Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Very good. Odd I was just reading that website when your post came thru.
I'm in the Southwest, 4 Corners. Nearby Albuquerque has got 3 1/2 " of rain=
 all year. Right now we're over 1ft snow & still blowing.

http://www.countercurrents.org/debuys051211.htm

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 12/5/2011 at 10:01 AM Doug Willhite wrote:

>Published Dec 4 2011 by TomDispatch.com
>The Parching of the West
>by William deBuys
>The Age of Thirst in the American West
>
>Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the
>History of Civilization
>
>Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust,
>and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from
>Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire
>ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New
>Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history
>(3,697,000 acres).
>
>The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was
>the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas,
>and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also
>resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded
>for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the
>hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
>
>Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented
>temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward
>unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a
>new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F
>or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)
>
>And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest
>or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and
>grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which
>may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of
>civilization.  No kidding.
>
>If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not
>yet nigh.
>
>In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the
>news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered.  Since
>January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead,
>backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas,
>has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to
>watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California.  And the
>near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge
>to the Southwest’s water reserves.
>
>The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or
>part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of
>them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego,
>Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the
>United States and Mexico.
>
>Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water
>utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days.
>“We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we
>had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself
>we’d never do that again.”
>
>In 2000, the lake began to fall -- like a boulder off a cliff,
>bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a
>staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage
>that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then
>-- and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering -- last
>winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
>
>The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous
>relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-
>Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and
>promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little.
>Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as
>usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.
>
>So don’t be fooled.  One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its
>downward plunge.  That’s a certainty, the experts tell us.  And
>here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in
>the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future
>are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really
>are entering a new age.
>
>And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good
>job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower
>Basin of the Colorado River -- California, Arizona, and Nevada --
>have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure
>from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-
>term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful
>reckoning for the Lower Basin states.  And even worse is surely on
>the way.
>
>Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and
>West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.
>
>The Age of Thirst: Act I
>
>The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River
>Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water equally between the
>Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre-
>feet, also known by its acronym "maf." (An acre-foot suffices to
>support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the
>architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet
>historical period, assumed the river’s average annual flow to be
>about 17 maf per year.  Based on reconstructions that now stretch
>back more than 1,000 years, the river’s long-term average is closer
>to 14.7 maf.  Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per
>year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the
>math doesn’t favor a water-guzzling society.
>
>Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their
>allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting
>their account by up to 1.3 maf annually.  At this rate, even under
>unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually
>drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the
>next few years.  And then things will get dicier because California,
>the water behemoth of the West, won’t have to absorb any of those
>cutbacks.
>
>Here’s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win
>Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the
>Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water
>to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado
>River water rights to California’s.  In that way, the $4 billion, 336-
>mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The
>state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback
>situation, but California’s as well.
>
>Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions,
>could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California
>continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the
>edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset
>a lot of Arizonans.
>
>Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the
>coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead.
>
>The Age of Thirst: Act II
>
>While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment
>for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate
>change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4ºC (7.2ºF)
>increase in mean temperature by century’s end, and events seem to be
>outpacing the predictions.
>
>We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which
>accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and
>record-setting temperatures -- and it’s now clear that we’re just
>getting started.
>
>The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will
>get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry
>is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words,
>there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s
>cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-
>century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.
>
>Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in
>California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of
>Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about
>2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of
>the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would
>mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water
>heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”
>
>If -- perhaps “when” is the more appropriate word -- that happens,
>California’s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los
>Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the
>Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central
>Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting
>the Colorado River’s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also
>be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
>
>The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California’s
>Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water
>planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which
>feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios
>were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California
>Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California
>possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the
>greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.
>
>Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake
>Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling
>under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close
>to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will
>drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas.
>
>Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will
>concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke
>among those who chronicle Sin City’s improbable history, is that the
>hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from
>Lake Mead’s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti-
>depressants. They’ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from
>their tap water.
>
>And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy.
>
>The Age of Thirst: Act III
>
>Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical
>patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don’t apply to
>the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to
>test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of
>environmental history.
>
>Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people
>who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long
>spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more
>severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have
>occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the
>Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to
>2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade.
>
>By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the
>ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its
>knees in the twelfth century, by contrast, lasted more than 30 years.
>The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth
>century was similarly a “megadrought.”
>
>Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona
>who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the
>Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect
>of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of
>decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that
>we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You
>can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these
>greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to
>be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”
>
>Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the
>transition to a “new climatology,” a new normal that will at least
>bring to mind the aridity of the Dust Bowl years. Richard Seager of
>Columbia University, for instance, suggests that “the cycle of
>natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but… around a mean
>that gets drier. So the depths -- the dry parts of the naturally
>occurring droughts -- will be drier than we’re used to, and the wet
>parts won’t be as wet.”
>
>Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After
>something terrible happens -- tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes --
>people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the
>things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is
>that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve
>already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings
>of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You
>never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well.
>Drought brings out the worst in us.
>
>After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still
>remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on,
>even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean
>drought, everybody left.
>
>By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins
>of the region’s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that
>the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by
>violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the
>changing climate, helped end that culture.
>
>So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the
>environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are
>not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead.
>The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably
>similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people
>haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle
>over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well-
>considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous
>reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think
>Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west
>and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago.
>
>We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will
>turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not
>survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The
>question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and
>at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if
>grimmest, shows on Earth.
>
>William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just
>published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the
>American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an
>excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in
>environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding
>chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-
>acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico.
>
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