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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Why the Great Plains Are Dying
  • Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:19:32 -0600


Based on the ideas and experience of others more qualified, I've been
pushing cutting edge soil and water (and fossil fuel) conserving practices
that are radical and effective. I believe there's no future without radical
change in the way we grow and market our food.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
-----------------------------------------

http://hnn.us/articles/37781.html
Why the Great Plains Are Dying
By Steven Conn

Mr. Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio State
University and a writer for the History News Service.

Much of the western United States has been experiencing a severe drought
for
nearly a decade, and the future only looks drier. One of the conclusions of

the new United Nations study on global climate change is that wet places on

the planet will probably get wetter and dry places, like much of the
American West, will become even more parched. John Wesley Powell is rolling

over in his grave.

Powell isn't a household name any more, but in the era after the Civil War
he was among the most prominent American scientists and explorers. His
expedition down the Colorado River became the stuff of heroic legend in the

late 19th century.

But Powell was not simply an adventurer. Between 1881 and 1894 Powell
directed the United States Geologic Survey. Based on his research he
concluded that there were really two Americas, one wet and one dry, divided

almost exactly down the middle, roughly at the 100th meridian. That
unalterable fact of the climate, Powell warned, would force limits on the
way Americans settled the West.

Americans don't like to be told that there are limits. The very idea rubs
us
the wrong way and it did in Powell's day as well. Yet then as now
scientists
were telling us that we faced real environmental constraints. Then as now
the question was whether we were prepared to face those limits, restrain
our
use of resources, and re-imagine our national aspirations so that they were

more environmentally sustainable. Powell's career serves as a reminder of
what it ultimately costs if we stick our heads in the sand.

In 1878 Powell wrote and submitted to Congress his Report on the Arid Lands

of the United States. It was a blockbuster as scientific reports go. Powell

told Congress that if the West was going to be settled at all, the region
would require an extensive plan for water management and allocation.

It was not what Congress wanted to hear, any more than Congress wants to
hear that message today, especially not the expansion-minded politicians
from the West who rashly predicted that their states would some day be home

to as any as 180 million Americans. Rep. Thomas Patterson of Colorado
denounced Powell as "a charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs of
which he has no proper conception." The bill to reconfigure the use of
public land in the West that resulted from Powell's report died a slow
procedural death.

Events proved Powell right, of course, though being right has never been a
path to political success in America. Americans have a long and rich
tradition of shooting the messengers bearing bad news. Drought hit the arid

lands in the 1880s, creating the first large-scale farm crisis in the
nation's history. "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted," so the
expression went at the time.

The rains stopped again in the 1930s and created the environmental disaster

of the Dust Bowl. Look at a map of the areas most devastated by the drought

and wind of the "dirty '30s" and you'll notice they hug that 100th
meridian -- exactly the region that Powell worried would be under-watered
and over-farmed.

After World War II, farmers on the plains dealt with the natural cycles of
rain and drought by pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer, a vast
underground lake, to irrigate their fields. It's the agricultural
equivalent of paying your mortgage with a credit card -- the bank catches
up
with you eventually. In this case the water table under the Great Plains is

now dropping dramatically, as much as five feet in a single year, and to
what end? The plains are being depopulated; the nation's poorest county is
now in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, suburban regions in the west continue to sprawl without
restraint. It makes even less sense to water lawns and golf courses in the
Las Vegas desert than it does to farm intensively on the plains. Yet they
continue to sprout up, surreal, unnatural green dots on a tan and tawny
landscape.

In the West, the region Powell spent a lifetime studying, no quantity of
boosterism, or political grandstanding or individual will can create more
water where there isn't enough. Denying a problem doesn't make it go away.
Oklahoma's Sen. James Inhofe, who still insists in 2007 that climate change

is a "hoax," is simply the successor to Rep. Patterson in
1878.

Climate change is no more a hoax now than Powell was a charlatan. We have
paid a grievous environmental price for our failure to take Powell's
warnings about water seriously. Perhaps we can learn from that failure and
face the challenges posed by climate change by pulling our heads out of the

sand.






  • [Livingontheland] Why the Great Plains Are Dying, TradingPostPaul, 06/12/2007

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