[Note: This is the forty-fifth sample from the rough draft of
my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy. The Search field on the right side will find
words in the full contents of all rants and reviews. These samples are not freestanding
pieces. They will be easier to understand
if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE
— if you have some free time. If you
prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my
book HERE.]
SACRED
WATER
Like soil, water is essential for all life — no water, no
life. Access to wetness determines the
essence of every ecosystem, from rainforests to deserts. The plant and animal communities that inhabit
them are species attuned to surviving in local conditions. Wherever our wild ancestors wandered, they simply
ate the healthy wild foods the land provided.
Until fairly recently, it never occurred to them to play the game of
stewardship, and assume the role of owner and master. They had no need to. They were wild, free, and happy. Life was good.
Everyone who reads these words has spent their entire life in
a fossil-powered era of super-insanity, a temporary catastrophic blip in the
human saga. Many believe that oil is
also essential — far more so than soil or water. But in the coming decades, we’ll have no
choice but to abandon our addiction to fossil energy — cold turkey — and
migrate to a more traditional path that is much slower, simpler, saner, and far
less crowded. Joy! It was a crazy-making bad habit. It turned much of the mob into full-bore
lunatics who lost all common sense and lived like they were the final
generation. I can assure you that we’ll
always need water. Water is good stuff.
J.
R. McNeill wrote that salt water is 97 percent of all H2O. About 69 percent of all fresh water is
frozen, mostly in Antarctica. Of the 31
percent that is not frozen, about 98 percent is stored in underground aquifers,
many of which are too deep to be molested by tropical primates and their boring
gizmos. The water in all lakes and
streams is about a quarter of one percent of all freshwater. An essential benefit of incoming sunbeams is
desalination. As salt water evaporates,
water vapor is released into the atmosphere, where it can travel the world and become
dew, rain, frost, or snow.
McNeill wrote that for almost the entire human saga, water
was mostly used for little more than drinking and bathing. Today, we use far more, waste far more, and
pollute far more. Three major guzzlers
are agriculture (70%), industry (20%), and cities and towns (10%). In 1990, we were using 40 times more water
than in 1700. In the twentieth century
alone, water consumption increased 900 percent.
Similar to their abusive relationship with soil, clever
control freaks are working like crazy to exploit water in every unsustainable
way they can imagine. Their objective is
to keep the unsinkable Titanic, with its seven-point-something billion
passengers, afloat for as long as humanly possible, by any means necessary (as
long as it’s profitable).
Irrigation
Water-guzzling agriculture began in places like southern
Mesopotamia. James
Scott wrote a new and improved version of the story about the dawn of plant
and animal domestication, and the eventual emergence of civilization. He focused on southern Mesopotamia, where
wild folks originally wandered into a region of thriving wetlands loaded with
wild wheat, barley, and many other wonderful things to eat. It was delicious paradise, full of wild game,
and nobody owned it, so they decided quit wandering, build luxurious huts, and
enjoy a life of prosperity.
By and by, the growing number of bambinos began to strain the
party. Their unfortunate solution was to
increase food production by transforming desert into productive cropland. In the following pages, we’ll examine some of
the downsides of irrigation. This was a
daunting fork in the path. Once again,
some folks who, for centuries, were well adapted to prospering in a wild
ecosystem, eventually became possessed by an urge to control and exploit
it. One lesson that environmental
history teaches us, over and over and over again, is that some cultures can
lurch out-of-balance, and develop an obsessive compulsion for cleverly
controlling people, places, plants, and animals.
Unfortunately, this devilish cleverness is not kept tightly
caged by knowledge, understanding, wisdom, respect, or acute foresight. (Hey, we’re just happy horny hungry savannah
primates! We didn’t know any
better!) Sometimes, it can make you
wonder if Big Mama Nature deliberately conjured the dark juju of cleverness,
because overseeing millions of years of ongoing sustainability was getting
really monotonous and boring. Bring in
the clowns?
