Yup. If the water can't come up from the ground, it has to be drawn from a river or a lake. It's quite an experience to visit Santa Fe and be shown the mighty Rio Grande branch there. There's a nice wide deep ditch where a river used to be, with a trickle of water moistening the bottom. Old graceful bridges cross the "river", or you can just walk across if you don't mid the mosquitoes and mud. The whole river is sucked out by upstream folks. I've seen dry creek beds before but this was a sight. The Aral sea in Russia- we're talking a freaking huge lake- has shrunk by 75% in this century, mostly as the water was piped out to cities and farms. There are not-so-old fishing villages miles from the latest shore, and dry cracked plains of mud with boat hulls embedded in them. This stuff is real, but impacts so few Americans that it's still off the radar to most. Good times ahead!
In many places, fresh water doesn't come from runoff, it gets pumped up out of aquifers in wells. Wasting water in such places (most of the midwest US for instance) means pumping the water out faster than it can percolate back down. Unfortunately, our cities and agriculture can rapidly suck out an aquifer which took hundreds of thousands of years to collect, and which will take that long to refill. In the next few decades, we're all going to get a harsh lesson in water management as we watch a lot of land west of the Mississippi dry out. I understand how it can be hard to see the problem when you think of it as a simple rain-drink-flush-evaporate-rain cycle, but that only holds true for areas overserved with runoff water that aren't in danger of overuse upstream (or of screwing people downstream). I'm in Philly; we take crappy polluted water from the end of a river, clean it, drink it and flush it into the last part of the river where it runs into the sea. Nobody's drying us out, we're not drying anyone else out. Very different than Montana, which is in a world of doodoo. Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.
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Good point, libertarian-man. We'll need some kind of cop to protect those existing broadcasters though. How about the FCC?
Yup. If the water can't come up from the ground, it has to be drawn from a river or a lake. It's quite an experience to visit Santa Fe and be shown the mighty Rio Grande branch there. There's a nice wide deep ditch where a river used to be, with a trickle of water moistening the bottom. Old graceful bridges cross the "river", or you can just walk across if you don't mid the mosquitoes and mud. The whole river is sucked out by upstream folks. I've seen dry creek beds before but this was a sight.
The Aral sea in Russia- we're talking a freaking huge lake- has shrunk by 75% in this century, mostly as the water was piped out to cities and farms. There are not-so-old fishing villages miles from the latest shore, and dry cracked plains of mud with boat hulls embedded in them.
This stuff is real, but impacts so few Americans that it's still off the radar to most. Good times ahead!
In many places, fresh water doesn't come from runoff, it gets pumped up out of aquifers in wells. Wasting water in such places (most of the midwest US for instance) means pumping the water out faster than it can percolate back down. Unfortunately, our cities and agriculture can rapidly suck out an aquifer which took hundreds of thousands of years to collect, and which will take that long to refill. In the next few decades, we're all going to get a harsh lesson in water management as we watch a lot of land west of the Mississippi dry out.
I understand how it can be hard to see the problem when you think of it as a simple rain-drink-flush-evaporate-rain cycle, but that only holds true for areas overserved with runoff water that aren't in danger of overuse upstream (or of screwing people downstream).
I'm in Philly; we take crappy polluted water from the end of a river, clean it, drink it and flush it into the last part of the river where it runs into the sea. Nobody's drying us out, we're not drying anyone else out. Very different than Montana, which is in a world of doodoo. Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.
"Consider Phlebas" was the first Culture novel, and is as good a place to start as any.
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