Water Crisis Impacts Power Crisis

One of the defining characteristics of a good Green, is being able to connect the dots between seeming unrelated phenomenon.

CNN Money takes a look at the connection between water shortages and power production:

Power generation takes water. Pumping water takes power. As the nation struggles to meet electricity demand - expected to surge 50% in the next 30 years - big sections of the country are suffering from drought conditions.

The article begins with an old Western saying: "Whisky is for drinkin' and water is for fightin' ."

Getting Serious over Climate Change

It is becoming increasingly clear that Climate Change in not just an environmental issue of interest to "tree huggers" and "EcoVillagers". Still there are those who choose to remain in denial because admitting that global warming is real is more than inconvenient. It means that they will have to give up some very deeply held beliefs.

Some of the strongest climate change deniers come from rural, basically agricultural communities. Yet, in the most recent newsletter from the Center for Rural Affairs, the editors argue that Climate Change is an "Evnivonmental, Economic, and Moral Challenge."

It (how can the public decide when some scientists disagree) is a fair question, but it should not stop us from fulfilling our responsibility as citizens of conscience to search for the truth. If predictions are accurate, climate change is the most critical environmental and economic challenge confronting our generation and one of the most urgent moral issues.

It is a moral issue because we have responsibilities to future generations. If climate change is happening and we don’t address it, our children and grandchildren will face a lower standard of living and less environmental quality. Shifting weather patterns and more extreme weather events would make farming more unpredictable and risky.

Those same changes in weather patterns which the Center finds will make farming more risky will also force us to make fundamental decisions about how we deal with our remaining natural resources. This is the subject of the feature article in the Feb. 4 issue of High Country News. They are dealing with the problem of Unnatural Preservation. The lead to this article poses the question quite directly.

In the age of global warming, public-land managers face a stark choice: They can let national parks and other wildlands lose their most cherished wildlife. Or they can become gardeners and zookeepers.

One of the images is that of a part ranger using a garden hose to ensure that the Giant Sequoia has enough water to survive.

The real challenge for the west is the change in rainfall patterns. On one television news program this AM I saw the questions raised of Lake Mead being dry by 2021.

We have to get some sense of reality here. If the shifting patterns of rainfall have such a devastating effect on the availability of water, if they change how we farm and what crops we are able to raise then we are in for problems that have no easy solutions.

Why build new dams if there won't be enough water to fill the reservoirs that we now have? Yet, that is exactly what our governor is proposing to do. It is obvious that we need to rethink how we use water, as Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute reminds us.

Yes, Climate Change is a moral issue and it is too important to be left in the hands of politicians. We can get very worked up over the War in Iraq and the approximately 4,000 American lives lost, or even the (by some estimates) 500,000 Iraqi lives lost. We agonize over what should be done in Darfur where the number of lives lost are over 100,000 What will we do when the numbers are 10 million in Bangladesh, in Africa, in SE Asia? What will we do when California can no longer be America's produce counter?

It is not going to be easy to be green in the coming years because that means dealing with complexity and we like to keep our lives simple.

What did I mean by that...

In a post to the Green California Forum email list, my fellow blogger, Orval Osborne asked me to elaborate on a viewpoint that I had voiced in a previous post to that list. What I had actually said was...

If I were able to control the agenda for GIWG, [GP California Green Issues Working Group] I would do the following:

• take a limited set of issues... probably only 2... Global Warming and Water.
• I would begin to prepare position statements, focused on California, even more focused on community activism, and I would target them toward candidates: what should I say we should be doing locally, state-wide about this issue?. I would then target them toward press releases, actions and/or tabling material and event illustrating that the Green Party is the one telling the truth and showing how this will be good for the community... not just the sacrifice of a penitent.

I agree that this needs further explanation.

There are interesting parallels between the narrative of the state of modern man that is the basis of most environmental rhetoric and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. The environmental rhetoric is that the world would be great is man stopped doing all of those awful things to it. We could then return to a state of harmony. In the religious narrative, the fall from grace was due to the knowledge of good and evil. In the environmental narrative the fall from grace is due to the pollution we push out into the world in the pursuit of economic advantage and a modern lifestyle.

I have problems with both in that they place man outside of nature. Until modern times, man's goal was to control nature and put it to work in the service of his needs. We are beginning to understand that the world does not work that way, but not many have yet put that understanding to work in the realm of politics. It is too frightening to think about because it mean that you have to rethink historical perceptions and that is never easy nor comfortable.

My transition from a conservative Republican dedicated to Conservation to a Green came from my own development of a viewpoint that I would best describe a that of deep ecology. In this, it was not the philosophy of Arne Naess nor the activism of Judi Bari that changed my thinking but rather the science of Frijtof Capra and the reading of his book The Web of Life. If you are a Green and have not read Capra, you should. He was also co-author (with Charlene Spretnak) of the 1984 book Green Politics.

I have, for a long time, been frustrated by some aspects of the environmental movement, in particular those whose thinking does not go beyond "stop" or "limit" to provide the alternatives. In too many cases, that becomes a task that we are all too willing to leave for someone else to do.

• When you stop logging the Humboldt County redwoods, how do you build a new, local economy? It would have been more effective to work on providing the alternative from the beginning, in other words community based sustainable economics.
• If you stop snowmobiles in Yellowstone, what do you do to replace that mode of tourist transportation during the winter months? Again it is a local economic issue. For a long time, there was no answer. At least, this year, the Sierra Club will have one winter trip to Yellowstone. Capacity 9.

Rather than viewing ourselves as outside of nature, we must think of ourselves as an integral part of the web of life. Instead of asking how we might return to whatever Eden we think existed in the past, we need to begin asking What kind of world might we create? Instead of asking Who am I? should we not ask Who am I becoming?

There are two fundamental concepts that are behind the Green Movement: an understanding of the truth of deep ecology and a strong sense of social justice. They should inform and guide all that we do. When we lose either we are no longer green.

Breaking News - Tennessee Town Out of Water

Posted by The Associated Press - 6 Hours Ago
Tennessee Town Has Run Out of Water
by Greg Bluestein

ORME, Tenn. (AP) — As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community's towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank's meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town's 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mighty waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and now the creek running through the center of town is dry.
. . .

He says the crisis in Orme could serve as a warning to other communities to conserve water before it's too late.

"I feel for the folks in Atlanta," he says, his gravelly voice barely rising above the sound of rushing water from the town's tank. "We can survive. We're 145 people. You've got 4.5 million people down there. What are they going to do? It's a scary thought."

New York Times Magazine - The Perfect Drought

Rush Put on Water Debate

I need to interrupt my sequence on the water issues to call your attention to a fine article by Hank Shaw in today's Stockton Record. Shaw is the Record's Capitol Bureau Chief, and as such offers some of the best commentary on the politics of water.

Schwarzenegger has called the Legislature into special session to deal with water supply issues in the hopes of crafting a compromise proposal that could appear on the February presidential primary ballot.

But that prospect appears to be dimming.

The deadline for any deal technically falls on Thursday, but even with the wiggle room lawmakers can afford themselves, a hard deadline appears to be mid-October. Dozens of lawmakers are overseas right now, visiting locales as far-flung as Azerbaijan, China, Argentina and Germany. A group of state senators will not return to the Capitol until Oct. 9.

I guess they legislature does not see this as being as urgent as the newspaper editorials (except the OC Register) indicated. Does water really matter for voters? Tell me what you think.