Sandra
Postel is fascinated by a dirty and destructive habit called irrigation. Today, about 17 percent of global cropland is
irrigated, and it produces 40 percent of our food. Crops can be grown in lands too dry for rain-fed
agriculture, and they can produce higher yields. Irrigation fans the flames of population
growth, which is usually the opposite of helpful. Since 1800, irrigated cropland has grown 30
times in area, and global population has soared from one billion to nearly
eight.
In the early days, irrigation was a game of moving surface
water into fields using low tech methods.
Keeping the irrigation channels from silting up was a major and
never-ending job that gave legions of slaves and peons satisfying work to
enrich their lives. When enemies came to
visit, a cruelly enjoyable way of destroying your society was to deliberately
rubbish your irrigation system.
After the Second World War, powerful electric and diesel powered
pumps became affordable and popular. So
did drilling rigs, which were used to bore tube wells for the extraction of
groundwater. Cheap and abundant energy
allowed far more water to be produced, compared to old fashioned muscle power
or windmills. This spurred a massive
expansion of the area of irrigated land, which tripled between 1950 and 2000.
Today, the mining of underground aquifers makes possible about
a tenth of world grain production. Huge
fossil aquifers are being drained in the U.S. Great Plains, the North China
Plain, and under Saudi Arabia. Ancient
water is being extracted far faster than the aquifers can naturally recharge —
a one-time reckless joyride.
Walter Youngquist was no fan of aquifer mining, because it
created “food bubbles,” where crops could be raised in locations where highly
productive agriculture was otherwise impossible. In 2011, the World Bank estimated that these
temporary bubbles were feeding 175 million in India, and 130 in China. The bubbles will inevitably burst. Then what?
In the U.S., the huge Ogallala Aquifer lies beneath eight states
in the Great Plains. It now provides the
water for about 27 percent of the irrigated land in the U.S. The aquifer contains water that may be 25,000
years old. After the Second World War,
folks started using automotive engines to pump wells. Rotating motorized center pivot irrigation
systems sprayed water over large circular patches of land. Irrigation transformed marginal grassland
into a highly productive environment for ranching, and growing soybeans, corn,
and wheat.
The Ogallala is mysterious, and humankind has yet to develop
X-ray vision. Writing in 2007, Clive
Ponting reported that the aquifer could be depleted as early as 2010. More recently, experts predict it could fail
as soon as 2028. What is measurable is
that in some regions, since the 1940s, the water table has dropped more than
300 feet (90 m). Youngquist noted that
“in north Texas, some 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2) of
agricultural land has had to be abandoned as the Ogallala aquifer is totally
depleted.” Luckily, what gets pumped out
today will be replenished by nature in a mere 6,000 years, maybe. Others say hundreds of thousands of years.
And so, as topsoil is taking a beating, aquifers and surface
water are being overpumped, and population keeps zooming upward (oh-oh!). Joel
Bourne noted that agriculture guzzles most of the water used by humans. Irrigated fields have yields that are two to
three times higher than rain fed fields.
Demand for water is projected to increase 70 to 90 percent by 2050, but
water consumption today is already unsustainable. The solution is easy, all we have to do is “double
grain, meat, and biofuel production on fewer acres with fewer farmers, less
water, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts, floods, and heat waves”
(and rising energy costs). No worries!
Draining
Rivers
Irrigation is draining major rivers. For example, Erling
Hoh described the Yellow River in China, which is 3,400 miles (5,472 km)
long. Its waters have been intensively
overdrawn for irrigating cropland. In
1972, for the first time in history, the flowing river never made it to its
normal outlet in the Yellow Sea. In 1997,
lower sections of the river were dry for 227 days, reducing the harvest by an
estimated 8.5 million tons. Some
sections have been so polluted by cities and industries that the water is unfit
for both irrigation and human consumption.
Fish no longer survive in some regions.
