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Denial in the Desert
Mike Davis, The Nation
…Although no one knows exactly why the bears, big cats and legendary vampires are moving northward, one plausible hypothesis is that they are adjusting their ranges and populations to a new reign of drought in northern Mexico and the US Southwest.
The human case is clear-cut: Abandoned ranchitos and near-ghost towns throughout Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora testify to the relentless succession of dry years–beginning in the 1980s but assuming truly catastrophic intensity in the late 1990s–that has pushed hundreds of thousands of poor rural people toward the sweatshops of Ciudad Juárez and the barrios of Los Angeles.
… La Niña events, Seager added, will continue to influence rainfall in the Borderlands, but building from a more arid foundation, they could produce the West’s worst nightmares: droughts on the scale of the medieval catastrophes that contributed to the notorious collapse of the complex Anasazi societies at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde during the twelfth century. (To make the bad news from the super-computers even worse, enhanced aridity is also forecast for much of the Mediterranean and the Near East, where epic drought is a well-known historical synonym for war, population displacement and ethnocide.)
Yet mere scientific pronouncement, even to the thunder of nineteen unanimous climate models, is unlikely to cause much of a flutter in golf-course suburbs of Phoenix, where luxury lifestyles consume 400 gallons of water per capita each day. Nor will it stop the bulldozers shaping monstrous strip suburbs of Las Vegas (a projected 160,000 new homes) along US 93 all the way to Kingman, Arizona.
… Despite a lot of recent sloganeering about “smart growth” and intelligent water use, desert developers are still stamping out burbs in the same “dumb,” environmentally inefficient mold that has blighted Southern California for generations. The trump card of the free-enterprise Southwest, moreover, is that the majority of the water stored within the Colorado River and Rio Grande systems is still dedicated to irrigated agriculture [which could be diverted to residential use].
…More futuristically, there is also the “Saudi” option. Steve Erie, a University of California, San Diego, professor who has written extensively about water politics in Southern California, told me that desert developers in the Southwest and Baja California are confident that they can keep the population boom well-watered through the conversion of seawater.
… As water becomes more expensive, the burden of adjustment to the new climatic and hydrological regime will fall on subaltern groups like farmworkers (jobs threatened by water transfers), the urban poor (who could easily see water charges soar by $100 to $200 per month), hardscrabble ranchers (including many Native Americans) and, especially, the imperiled rural populations of Northern Mexico.
Indeed, the ending of the age of cheap water in the Southwest–especially as it may coincide with the end of cheap energy–will accentuate the region’s already high levels of class and racial inequality as well as drive more emigrants to gamble with death in dangerous crossings of the border deserts. (It takes little imagination, moreover, to guess the Minutemen’s future slogan: “They are coming to steal our water!”)
Conservative politics in Arizona and Texas will become even more envenomed and ethnically charged, if that is possible. The Southwest is already sown everywhere with violent nativism and what can only be described as proto-fascism: In the droughts to come, they may be the only seeds to germinate.
As Jared Diamond points out in his recent bestseller Collapse, the ancient Anasazi did not succumb simply to drought but rather to the impact of unexpected aridity upon an over-exploited landscape inhabited by people little prepared to make sacrifices in their “expensive lifestyle.” In the last instance, they preferred to eat one another.
(3 April 2007)
UPDATE: Big article in the NY Times: An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain.
Drought means no palms for Palm Sunday
Australian Associated Press
Up to 300 NSW churches could have no palms for Palm Sunday with suppliers blaming the drought and logging for the shortage.
Instead, churches will be supplied with paper replicas for the religious day, observed on April 1 this year as precursor to Easter Sunday.
Priests are also urging parishioners to take offcuts from their own trees.
Supplier Mark Nixon of Nixon Palms on the central coast said a sufficient supply is not available this year.
“Drought is a big problem because these palms need a canopy and when the forests start dying, or losing a lot of canopy, that really affects palms,” he told News Limited newspapers. ..
(21 Mar 2007)
See also ‘Eco-palms’ can help sustain god’s green earth.
Asia’s river systems face collapse
Alan Boyd, Asia Times
Water in the Indus River is so clouded that the native dolphin has in effect lost its eyesight and has to detect prey and other objects through sound waves.
More than half of all the industrial waste and sewage in China flows into a single waterway, the Yangtze. And tributaries of the Ganges, one of Asia’s greatest cultural and religious treasures, are running dry because of the crippling burden of irrigation.
Such has been the legacy of the frantic Third World rush to industrialize at any cost, according to a landmark study by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) that was released as part of World Water Day on Thursday.
It found that 21 of the world’s greatest rivers, including the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges, Indus and Tigris-Euphrates in Asia, were struggling to survive against the tide of man-made pollution and the diversion of water through dams, pipes and irrigation.
“We’re talking about a complete collapse of the system – they’re so polluted, so over-extracted or so cut up by dams that it’s really not functioning as a river anymore,” said Tom Le Quesne, freshwater-policy officer at WWF. “It’s a challenge that humanity faces not far off the scale of climate change.”
(24 March 2007)
Malaysia To Make Rainwater Collection Mandatory for Big Roofs
Associated Press
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia plans to require many buildings throughout the country with large roofs to install gutters and tanks so that they can harvest rainwater, news reports said Wednesday.
Under the plan, the harvested water would be used for washing cars, flushing toilets, watering plants, while saving treated water for drinking, cooking and showering.
“It’s a sheer waste for treated water to be used to wash cars or water plants,” the New Straits Times quoted Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as saying. “When we use treated water for such chores our water bills increase and we are the ones who will lose out.”
Malaysian authorities say consumers waste too much water and that supplies in the country’s main city, Kuala Lumpur, are expected to run short within the next decade. ..
(28 Mar 2007)
