An Account of Human Costs: The reservoirs that provide water to New York City
placesjournal.org
placesjournal.org
This is bogus: do neither.
The cities should have accepted Nature's limits on the population of that land. There is only so much water and therefore there can only be so many people. To put it simply: "sorry, New York is full. We cannot issue you a building permit or allow you to make a water/sewer connection." Bolinas, CA does this.
But oh, no! We the great and mighty Cities Of Humanity know better than Nature. We must not accept her limits. And so they grow without control, and then when Fire or Cholera exposes their overleveraged water account they fall back on Too Big To Fail. Sorry farmers, we know better, your land is ours now. We're Urbanists, we know what's best for you.
If you're interested in these issues, consider reading Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's long and scholarly and dry (heh) but it will change your perspective on the limits of Nature. Perhaps you'll move somewhere with 100 inches of rainfall per year, like I did.
Every city must import food. By that argument, all cities exceed the biological carrying capacity of its land and therefore shouldn't exist.
Many nations also have a greater population than their capacity to grow food (e.g. UK, Germany). Should we forcefully remove half their population?
Anyway, if you accept that cities can exist and can import goods, why is water somehow the exception?
> The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sorrow, anger. That land might have been in their families for generations, might have been the family’s sole support, might have been the only home they’d ever known. The city decreed and mobilized and condemned properties for seizure without asking residents’ permission; found all sorts of legal subterfuges for denying the value of their fields and homesteads as established by expert witnesses; lowballed every estimate; treated them with distant contempt. Since the politicians and commissioners were not running for office upstate, they felt no need to package their enterprise as a humanitarian mission; they spoke in numbers and legal precedents.
Do you think this is acceptable conduct if it was in the service of procuring food for city people, or people in a country that was a net importer of food?
But our civilisation does require large-scale infrastructure. Dams, railways, airports, highways. I doubt any of these have ever been built without compulsory purchase of land.
In fact, I think the legislation needed to do this was first designed for building canals. And it was controversial because it obviously clashed with property rights, which in the 18th C were pretty absolute. But if each guy who owns 5 acres right at a critical spot can hold the whole 100-mile project hostage, then it can never be built.
Growing food just doesn't have the same demand. It is completely routine to farm two patches of land separated by someone else's house, no big deal.
The point of the article is to question whether "our civilization" is worth treating people this way, or whether it would be better to craft a different civilization that treated people better.
You also seem to be unaware of the difference in scale. The average American uses between 500kg and 1000kg of water per day. The weight (and volume) of food they eat isn't even in the same ballpark. There is almost a 100x difference here.
... which is why the growing is done near the water source and fertile soil.
If the soil and water aren't in the same place you move the water, because the soil is even more massive and volumous.
I think you've missed the point of this thread. It isn't about what we do or don't do, but about where we do it.
Upstate New York, along with most of the country, used to be wilderness, sometimes huge forests, and is now farms.
Most farms only exist because they are subsidized. It's a welfare program. Economically and environmentally it makes no sense, farms in upstate New York or Wyoming, when food grows so much better in Illinois and California.
Another good book: An Indigenous People's History of the United States. There were people everywhere when colonists arrived, it isn't even accurate to really call it wilderness.
Anyway, the celebration of the farmer is preposterous, the best thing that could happen to farming is if fewer people farmed, because prices would rise.
But how much water is consumed by the farming that remains in NY? I never had the impression any of it was irrigated, but haven't tried to look up numbers. Farming in CA is of course a wildly different story. Left without water it's a desert, not a forest.
Nonetheless for some geographic reason, sure, it makes sense to send water there to grow things. The politics of it all are, if capitalism didn't deliver on efficiency in things that bring justice, like providing everyone with good food and shelter better than alternative governments, nobody would tolerate redirecting huge amounts of water to deserts in California or cities on Manhattan island.
Without capitalism, there would be something intrinsically valuable to pastoral, moneyless living, like the kind of farming people were doing when these reservoirs were built.
It's just ironic that, people have been living in the Americas doing just that, for at least millennia, and the same exact 1800s people and their descendants who felt they were entitled to do what they wanted with their upstate New York land, however inefficiently, will do nothing to remedy the same exact kind of losses for people who were there before them. Which is to say, just for the people who used to live on precolonized land, the "human costs" were not resolved by a free press, or laws, or money, it was resolved by simply ceasing to "account" for those costs.
Although, like I said, today you can go farm for subsidies if you wanted to, which is as good as a government-sponsored remedy will get, turning $1 tax into $0.10 of low cost of living and $0.90 in agricultural business income domiciled in... New York City.
San Francisco basically does this and everyone and his brother here complains about all the problems it brings.
When you say "stop no more water" land values plunge, and fast.
"No more growth" scares people like nothing else. It does NOT cause prices to rise.
In both cities, people did not moved in just because they were bored one Sunday. They move in, because they follow industries.
What? Why?
If New York were population limited, the permits would be worth their weight in gold. Any process put in place to ration them would be worth hiring lawyers and lobbyists and consultants to influence.
Like New York?
Humans burning everything they can get their hands on is not.