Sandra Postel noted that a growing number of major rivers are,
for months at a time, discharging little or no water into the sea. They include the Colorado, Rio Grande,
Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Amu Darya, and Murray.
Rivers deliver both life-giving water, and death-bringing
pollution. As the volume of flow diminishes,
there is less water to dilute the crud.
The Ganges is getting sucked dry. Old fashioned irrigation, which moved river
water to fields via canals, worked for centuries, when there were fewer people,
and more forests. As demand increased,
the water level of the river dropped lower and lower, until the old canal
distribution system could no longer work.
Luckily, our hero technology came to the rescue. Tube wells were drilled, and motorized pumps
began extracting water like crazy, and the crops prospered.
Naturally, with this increased demand, underground water
tables dropped. Consequently, less
groundwater naturally flowed back into the river. So, to an increasing degree, the Ganges is
looking less like a mighty river, and more like a big mudflat. [LOOK] Breezes drifting over the mountain from the
future have the pungent aroma of food shortages. Progress!
Subsidence
Clive Ponting noted that many folks today are still able to
snatch as much water as they want, pay nothing for it, and not worry about
waste. Irrigating cropland with state of
the art, maximum efficiency technology is prohibitively expensive. It’s far more practical and affordable to
continue using highly wasteful methods.
In India and China, two-thirds of irrigation water never reaches the
plants, because of losses due to evaporation, or seepage from delivery
canals. U.S. farmers merely waste half
of their water.
Postel wrote that water tables are dropping beneath large
regions of northern China, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East, Mexico, and
the western United States. Ground water
is being pumped out faster than the aquifers are naturally replenished. When a well begins to wheeze, they keep
drilling it deeper and deeper, until it finally goes dry. Up to 10 percent of the global food harvest
is made possible by aquifer mining. This
path does not have a happy ending.
Subsidence is a common but unintended consequence of aquifer
mining. It affects locations where the
geology is not sufficiently rigid.
Underground, as the water is removed, it leaves behind an empty void
that the land sinks to fill. Aquifer
compaction can be irreversible — nature may never again be able to recharge the
aquifer. Game over.
J. R. McNeill reported that in 1990, Mexico City was using 35
times more water than it did in 1900.
The land surface subsided. On the
streets, some locations have unevenly sank up to 23 feet (7 m), which damaged
sewer pipes, streets, and buildings.
Walter Youngquist wrote that the entire San Joaquin Valley is
sinking. In some areas, the water table
has dropped up to 500 feet (152 m). Near
Mendota, the land surface has sunk more than 28 feet (8.5 m). [LOOK]
Subsidence is an issue in many places, including Osaka,
Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, Alexandria, New Orleans, Houston, Las Vegas, and southern
Arizona. Jakarta, Indonesia is the
fastest sinking major city in the world.
It gets 300 days of rain per year, and it sits on a big freshwater
aquifer, which its huge population is guzzling faster than it can recharge. Because so much of the city is paved, not
enough rain can soak into the ground to keep the aquifer full.
Around the world, farmers, industries, and cities engage in
aquifer mining. Subsidence is the shadow
of overpumping. The problem will
increase as long as irrigation and extreme overpopulation continues. While population continues growing, water
mining makes it harder for food production to keep up with growing need.
Salinization
Big Mama Nature often presents prestigious awards to honor the
great achievements of human cleverness. One
of her golden awards for the invention of irrigation is called salinization. By around 6,000 years ago, irrigation was
cleverly transforming the deserts of southern Mesopotamia into a (temporary)
utopia of highly productive fields of wheat, barley, peas, and lentils. The long and winding soap opera in this
region could fill 100 pages. Let’s boil
it down to a quickie.
Southern Mesopotamia is a flat, hot, nearly rainless desert
covered with fertile soil that has above average salt content. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through
the region. To the north, a higher and wetter
region, there is an annual rainy season.
When the rains arrive, both surging rivers move heavy loads of silt
downstream. Something odd happens
here.
