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Water
Sept 12, 2013 21:49:58 GMT -5
Post by steev on Sept 12, 2013 21:49:58 GMT -5
Today on NPR there was a presentation about ground water around Paso Robles, California. I lived there a few years, as a kid; it was all cattle-range then, and a small backwater (although Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio spent the first night of their honeymoon there) between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The point of the program was that in the last 16 years, the aquifer there has dropped 70'. It is only recharged by rain, of which it received 3" last year, a drought year, but it is never an area of ample rain. Increased pumping is driven by migration from LA (largely retirees) and vineyards (perhaps you've seen the movie "Sideways", which is set in that area). It's a prime example of "water mining", where the water is pumped to irrigate the grapes, which are converted to wine, which is shipped out of the area, largely exported. Those with deep pockets can drill deeper wells; those without can suck hind tit.
Today, in the Chronicle, there was an article about the declining aquifer in the Central Valley, also citing increased population and the headlong planting of vineyards and orchards (I've noted huge acreages of these newly established the last couple of years, on my way to the farm); the article made a very telling point: if a farmer is growing row-crops and his water supply is reduced, as in drought years, he can plant less acreage, but if he's invested in perennials, like vines and trees, he must have the water they require, or lose his investment, though it means over-pumping. Again, both the vines and the trees (mostly nuts) produce commodities that can be exported. Investment in California agricultural land by foreign interests that have no real interest in the local environment, ecosystem, or economy, is rampant. Small towns are seeing their water systems "privatized" mostly for replacement of antiquated infrastructure.
When I lived in El Salvador, rather little of the produce available in the markets was grown there (mostly brought from Guatemala; cabbage,lots of cauliflower, I never quite understood that, cauliflower?); the agricultural land was largely owned by a few rich concerns (families) and used to grow commodities for export: coffee and sugar. Are we seeing this model gaining ascendency here? Are we ready to be a third-world peasantry?
If I were a cynical man, I would suppose that these developments are just those with lots of money buying the resources (land and water) to produce commodities they can globalize to their profit, which they can invest in legislators who will promote their interests, reducing their responsibilities to the ecosystems from which they extract their riches. Oh, wait...I AM a cynical man, and I think they're self-serving bastards.
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 11:42:39 GMT -5
Post by dustdevil on Sept 13, 2013 11:42:39 GMT -5
Hey Steve...with your huge population in CA and your frequent drought, things look rather dire for the future. Is there a plan B?
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 12:10:28 GMT -5
Post by steev on Sept 13, 2013 12:10:28 GMT -5
There are various plans for desalinization plants, which of course need huge energy input and salt disposal (tends to produce marine dead zones).
There has been a reservoir project in the works the past 30 years. There's a wide, shallow valley that I drive through to my farm. The state wants to dam it off, pump water uphill in Winter from the Sacramento River (I think) to fill it, and it'll all be good because when the water is released in Summer for irrigation and all, it can generate electricity. This sounds like a net loss of energy to me; that wide, shallow valley will lose a lot of water to evaporation and seepage; it will add an hour to my drive, getting around that lake.
Rather dire, indeed.
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 15:14:47 GMT -5
Post by 12540dumont on Sept 13, 2013 15:14:47 GMT -5
Plan B - Move... far far away.
Steev's on Plan T (Way past Plan B).
Basically, if you don't have water tanks and rainwater collection, your land paid for, and solar to run the pumps, you won't be farming in California much longer.
My neighbor has 4 acres of grass which he waters every other day. He pays less for his water than I do as a small farm and I'm only farming 1-2 acres. Because we all know you can't eat grass. Therefore, it is important to keep people growing it.
Wake up, drought is coming to a small planet near you.
