Water, Water, Anywhere?

I can say without reservation that water will be for the twenty-first century what oil was for the twentieth: source of wealth, source of political unrest, and source of violence.  Already, issues of water scarcity are becoming critical on both national and global scales, and the century has barely dawned.  Things will only get worse, as populations and consumption grow, and the potential for conflict over water far outstrips that over petroleum, given water's absolute and irreplaceable role in life, human or otherwise.  Even in America, land of plenty, we're not being spared the problem; just consider California's current drought, which threatens to plunge the state into fiscal and environmental catastrophe.   

California's drought serves as a crucial example of water usage issues primarily because of the state's role as agricultural superpower.  The three-year drought currently gripping the state has crippled farms and orchards, and it's because of their difficulties that the rest of the state is feeling the pinch.  Even though farms and crop production are in jeopardy, however, California's difficulties are not yet life-or-death.  Rather, they are monetary.  Crop lose is not an issue of survival, but rather of economic downturn; most of the farms suffering are citrus orchards, almond growers, wineries, and other luxury crop producers.  No one wants these growers to fail, but perhaps it's time to examine the cost of letting them survive.  Reducing consumption is a given. Taking shorter showers, watering the lawn less (for that matter re-evaluating lawns in general), and sacrificing bottling plants are all steps that should be taken, drought or no drought.  But how far will California go?  I've read ridiculous proposals online for building pipelines, possibly to Washington, because, and I quote, "it rains so much there anyways".  Worse, farmers are fighting for water diversion away from EPA mandated conservation projects and endangered species allotments.  It's an issue of blood money, ultimately, and whether life is worth more than livelihood.  It's an old fight, and one characteristically American.  Look north, to Oregon's Klamath basin.  There, at the turn of the twentieth century, farmers carved out arable land by diverting river water into otherwise infertile areas.  Now, years later, water rights have ignited a political firestorm, as environmentalists and local tribes seek to prevent farms from stealing away the last free watersheds, and possibly dooming salmon, waterfowl, and other local species to slow extinction.  

In America, however, the lives at stake are not yet human, and therefore still secondary to financial concerns.  Not so in the rest of the world.  Australia has been the victim of a decade long dry spell, devastating the country's agriculture, and resulting in the recent wildfires which claimed upwards of 200 lives.  China has so polluted much of it's rivers that the water is unfit even for industrial use, let alone human consumption.  The difficulties in Africa, however, still stand as the most critical and emblematic of the problem.  The mass starvations in Ethiopia are caused by drought and soil degradation, and areas of southern Africa have long been affected by famine for the same reasons.  The genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, as much as it is a tribal and religious conflict, was catalyzed by water competition between agriculturalists and herders, and it will continue until water somehow becomes more abundant in the area.  Which it won't.  People will continue to die, in the sand, and in the dust.

How do we counter these looming water issues?  First, we need to critically examine how we live.  It takes something like 4,000 gallons of water to bring a pound of beef to the table, and the US annually consumes about 28 billion pounds.  You do the math, cause frankly, I don't even want to.  Now, I love a good steak, but that's ridiculously unsustainable.  And livestock use is the tip of the iceberg.  If I was a Californian farmer, I'd be out picketing every golf course I could find.  The requirements to keep a course green are staggering, and every year they proliferate, even in the arid southwest.  A golf course in Arizona goes against the very rule of nature; it simply shouldn't exist in such an environment.  For that matter, neither should Las Vegas.  The amount of water it requires to operate a city in the middle of the desert is mind boggling, and criminal, and eventually, someone will have to acknowledge the fact that people simply were not meant to live there.  And that's what it boils down to, wherever water is scarce: humans struggling to live where they simply can't.  As sympathetic as I want to be to those starving Africans, I have to look at the larger picture, and it's unpleasant.  They can't continue to live at the population densities they do.  All the relief we care to send not only postpones the inevitable,  but aggravates the situation by momentarily supporting unsustainable birthrates.  The situation is the same in America, if not so dire.  The farmers in the Klamath basin, the citrus growers in the San Joaquin, the blackjack dealers in Vegas; they need to go, or at least be reduced in number to sustainable levels.  As it stands, they are content to drink the water that's available dry, ignoring the harsh truth of tomorrow's coming crisis.  When it comes, and it will, the only thing remaining wet will be the tears.