[Mb-civic] Getting Resourceful About Resources - Bill McKibben - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

Getting Resourceful About Resources
By Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author, whose most recent book is 
titled "Wandering Home."

Sunday, January 1, 2006; B02

One question naturally arises when you hear that 67 million more people 
are on the way: Do we have enough to go around? Last year raised worries 
about "peak oil," the notion that the glass of crude may be half empty, 
bringing with it higher prices, increased jousting with countries like 
China, maybe even threats to the supremacy of the sprawled-out American 
suburb. Now get ready for peak water, and even peak food.

America is, on average, a damp nation -- the lower 48 states see 4,200 
billion gallons of rainfall every day. But averages deceive; water is in 
short supply in the Southwest, where growth is fastest and rivers are 
already over-tapped. Even back East, we use so much water that supplies 
can run short. The Ipswich River near Boston now "runs dry about every 
other year or so," according to Sandra Postel, director of the Global 
Water Policy Project. "Why? Heavy pumping of groundwater for irrigation 
of big green lawns." In drought years like 1999 or 2003, Maryland, 
Virginia and the District have begun to fight over the Potomac -- on hot 
summer days combining to suck up 85 percent of the river's flow.

Just as gasoline shortfalls have led to new interest in hybrid cars, 
aggressive conservation measures could alleviate some of the water 
deficit -- Boston already uses 31 percent less water now than it did in 
the 1980s. And in the West, where irrigation uses up 80 percent of water 
supplies, reducing subsidies that keep water prices artificially low 
would help. But Postel cautions that "water savings on farms will simply 
go to fill urban swimming pools" unless governments establish strict 
allocation policies designed to make sure that streams and wetlands get 
the water they need.

Talk of irrigation raises the question of food. To judge by simply 
looking at American waistlines, we have more than enough -- and the 
fertile midsection of the country means we're in better shape than the 
rest of the world to keep growing our dinner. But overall food 
production around the world has begun to sputter; after fast growth in 
the decades following World War II, says Lester Brown of the Earth 
Policy Institute, the last 10 years have seen a steady erosion in the 
amount of grain grown per capita. And since wheat and rice and corn are 
all world markets, the need for imports elsewhere could drive up the 
cost of food here at home. The Chinese, in particular, are constantly 
converting farmland to factory sites (even as they learn to eat more 
meat), and they have plenty of American cash stored up to pay for any 
shortfall. But if they do so, the first casualties will be the world's 
really poor nations, already reeling from increases in the price of fuel.

All these fairly grim projections may, in fact, be optimistic. They 
assume a physical world that operates in the future the way it has in 
the past. But, as this year's outlandish hurricane season hinted, that 
may be a sucker's bet. Global warming will almost certainly stress water 
supplies in dramatic ways: In the western mountains, for instance, where 
the snowpack serves as a natural reservoir for the winter's 
precipitation, more rain and earlier melt will mean less storage. The 
same rise in temperatures will almost certainly make farming harder. 
Earlier snowmelt means more parched fields by midsummer -- and when the 
temperature rises into the mid-90s for long stretches, crops like corn 
begin to have trouble fertilizing. The summer of 1988 was the warmest 
yet across America's grain belt, and yields dropped as much as a third.

So far we've always innovated our way to plenty, and we may again. The 
high-tech gurus talk about spreading Israeli drip-irrigation techniques, 
for instance. But there's no question that by 2030, limits will be 
pinching much more tightly. As we're warned at the bottom of all the 
mutual fund ads, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/31/AR2005123100307.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060101/c610e2af/attachment.htm