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 16:32:17 GMT -5
Post by synergy on Sept 13, 2013 16:32:17 GMT -5
Funny I love reading a Robert Rodale book over and over, I think it truly is what I believe in as much as others believe their bible , it is called Our Next Frontier and everything we are growing concerned about , he was concerned about back in the 1970's . Part I was rereading last night was about competition for water and governments taking more and more control of all groundwater they can and also surprisingly to me the idea of competition for sunlight and that being controled/taxed . Anyways, your U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a lengthy report on the future state of agriculture and California was predicted to lose 70% of its present growing capacity by about 2040 due to lack of water . Even residing in coastal BC, which is home of rainforest I am growing wary, another close municipality is losing capacity of its aquifer and agriculture will no longer be allowed to irrigate off wells as of 2016 .
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 17:09:36 GMT -5
Post by nathanp on Sept 13, 2013 17:09:36 GMT -5
This is NOT a problem unique to the Western US (or Canada). The east is going to see these things increasingly as well. This book is an excellent portrayal of the issues we are and will be facing shortly. Mainly it is about the situation in Florida, but the analysis portends dread for the entire US due to what you are describing. www.amazon.com/Mirage-Florida-Vanishing-Water-Eastern/dp/0472033034
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Water
Sept 13, 2013 22:55:31 GMT -5
Post by steev on Sept 13, 2013 22:55:31 GMT -5
Here in California, "wine is for drinking; water is for fighting over", it's been that way at least the last 100 years. Before levee projects, dams, and canals, NorCal was a seasonal marshland (fantastic waterfowl flyway; my great-grandfather, out near Lodi, would shoot ducks and such to fill his Model T Ford and drive them to San Francisco for sale to hotels and restaurants) and SoCal was semi-desert, at best. Today, they aquaduct NorCal water to SoCal to grow lettuce year-round. We fight bitterly over how to allocate the water supply: salmon in the NorCal rivers or produce in the SoCal deserts. It's kind of like buying a cheap mom-and-pop grocery store in a blighted area and being pissed off when you are opposed in trying to get an off-sale liquor license, so you can make some real money.
It's only going to get worse; the semi-arid California climate is getting drier, due to global climate change. The Big Ag interests are less interested in local conditions every year. One "bright?" spot is that most of the new houses they're slapping up for the burgeoning population are such crap that they'll barely outlast a 30-year mortgage, so the prime farmland they're built on may be easily returned to productive use, in the event that our stupidity brings about societal/population crash.
Did I mention the Monteray Shale, which underlies the whole Great Central Valley (it's what has been buckled up by the pressure of the rising Coast Range to form the hills to the East of my farm); it's being promoted as the greatest petroleum/natural gas reservoir ever. Whoopee! Think of the jobs! (Think quietly of the money to be made). Sure, it calls for fracking/acidifying, but think of the jobs (money!)! Sure, it uses/pollutes lots of water, but there's water in California; there are still rivers that trickle unused into the sea; think of the jobs (money)!
I admit to having a bad attitude; I always did; I hope I always do. Human stupidity is destroying our infrastructure, our quality of life, and our life-support system. Do you like your kids? Let's let Big Ag and Big OIL suck the life out them.
All that NorCal water going to irrigate SoCal, can I mention salinization? You pour water where it doesn't flow away, but tends to dry/evaporate leaving its dissolved salts which poison the soil as they build up. Much of Iraq was agriculturally destroyed this way a couple thousand years ago; very productive until water brought from the mountains salted up the arid plains. Well, it was doubtless a very profitable project, that irrigation system, until it crashed. What could we learn from the mistakes of those ignorant, primitive people? Probably not much, we being so technologically advanced and all.
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Water
Oct 31, 2013 21:28:46 GMT -5
Post by steev on Oct 31, 2013 21:28:46 GMT -5
I heard another shoe drop in California's water/ row-crop/ nut-grape quandary: those tree-nuts can be totally mechanized, so very few messy laborers needed.
We've seen this movie before.
