The article mentions the Salton Sea in passing, but left out the story of how this sea was created: the Colorado River flowed into the Salton Basin for two years after a bungled engineering job on the river in 1905.
One of the better documentaries I've seen is Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea. It goes into the history, adds the best type of humans to the mix (the kind that live near the Salton Sea), and is narrated by John Waters; I would really suggest you check it out.
Excellent write up - the newyorker has been knocking it out of the park lately. I particularly like this nuance:
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.
Damn that was a long read. Lots of facts and history but sprinkled will lots of extra too. The last paragraph for example is pure fluff. If you want to write a book then by all means write one, but these super-long articles are getting out of hand. Just because your "magazine" is on the internet doesn't mean people have all day to read one article.
I saw a great short film called Delta Dawn at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Unfortunately, all I can find is a short clip. Even the filmmaker's website doesn't seem to have it (or the page won't load properly).
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.
Just yesterday I watched this episode[1] about the Dead Sea. The same thing is happening - everyone is pulling water out of the Jordan River upstream and there's barely any left once it reaches the Dead Sea... There it's complicated by the fact that multiple countries are involved.
If you're interested in the topic and in the mood for a fiction book, this one is an enjoyable read which gives a great description of the Colorado and all the various dams along it. Its set piece is domestic terrorism/unlikely hero saves the day stuff.
CA gets a ridiculously oversize portion of the river. The 'Colorado' river is mostly an Arizona watershed. Yet the rules are basically 'Arizona gets what's left after CA is done.'
Very true. But why not put up a few square miles of solar arrays in the Southern California desert to power it?
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.
Yet nobody wants to talk about overpopulation. It's the herd of elephants in the room. USA is poised to be a net food importer next decade, at least in dollar terms. How absurd is that?
US population is growing, but only because of immigration. The birth rate was at 1.88 per woman and falling, well below replenishment. We're growing at .7% per year, somewhat below the world average.
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.
Without the 1965 immigration act U.S. population was on a course to permanently level out at a quite sustainable ~230 million level. Immigration levels of recent decades clearly play a roll in suppressing native fertility to below replacement levels. If the problem really was not enough population, it is actually not very difficult to pursue policies that increase native fertility.
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.
USA is poised to be a net food importer next decade, at least in dollar terms.
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?
Or, better yet, consuming less. There's plenty to go around if we all don't try to live the heavily over-consumptive lives of middle-class Americans...
Reducing consumption to the point where first-worlders aren't suffering increasing rates of obesity-related health disorders doesn't sound like a lower standard of living to me.
That statement can mean pretty much whatever you want if you carefully choose your definitions of "sustainable", "overpopulation" or even "meat". I wouldn't go as far as to tinker with the definition of "Eating", but could tamper with the implicit size of the daily ration, which is almost as good.
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.
Well, yes, the total sustainable population of Earth is down toward 2.5 billion. Nobody said anything about accommodating 7 billion as sensible policy.
You are correct about that, maybe even in the upper limit.
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.
Lower consumption != lower standard of living. My life would be much better if I didn't have to consume a few cups of gasoline just to be able to get to work.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea