Water and the control of nature

Some scientists predict that more than a few of us will be facing serious water shortages in the years to come. Check this out:

Coastal states like Florida and California face a water crisis not only from increased demand, but also from rising temperatures that are causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. Higher temperatures mean more water lost to evaporation. And rising seas could push saltwater into underground sources of freshwater.

Florida represents perhaps the nation's greatest water irony. A hundred years ago, the state's biggest problem was it had too much water. But decades of dikes, dams and water diversions have turned swamps into cities.

Little land is left to store water during wet seasons, and so much of the landscape has been paved over that water can no longer penetrate the ground in some places to recharge aquifers. As a result, the state is forced to flush millions of gallons of excess into the ocean to prevent flooding.

Also, the state dumps hundreds of billions of gallons a year of treated wastewater into the Atlantic through pipes - water that could otherwise be used for irrigation.

This isn't something that's just happening to us. We bear some responsibility because of the way we live. Patrick Deneen, now in Italy for a conference, watched "Larry King Live" discuss the San Diego fires as if it were a simple morality play of Man vs. Nature, and Man's resilience conquering, at least spiritually, Nature's fury. Nobody's talking about the responsibility borne by individuals who chose to live in a disaster-prone area, and who now expect to socialize, via extra money to be paid for firefighting, higher insurance premiums, etc., the cost of their decision. Writes Deneen:

The case of California is far worse [than New Orleans']: in their desire for a McMansions of their own, approximately 55,000 people knowingly have moved into fire prone areas in the past several years. No one thought to raise the "inconvenient truth" that buying a wood-and-plaster home in a desert environment, one prone to regular and periodic wildfires, was a recipe for disaster that we would all end up paying for (your tax dollars at work, to the tune of an additional 2 billion in increased fire-fighting costs). As a culture we've become accustomed to ignoring any feature of nature that might be seen either as a benefit or a detriment to where we erect these flimsy structures: neither readily available sources of water, temperate climes, or the availability of local building materials, on the one hand, nor hostile environments like the deserts of California, on the other, encourage or dissuade us from building the same pre-fab houses everywhere they can possibly be slapped together and sold for ridiculously inflated prices.

The "news" focuses on the human interest story, and I am truly sorry that these many people lost their houses and possessions. But there is a bigger moral of this particular story, which is that perhaps people shouldn't be living in disaster areas waiting to happen, or if they do, that they shouldn't be surprised when disaster happens.

The same could be said for all the people moving to south Florida, heedless of the fact that terrible hurricanes are a fact of life there. I don't believe people should be condemned to suffer natural disaster without help from the rest of us. After all, there is no place in the country, at least not that I can think of, that is free from the prospect of a catastrophic natural disaster. (Well, maybe New England and the Great Lakes area, which don't have to worry about forest fires, earthquakes, volcanos, tornados...). But what I do think is a question well worth asking is to what extent should individuals in any one locale have the right to expect the broader community to subsidize their own irrational risk? It's a pressing question to ask on the question of rebuilding New Orleans, a city that faces very dim prospects in this century, simply because it is already below sea level, and the seas are rising. It is certainly an unpleasant question to ask, but not an unjust one, and even a necessary one. The same ought to be asked of the people racing to move out West, given that there is not going to be enough water for them.