Forget Global Warming; It’s the Least of Our Problems
January 3, 2008
In researching for our Moving Mountains Symposium on Water today, I was reading a fascinating New York Times Magazine article today about water issues in the West. It begins:
“As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, ‘an Armageddon.’”
Click on the picture to link to “The Future is Drying Up”
from the New York Times Magazine
And later on: “The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other.”
The article brings up some scary statistics about the water in the West, and discusses just briefly one idea that James Howard Kunstler brought up at our energy symposium last year: in a very brief span of time from now, and directly related to the enormous population growth of humankind, there will simply no longer be enough resources to sustain us all. As population continues to grow, we’ll need to drastically curb our consumption habits—the article mentions that our “water footprint” will soon be talked about just as much as our carbon footprint—or we frankly will not survive. Or at least, many of us won’t survive.
If we’re trying to save the planet for our children, the vast majority of us should not have children in the first place. In my opinion, the root of every potential global resources shortage we are now facing is not consumption, per say (although you could easily argue that in the States our consumption is off the charts in very selfish and hedonistic ways), but rampant unchecked human population growth. If we don’t take steps to curb population ourselves, nature will do it for us.
Posted by Emily Long
John Wesley Powell knew it all along, The west is an arid environment that can’t support a heavy population. He warned against relying on western rivers to supply water. And yet, the Colorado River has been a jewel of mismanagement throughout the 20th century. When Glen Canyon was being built they allocated water to western states based on calculations from a high water year. Oops. You can imagine their surprise the next few average years.
What do you think of just blowing up Glen Canyon and Hoover dams and expediting the inevitable?
brooksut said this on January 4th, 2008 at 6:21 pm