Over the centuries, as silt dropped out of the water flow,
layer upon layer accumulated in the flood plains, deeper and deeper. Eventually, both rivers were travelling
through channels that were elevated above the surrounding land. Clever folks recognized the possibility that life-giving
water could be diverted from the rivers into irrigation canals, via a labor
saving magic called gravity. So they
did.
Now, all they had to do was dig miles and miles of irrigation
canals to deliver the water across the desert and start growing crops — good
healthy exercise. Unfortunately, year
after year, the rivers continued to deliver more and more silt, which took
great delight in repeatedly plugging up the tidy canal systems. Keeping the canals clear was a never ending challenge.
Big Mama Nature thinks this is hilarious. She laughs until the tears flow. Technology and progress always bites us on
the ass. It’s so much easier to simply
adapt to elegantly sustainable wild ecosystems, like the rest of the family of
life does.
Anyway, irrigation made it possible for folks to produce lots
of food, and feed lots of people, which enabled the emergence of the first
states, cities, and empires — and the endless bloody clashes between super ambitious,
testosterone powered, glory-seeking control freaks. Meanwhile, out in the fields, dissolved salt
ions were deeply involved in a project to teach the too-clever critters
important lessons about agriculture, irrigation, and unintended consequences.
Several types of mineral salts, at varying levels of
concentration, are natural components of soils and water. Even rain drops can contain traces of
dissolved salts. All irrigation water
contains some salt. Salinization is a
process in which the accumulation of salt in the soil can reach levels that affect
plant health, or even prohibit plant life.
When cropland is not well drained (as in Mesopotamia), irrigation can
make the water table rise. When this
happens, water containing dissolved salts moves upward, closer to the root zone
of the crops above.
When salty moisture migrates close to the ground surface, the
water evaporates, and the salt is left behind.
When plants are thirsty, their roots take in water, and leave the salt
behind. As salt levels intensify near
the soil surface, eventually not even weeds can survive. At the end of the road, evaporation of saline
water can leave the ground surface covered with a white layer of salt crystals,
looking a bit like fresh snow. Coroners
would issue these lands a death certificate. They remain useless to this day.
Clive
Ponting indicated that salinization can be a slow motion catastrophe that may
remain largely invisible to multiple generations. In Mesopotamia, wheat and barley were grown
in equal amounts in 3500 B.C. Barley is
more salt-tolerant than wheat. By 2500
B.C., wheat was just 15 percent of the grain grown, indicating salt problems. By 1700 B.C., wheat growing had gone
extinct. Around 2000 B.C., there were
some reports that “the earth turned white.”
At its peak, Mesopotamia maybe had a population of 1.5 million. By A.D. 1500, just 150,000 lived there.
Now, let’s fast forward to modern times, an era when folks
built lots of big dams — a subject that fascinated Marc
Reisner. Many were built in the
Colorado River basin, for flood control, hydroelectricity generation, recreational
fishing and boating, and to store water for irrigation and municipal water
systems. Historically, salinization has
been a tireless serial killer of civilizations.
In the big dam era, human cleverness achieved new levels of brilliant
incompetence. Irrigation grew
explosively.
As water in the Colorado moves downstream, it is diverted
multiple times to irrigate the land it passes on its long journey from the
Rockies to Mexico. The water is dumped
on a field, where it keeps crops on life support, dissolves salts in the soil,
and eventually finds its way back into the river. The salty water flows down to the next
irrigation project… and then the next, and the next. Along its journey, the water takes rest stops
in reservoirs, where about a tenth of it evaporates, concentrating what is left
behind. By the time it reaches trendy restaurants
in southern California, the water is so salty that it’s sometimes served with a
lemon slice.
Reisner noted that in the Grand Valley, when Colorado River
water is diverted for irrigation, it contains 200 parts per million (ppm) of
salt. When it returns to the river, it
has 6,500 ppm. On rivers like the
Colorado and Platte, the water may be used up to 18 times. Eventually, the Colorado flows across the
border into Mexico, where the water has become “liquid death.” At the end of its journey, the river used to
empty into the Gulf of California.
