain what we humans are doing. We are subject to these limits. We must, we must, act accordingly. Or else… Really… or else…
Technorati Tags: Lake Mead, unsustainable development, southwest running out of water, inappropriate development population growth
Overshoot graph: European Environment Agency
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