Turning on the taps and nothing comes out. It wasn’t like that yesterday, but today, there’s no water. Maybe they’re doing work on the pipes and you missed the memo, right? You call the city, and ask when it will come back on. They tell you it won’t. There’s no more water. They’re going to truck some in so people have something to drink while they pack, but that’s it, the water’s gone and it’s time to leave. This isn’t a fantasy situation. It has actually happened throughout human history, usually when we do not have the technology to manage our water supplies. The problem is that today, even with all we know about water management, we are still facing this very situation in our lifetimes, in major cities.
California has had a drought for the past four years. Even before the drought, the state was using water at an unsustainable pace. It gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River, which is highly stressed, and from underground aquifers. Those aquifers are almost dry, and they take millions of years to replenish, and the Colorado River cannot give up any more water — it hardly ever arrives at the ocean as it is. So where will the water come from to supply California? And where will we get food from, if we can’t get it from California anymore?
This is in one sense a very simply problem — California does not have enough water and the outcome will very soon be catastrophic. The state is likely to continue guzzling water at unsustainable rates until it simply cannot do so any longer — that is to say when the last drop is gone taps are literally dry. In another sense, it is very complex problem because there are a number of critical water users, because so many people depend on the state for food, and because of the state’s status as an economic power — you cannot simply relocate tens of millions of people without completely disrupting the American economy.
If water shortage is the macro-level problem, it has to be understood in two parts. The first is water usage. There are 39 million people in California, making it the most populous state in America. It is also a major agricultural heartland, sustainable or not, and that complicates the usage problem because so many people rely on California’s agricultural product, which so happens to be a major water user. The dairy industry is the biggest user of water, but realistically dairy products are ubiquitous in our society. Even if everybody stopped drinking cow milk and started drinking almond milk, almonds come from California and take a lot of water to produce.
So while demand is very high, and a seemingly intractable problem given the population of the state and its water usage patterns, the supply is also a problem because California has relied on non-renewable water sources, and is at capacity for the renewable ones. There are no easy solutions.
The first part of the solution is therefore to admit the problem — as of yet serious acknowledgment of the need to change the patterns of consumption has not occurred. The solution has to mean restructuring agriculture towards products more suited for the climate — the drought will end eventually but this is desert climate for the most part, not suitable for water-intensive crops or dairy cows. The second part of the solution is twofold. First, new short-term sources of water need to be found. This will involve going farther afield, but solutions need to be started today because they are likely to involve major infrastructure projects. The second part of this is that the state needs fewer people and a lot less agriculture. There needs to be a balance. This means that the U.S. has to start thinking about changing the agricultural economy it has had for the past several decades, shifting back towards more local agriculture that is genuinely sustainable. It also means that the habit of building massive cities where the local geography cannot support them also has to go by the wayside. Californians will start leaving when their property values collapse, which will happen when the taps run dry, and the smart ones will start this process early, as part of reducing the demand for water in the state.
All of this will happen the hard way, or it can happen with government intervention that encourages the right behaviors that will bring about balance to the ecosystem — reducing water, selling and moving, switching crops to ones suited for the environment, and ending the limitless, unsustainable growth patterns that have characterized California for decades.
¶ … ecology, war: Connections
The phrase ‘Mother Nature’ suggests that human beings personify nature as a physical human being. The image of nature as a human entity is very common throughout literature across a variety of cultures. Yet for much of Western civilization, nature has not been treated with great sensitivity or respect. Ever since the birth of modern agriculture, there has always been a tension between human needs and the need to respect the demands of nature. While some societies have striven to remain in balance with nature, not taking any more or less than needed from the land, this has not been the case for much of the history of Western dominance of the known world.