Today, it dries up before it can reach the finish line.
The salt problems could be reduced by installing state of the
art drip irrigation systems, in which far more water actually makes contact
with plant roots, but this option is insanely expensive. Another option is installing drainage systems
in irrigated fields, so dissolved salts can be leached out of the soil. This is also insanely expensive, and it
produces very salty dreck that should then be disposed of in a thoughtful mature
manner.
Regions of salt damaged soils are found in Africa, Asia,
Australia, and the Americas. Writing in
2015, Pooja
Shrivastava summed it up like this: “It
has been estimated that worldwide 20% of total cultivated and 33% of irrigated
agricultural lands are afflicted by high salinity. Furthermore, the salinized areas are
increasing at a rate of 10% annually for various reasons, including low
precipitation, high surface evaporation, weathering of native rocks, irrigation
with saline water, and poor cultural practices.
It has been estimated that more than 50% of the arable land would be
salinized by the year 2050.” Hmmm… Maybe we won’t be having ten billion for
dinner after all.
Siltation
On the day you squirted out of the womb, you took your first
breath, and began a fun-filled journey that will inevitably conclude with your
final breath. Likewise, the working life
of every dam is also finite. Brilliant
engineers design them to survive earthquakes, landslides, and intense floods —
and they usually do. Most will
peacefully die from a natural cause, siltation.
Rivers transport both water and silt.
When the water flows into reservoirs, it slows down, and the silt is
dropped. Year after year, the silt
accumulates, displacing space for water storage — the purpose of the dam.
The Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) is an
organization within the U.S. Department of Interior. One of their areas of concern is dam
sedimentation, and they have created an excellent document that addresses FAQs (frequently asked questions).
Every dam that doesn’t experience a catastrophic failure will
eventually fill with silt, and become a concrete waterfall — as useful at the
tits on a bull. Engineers understand
this. Typically, dam project plans are
calculated to have a sediment design life of 50 or 100 years — planned
obsolescence. So, mommy and daddy get to
enjoy the wonderful benefits from their hard earned tax dollars, and the
grandkids inherit a collection of concrete waterfalls that are obscenely
expensive to properly dispose of, and increasingly prone to failure as they deteriorate
with age.
More than 5,000 large dams in the U.S. are over 50 years old,
approaching the end of their designed lifespans. Some are already goofy bull’s tit waterfalls,
enduring monuments to shortsighted pork barrel politics — idiotic projects
demanded by slick-talking legislators to delight their donors, and enrich the
rich. The folks who get most of the
financial benefits are entrepreneurs who adore the golden benefits of
socialism, but hate government, and are hysterically allergic to taxes.
Marc Reisner wrote that President Jimmy Carter detested dam
projects because the national debt was in the stratosphere, there was
double-digit inflation, and dams made little or no economic sense. He was cursed to frequently suffer from
painful mental impulses known as principles.
“He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams
we had built. What right did we have, in
the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers? What would happen when the dams silted
up? What if the climate changed?” This didn’t win him many friends in the arid
west. He didn’t get reelected.
Anyway, the ACWI FAQs note that “proper maintenance” is required
to provide dams with eternal life. Proper
maintenance involves periodically dredging out many tons of polluted sediment,
hauling it somewhere, and disposing it in a thoughtful mature manner. Proper maintenance is massively
expensive. This begs a follow-up
FAQ: “Is reservoir sediment managed in
the USA?” Answer: “With only a few
exceptions, the answer is no.” It is
done at just two reservoirs that fill rapidly.
There is no dredging. The dam
gates are opened, and the sediment is flushed downstream, which blindsides the
riparian ecosystem. This proper
maintenance is highly destructive.
An extreme example of “proper maintenance” is the Xiaolangdi
Dam on the Yellow River in China.
