Here's an appalling story about how the city of Atlanta fiddled while its water supply dried up. Excerpt:
For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.
The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.
By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.
Atlanta could be bone-dry by New Year's Day. Has that ever happened before? A major American city running out of water? I tell you, this story sends a chill through me, because there's something deep about this, about Atlanta just pootling along through life, as if Something Will Turn Up. At the Berry conference, some of us were talking Deneenishly about Peak Oil and the prospects for what the end of cheap energy would do to American life. One of our number predicted that Something Would Turn Up.
"But what if it doesn't?" another professor said, adding that this childish faith in the future prevents us from behaving like adults now, and changing our behavior to live more responsibly.
I thought of that conversation when I read the Atlanta story. This country, this culture, we think that it's just going to get better and better. We have no idea how quickly and easily it could all disappear, all this around us. I know I'm super-skittish about this, but I keep thinking about how quickly the Twin Towers went down, and the world changed for us so dramatically -- all before noon on a single day in September. The current New Yorker has a profile (not online yet) of the scholar and polymath Jacques Barzun, who turns 100 next month, and who was a boy in France when World War I broke out. It shattered his family's dreamy artistic life. Barzun tells the writer that people simply don't understand how fragile civilization is.
I don't mean to pick on Atlanta. I am certain that Dallas would be just as heedless. Did you see the stunning story in the Times Magazine, about how the West is drying up? Quote:
The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
Why are people still moving to the West? Is it faith that Something Will Turn Up?
When we crash, we're going to crash hard.
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Great post, Rod. I 100 % agree. As a film buff, I wonder if you have seen "The Pianist" or " The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"? Both deal with well off Jewish families who were unable to recognize that it was time to flee the Nazis because they were too tied to their comfortable lives. I believe that's human nature.
I think one of the reasons people do not take genuine emergencies seriously any more is that absolutely every social and environmental issue is couched by those most interested in drawing attention thereto in terms of abject hysteria. Since in-depth journalism has become a dying art, the process of raising awareness for any problem has become one of front-loading a twenty to thirty second sound bite with enough apocalyptic rhetoric that people simply "must" pay attention. The accumulation of hysterical outbursts has had the unintended consequence that Joe Average interprets all putative emergencies as non-emergencies - his world having failed to end due to overpopulation, global cooling, SARS, AIDS, Bird Flu, Mutating Frogs, Black Militancy, the internet gap, low test scores, troubled teens in thongs, the music of Judas Priest, secret networks of Satan-worshiping day care toddler touchers, etc.
Note I have deliberately mixed genuinely horrible problems (AIDS is mauling an entire continent) with crises du jour that turned out to be without substance. Joe and Joanna Sixpack half hear this crap in one ear, and what stays with them is the accumulation of emergencies - most of which do not turn out to be emergencies, or which at least do not turn out to be emergencies in their neighborhood. Thus immunized to alarm and rendered insensible to shock, they wake up to find that a lack of water in a reservoir down the road has been able to "sneak up on them." I blame lazy journalists allowing world-saving activist pester groups to write their news stories for them, so that no sense of proportion is ever attached to any pending crisis. I also blame people's laziness, since refusing to read serious journalism accelerates sound bite advocacy journalism.
william -- Spot on and well said!
You get my vote for Post of the Week.
Price is a big incentive for conservation but one wonders about the reward system. When it comes to gas and electric I am informed that if I cut my usage by x % when my usage is already minimal, I will receive such and such a discount whereas the energy pig who could easily cut his usage by x% and still exceed mine gets rewarded.
Likewise with water. Where I live the more the people conserve in their use of water, the less money the city should take in in water charges. But, as they hasten to inform us, they still need to cover their fixed costs and so no matter how much we conserve the cost of water still goes up and up during a drought time. And it never goes down no matter how hard the rains come.
Last year my husband was looking for work and we decided that although there were definately many things to like about the southwest, we would not consider moving there unless we had no other concievable choice. The reason was that the Southwest is not able to sustain our family over the long run from an ecological POV. There's not enough water - it must be stolen from elsewhere for its inhabitants to survive.
It's the same reason I don't eat much seafood. I live a thousand miles away from an ocean. It's just lovely that seafood is good for you and eating it can make you live 100 years. The bottom line is that I have no business eating something the planet provides for people who have easy access to.
Although it may seem bonkers to other people, one of the reasons I like where we live is precisely because if we needed to, we could get water, meat and agriable (not even sure if that's a word!) land from our immediate surroundings. Although we're not doing much aside from keeping a small vegetable garden now, it is something I think about and it does influence our decisions.
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