Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Missed posting the past few days. I was traveling again, and this time found myself driving through a record-breaking spring snowstorm in the upper Midwest — 7 inches at the airport in Milwaukee.

The second storm behind it is pummeling states south of here — with snow and predictions for major tornadoes.

Spring is fun isn’t it?

Crazy weather. Crazy extreme weather — and we best get used to it.

However, what brings me to this post is an article I just read having to do with the regional impacts of global warming — this time here in the US, and this time about the availability of water — or not.

The second of this year’s reports on climate change from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes some of the looming regional impacts, and this article from Reuters’ PlanetArk news wire, concerns North America and the water crisis that will hit this part of the world.

We have posted before about how global warming will impact some parts of the US, leaving the southwest parched, reducing snowpack on which many communities in the West depend for their water, bringing about changes in rain patterns, resulting in more downpours which means more erosion, and, at the same time, more evaporation in the warming air.

This article describes how the US and Canada could find themselves locked in conflict over water sources — like the Great Lakes, for instance.

Really frightening is the extent to which the Ogallala aquifer, which sits under 8 states, has already been drained. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

And still we build in the desert. And still we refuse as a nation to implement programs to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Of all the resources that are indispensable, water is the most indispensable. So much prescinds from the availibility of water, and we are so used to having it at our command in vast amounts, that it is hard to imagine what it will be like to have this precious gift of the Earth grow scarce.

As Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows wrote in the stark and compelling book, Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update, which I am pouring through right now, “Water is the least substitutable and most essential resource.”

According to their studies:

If average per capita demand did not change at all and the human population grew to nine billion by the year 2050, as the UN presently projects, humans would withdraw 10,200 cubic kilometers per year, 82 percent of the global sustainable freshwater runoff. If not only population but also per capita demand increased, there would be severe global water limits long before the year 2100.

That number still sounds so far off, but we are talking decades here, the lifetime of our children.

“Pumping up groundwater faster than it can be recharged,” as we are currently doing, “is not sustainable.” Well, duh……

The human activities that depend on it will either have to decline to a level that the renewable recharge rate can sustain, or, if the overpumping destroys the aquifer by saltwater infiltration or land subsidence, cease altogether.

And, of course, if we choose the latter, there will be regional, national, and international repercussions.

Do we ever say to developers, there is not enough water, you can’t build there?

For North America — less water, more wildfires, more extreme weather events, rising ocean waters lapping in the streets of our coastal cities. So says the IPCC report. Now wouldn’t you like to see your government, your community leaders, your religious leaders, your cultural leaders doing a whole lot more to address this crisis?

From the folks at Limits to Growth:

Water sustainability is not possible without climate sustainability, which means energy sustainability. Humanity is dealing with one, large, interlinked system.

Any response that does not adequately address this one large interlinked system, that tries to patch here and there, will fail to save us from this looming North American disaster.

[tags] water scarcity, global warming impact on North America, global warming, climate change in US, Limits to Growth, Meadows-Randers-Meadows[/tags]