Its reservoir accumulates an estimated 30 million tons of sediment each
and every year! So, every year, a team
of maintenance professionals open the base drains, and allow 30 million tons of
muck to ooze downstream. It’s much
cheaper than dredging.
In 1950, there were about 5,000 large dams in the world. Today, there are more than 45,000. Big dams are enormously expensive, and the
cost of decommissioning a hydropower dam can exceed the cost of building
it. Corporations have no interest in building
them, because the odds for making meaningful profits are slim at best. So legislators order them, and taxpayers
enjoy getting the huge bills
Of course, dams can also be very exciting. Reisner shared some thrilling stories. In the summer of 1975, typhoon Nina blasted
Asia. In the vicinity of China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of
rain, half of which fell in just six hours.
The dam collapsed, and the outflow blew out a number of smaller dams
downstream. Floods killed 171,000
people, and 11 million lost their homes.
Today, everyone in the Southwest prays several times a day that there
will not be a similar chain reaction failure on the Colorado River.
In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation was running out of
ideal sites for new dams. For maybe 40
years, Idaho farmers had begged for a dam on the Teton River. Conservatives who detested socialism were
eager to have U.S. taxpayers buy them a dam, despite the fact that the costs
would far exceed the expected benefits.
This was earthquake country, and the proposed site had highly porous
bedrock, an unbelievably stupid place to build a dam. It was OK’d in 1973, and built in 1976. The Teton Dam did a
spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.
The reckless and idiotic impulses that conjured the Teton Dam
into existence, and non-existence, strongly resemble the impulses that have
brought the twenty-first century global economy into existence. It too was built on a dodgy foundation, and
is now springing more and more leaks.
Damn Dams
Oh-oh! I feel a rant
coming on. What right did we have to
build the dams? Who is going to pay to remove
the ever growing number of useless concrete waterfalls? Where are we supposed to put millions of tons
of polluted silt where it will not poison life?
The dam building binge was an atrocious insult to younger generations of
all species. Why are we promoting sprawling
cities in bone dry blast furnace climates, regions that import most of their
food, and depend for survival on snowmelt water from faraway places? Perpetual growth is not the purpose of life. It isn’t even fun.
In my perception of reality, salmon lives matter. Eel lives matter. Sturgeon lives matter. Vast regions of land are now used to grow corn
and soybeans to feed cattle who are far happier eating the natural food they evolved
to enjoy, grass. Is the Extinction
Rebellion complaining that the climate is being destroyed by salmon farts and
belches? Salmon need no ranchers or
herders. They feed themselves. They don’t overgraze public lands, or rubbish
riparian areas. They don’t fill huge
sewage lagoons. They don’t need to be
treated with antibiotics or pesticides.
They are sacred wild and free beings, not enslaved feedlot
meat machines. Their flesh is highly
nutritious, and organic. When they
return to the place of their origin to spawn and die, they leave behind enormous
amounts of precious nutrients from the sea, not synthetic fertilizers from chemical
plants. Salmon carcasses enrich
ecosystems, rather than running off into waterways, stimulating algal blooms,
and creating sprawling oxygen-free dead zones where nothing can live. Salmon rock!
Dams don’t. Long live the salmon!
There! I feel better
now. Sorry!
3 comments:
Jacques Leslie's immortal words:
In the end, of course, nature will reassert itself. Some dams will crumble into the basins from which they rose, while others may still be intact but no longer storing water, which instead runs over or through or around them. They will be relics of the 20th century – reminders of an ancient time when humans believed they could conquer nature and found themselves conquered instead.
Hey Amarnath! I was worrying about you. Good to hear from you!
The news lately is coming from the Yangtze River, where floods are tremendous, and the biggest dam in the world, the Three Gorges, is getting strained. The bureaucrats assure the world that the dam is invincible. We’ll see.
In my perception of reality, salmon lives matter. Eel lives matter. Sturgeon lives matter.
The bears agree with this
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