The Disappearing Colorado River
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
http://www.inventionandtech.com/content/lake-mistake-0 - Click the printer friendly link for a one-page view - and I wish this had the pictures that were in the original print version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_Sa...
The Slab City folks?
Growing food in a desert may seem nutty, but there are advantages. Frost, hail, and damaging rainstorms are far less common than they are in other parts of the country, and the growing season is year-round, as are the jobs. Last year, Brawley received a little over half its average annual rainfall on a single stormy day, August 21st, and other than that got just the odd sprinkle. Total reliance on irrigation is a drawback in one way, because the water has to come from somewhere, but the absence of rain is what makes precise planning possible: farmers in the Midwest don’t know to the day when they will harvest the corn they hope to plant next month (weather permitting).
As well - the fact that conservation, can actually be negative - this article is full of all sorts of nuance you can get when you let a writer actually spend time, and do the research:
Cox drove me past a field in which one of his employees was planting lettuce, and parked by another ditch. “This is some of our citrus, here,” he said. “It’s grapefruit. It’s been flood-irrigated in the past, but we’re switching it all to micro-sprinkler.” Doing that will reduce Cox’s water need, but it will also have the perverse efficiency effect that Bradley Udall described, by turning a non-consumptive use (irrigation runoff) into a consumptive one (more grapefruit). That’s an especially complicated issue in the Imperial Valley, because runoff from farms like Cox’s is the only source of water, other than modest amounts of rainfall and mountain runoff, for the Salton Sea, an immense but shrinking and increasingly threatened lake at the northern end of the valley.
If leisurely reading is too much of a strain, might I suggest the following?:
The article author's comment about driving the Colorado reminded me of the filmmaker riding a paddleboard all the way to Mexico on the river.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-twl/...
http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Desert-Novel-Gary-Hansen/dp/097935...
and even harder to get rid of the waste brine
Desalination is an activity well suited to an intermittent power source. Need more water? Just build another plant and a few more square miles of solar cells.
It might be expensive, but it would certainly be a lot more useful than Governor Moonbeam's high speed train from nowhere to nowhere.
Pumping massive amounts of seawater means subjecting tremendous amounts of sealife (macroscopic and microscopic) to trauma. As one example.
Your idea of quality of life will need to be compatible with the carrying capacity of the physical world.
In conventional terms, though, no. You cannot expect to have 7+ billion people to eat as much beef as the average American on a daily basis for any meaningful length of time without causing severe environmental damage.
Maybe the 1 billion at the top of the global economy can, but if this comes at the cost of having the 1 billion at the bottom starve, not because actual lack of food, but because they get priced out of the market by the cattle... I don't see it as an overpopulation problem, but a wealth distribution problem.
Given that you are aware of that, it makes even less sense to pretend that 1 billion people can keep eating the amounts of meat that are currently considered "normal" in the US.
Some people can eat that much, or even more. Those people probably live in an environment where the land cannot produce that much vegetable calories that are eatable by humans, but do produce the low grade, cellulose rich stuff that was typically used to sustain cattle.
In different geographies, where grain can be grown in big quantities, people would be better off eating the grain rather than feeding the grain to animals and then eating the animals. Meat can still be raised in that environment, as a complement, but probably not in the amounts we have gotten used to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT
Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of P= Population, A= Affluence, T= Technology. This describes how growing population, affluence, and technology contribute toward our environmental impact.
Domestic food production is rising much faster than population is, causing rising exports. Imports are going up as well, due to increased appetite for variance in our diets.
You must've missed the memo. What's going to be the big problem in the medium term is de-population, not overpopulation. We're going to find our workforce resembling Japan's in 30 or so years unless we overcome our political resistance to immigration. We should be begging Mexico to send their best and brightest over here.
Japan is way over-populated. There is a myth that they face some sort of crisis as they deliberately pursue policies that bring population to sustainable levels. This is actually mostly immigration lobbyists in the west shrieking. Japan is being sensible and will be fine. Certain elements hate the Japanese example.
Trailed by Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan.
By population density, it's lower, but by total resource consumption intensity, overall impacts of the U.S. are hugely outsized.
With ten minutes' googling, I confirmed my initial suspicion of "bullshit". Several low-content pieces on alternet, grist, etc. with that exact "poised" phrase, from 2005, 2009, 2011, etc. Some cite "data from the US Department of Agriculture", but none actually link to this purported data. What political or philosophical position commits one to such opposition to reality?