The failure to show respect for the demands of nature can be seen in the failure of the early Jamestown colony in Virginia. A lack of knowledge of sustainable faming practices and a contempt for tilling the soil lead to the deaths of most of the residents. Were it not for the intervention of the native people, the early colonists would likely have starved, given their lack of knowledge of how to make the soil yield food. And even after growing more accustomed to farming, the European colonists always focused on the land’s ability to yield a profit more than its ability to keep them alive: “The European colonists were engaged from the beginning (almost…) in market-oriented farming. Within the first decade, the Virginia colonists were raising tobacco for export rather than food for subsistence. For the first five or more years, the colonists depended upon the resupply shipments from England plus trade with the local Indians for a substantial portion of their food supply” (“Virginia agriculture,” Virginia Places, 2010.).
The fact that many of the native peoples lived in harmony with nature, and respected the needs of the soil was viewed with contempt by the Europeans. Because the natives were more ‘natural’ in their lifestyles they were seen as inferior. The fact that the natives did not view the land as an object to be possessed was seen as justification for acquiring their land by any means necessary. When natives, lacking the resistance to European ailments, began to be decimated by the diseases brought to the Old World, this was seen as further proof of Indian ‘inferiority.’ “Nature to the Europeans – and the Indians detected this – was something of an obstacle, even an enemy. It was also a commodity: A forest was so many board feet of timber, a beaver colony so many pelts, a herd of buffalo so many robes and tongues. Even the Indians themselves were a resource – souls ripe for the Jesuit, Dominican, or Puritan plucking” (“Native Americans,” American West, 2010).
Of course, native societies were not free from war even before the arrival of the Europeans. But the European mentality was distinctive in that it saw the need to colonize the land and make it yield a profit as synonymous with eradicating forests and herds of buffalo and the ways of the people who lived upon it. Colonial power was expressed in the dominance of people and dominance over ecology, a war that the colonists were determined to win. The native resistance was cast as ‘savage’ because the non-Christian natives wished to keep the land wild, rather than appropriately allow the more ‘civilized’ Europeans to dominate. Destroying native control and folk practices, taming the forest and artificially imposing Christianity, European crops, European notions of private property and ownership, and European systems of government were all deemed to be critical parts of the civilization process.
One problem with this type of civilization was that long after the native people had been removed, the land continued to silently protest. The Dust Bowl, the blowing-away of the soil in the Great Plains during the 1930s, was not a freakish act of nature. Rather, it was the result of unsustainable farming practices. “Would-be farmers…had reason to think they could prosper by farming wheat — at the time, prices were good and the area was enjoying a period of relatively wet years. But the land was shortgrass prairie and was best suited for the buffalo that roamed there until they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century. After a few prosperous years of wheat farming, the price of wheat dropped, and it continued dropping for several years, causing the farmers to rip up ever-larger areas of perennial grass for the cultivation of annual crops, until virtually all of the shortgrass prairie had been plowed…the rain pattern in the High Plains shifted. In 1931, an eight-year period of drought began, and the stage was set for catastrophe” (Welch 2010, p.1).
War does not simply destroy lives — it can also destroy entire populations and eradicate cultures. Some of the deepest causes of war — a desire for more territory, food and power — is linked to dominance of the land. Unlike the Europeans of the past, a love of artificiality and imposition upon nature is not longer seen as a positive thing. Yet the routine habits that are the legacy of industrialization still linger in our society, destroying the natural ecology.
While human beings, even buffalo, can be eradicated, the needs of nature do not go away. If humans make war upon nature by treating it cruelly, nature’s response is harsh, as seen in the modern catastrophe of global warming. Pollution has caused nature to retaliate, and rather than conquer nature it seems as if nature has turned against us. Peace with nature will prove elusive unless human beings radically change their lifestyle practices, and seek to truly live in harmony with the needs of their Mother Nature.
Works Cited
The American West. Native Americans. October 20, 2010.
http://www.americanwest.com/pages/indians.htm
Virginia agriculture. Virginia Places. October 20, 2010.
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/agriculture/index.html
Welch, Carolyn Review of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. September 2, 2010.
October 20, 2010. Mother Earth News.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-community/causes-of-dust-bowl-zw0z10zhir.aspx
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