Jethro Tull (not the band) was an aristocratic musician in early 18th century London who inherited a country estate. He despised the rural bumpkins needed to work the land so much that he invented a seeder (from parts of an old organ), to start replacing them, thus starting the agricultural revolution that led to unneeded peasants being driven off the land into the cities, where they became an impoverished underclass, ripe for "transport" as colonists and impressment as cannon-fodder, for the Glory of Empire. Lots of folks got "settled" in North America, Australia, and New Zealand during that period. The alternatives tended to be hanging or transport (indentured servitude).
This is not to say that I resent that some of my ancestors got here by coercion, as I feel that I have benefited greatly by their having come here, but that I resent an "aristocracy" treating the less-privileged as a commodity, to be used for their purposes no less than soybeans or pork-bellies.
The fact that global climate change, coupled with population growth, is going to drive competition for diminishing resources, must lead us to serious consideration as to whether our current socio-political constructs are self-destructive (they sure seem destructive to other species, our non-voting cousins) must be addressed, PDQ!
Lest this seem too far off the purpose of this forum, I would point out that I'm addressing the question of whether the rich should rule agriculture for their continued enrichment, or whether agriculture should serve the needs of the mass of humanity. What if people are freed from the spectre of hunger and prosperous enough to educate their children (even the girls!)? Might they breed less? We might get a grip on our current rush to over-population. What a concept! What if we returned to human-driven agriculture, rather than petroleum-based farming? What if people learned that physical labor is a valuable part of life, not proof of social inadequacy, that working to grow food might be better than paying for gym-time, pumping iron to produce nothing but sweat or running on a treadmill, like gerbils?
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Water
Nov 1, 2013 4:39:47 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Nov 1, 2013 4:39:47 GMT -5
Wendell on water, corporations, farming. So elegant, so simple, so true.
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Water
Nov 1, 2013 11:12:26 GMT -5
Post by davida on Nov 1, 2013 11:12:26 GMT -5
Thanks for sharing Steev and great video MikeH. Wendell Berry is a fantastic spokesman for the land and the Christian faith.
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Water
Nov 1, 2013 17:39:49 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Nov 1, 2013 17:39:49 GMT -5
This is the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle. Irrigation makes it green. If you put the coordinates in the picture into Google map and zoom in, a dead tree would have trouble surviving outside the green rings. Wendell's a pacifist but it's clear that he's being pushed to civil disobedience. And he didn't seem all that disturbed by it either. Scientists and businessmen are telling us to revolt: Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary). It would seem that events, both weather and economic, are taking us past the point of petitions and 350.org demonstrations into something more fundamental. It's not new - Ghandi did it, MLK did it and it worked.
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Water
Nov 1, 2013 19:50:23 GMT -5
Post by steev on Nov 1, 2013 19:50:23 GMT -5
I didn't know there was reason to separate "pacifist" from "civil disobedience"; perhaps you were thinking "passivist".
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Water
Nov 2, 2013 1:59:39 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Nov 2, 2013 1:59:39 GMT -5
He's anything but passive but he's been a non-confrontational pacifist, a wordsmith. His uninvited visit to the Kentucky governor's office was confrontational pacifism, civil disobedience of the peaceful kind.
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Water
Nov 3, 2013 22:48:30 GMT -5
Post by steev on Nov 3, 2013 22:48:30 GMT -5
Yes; if one is to be a pacifist, but engaged, one can't be a passivist; one must act, not merely react nor suffer. Actually. I've never read any of his works, but watching that video, I was struck by how he speaks my mind. I don't mean to puff up myself, but this stuff is just common sense; quite obvious unless one is blinded by dreams of short-term personal gain.
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Water
Nov 4, 2013 4:43:28 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Nov 4, 2013 4:43:28 GMT -5
It's not as common sense and quite obvious as it seems. When I hear and read him, my first reaction is "yes, of course, exactly, that makes sense, that's obvious". My second reaction is "why didn't I think that?". There's a deep, resonating profoundness in his simple, obvious, straight forward common sense. He and Vandana Shiva seem to be cut from the same wordsmith cloth.
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