I think we're setting ourselves up for a nasty shock when we've pumped all our wells dry and the rest of the world (Canada included) tightens the screws.
I may have written something about this upthread, but I think the water situation may end up being as serious (if not more so) than the fuel situation in the near future. When I've been in Arizona, I can't believe the expansion of housing that is going on, as well as irrigation-based agriculture. To give you some idea of what I mean, in 1997, while in the Phoenix area, I visited the Desert Botanical Gardens in Tempe. On the eastern side of the garden, they had a look-off area where you could look out across the desert towards the Superstition Mountains. Things were pretty much vacant from the gardens out to the mountains. A few houses here and there, but not too much. Went back and looked out from the same spot in 2001, and the landscape has pretty much filled in with housing, etc... Absolutely incredible amount of expansion.
When I was over at Taliesin West, the docent who was leading the walking tour that I was on, said that the humidity levels in Phoenix are now pretty much the same as they would be in most other U.S. cities due to evaporation from all of the gardens, swimming pools, fountains, and irrigated golf courses (and there are a ton of these in Scottsdale-Phoenix), etc...
Now, on the same trip, I was up at the high ruins at Tonto Monument, looking down on Roosevelt Lake and the Salt River Basin area. The lake is a major reservoir above Roosevelt Dam and the Salt River bringing water down to Phoenix. The lake levels were down so much that it was a bit frightening. Apparently, the anthropologists were having a heyday checking out ruins and looking for artifacts that have been underwater for several decades. The park ranger that led our group up to the high ruins has lived in the area all of his life and has never seen the water so low, and he said he thought the situation was pretty much destined to get worse.
Now, the interesting thing up at those ruins is that they were inhabited only from about 1300-1550 (or something like that). Most of the dwellings down at the basin floor and then up to the top of the mountains were built over about a 200 year period. At the beginning, there was plenty of food and people seemed to have been living well. The diversity of plant life was great at that time. However, by the end, it seems that the plants were gone, the deer that had been plentiful seemed to have been gone, the last dwellings that were built were of shoddy construction using more mud than stone as the supply of loose stone in the area had been used up. The skeletal remains of the last people to live in the area show signs of malnutrition and of death by violence (smashed in skulls, spear wounds, etc..). The prevailing theory is that there got to be far too many people trying to live in that one area, the food ran out, along with the wild game, fuel, building supplies. At some point, the people who had seemed to be peaceful enough earlier on, must have started to fight over what little food remained,.. and so it went. The people vanished from the area by about 1550.
It was rather sobering to visit those ruins a couple of days after being in Phoenix and seeing things like a stretch-Hummer limo parked in front of a car dealership, or the big reservoir-water park at Tempe. And then, to look out and see large areas of the "bed" of Roosevelt Lake exposed and cracking in the desert sun.
Well, it was all a bit ironic. But the sight of it just reinforced my opinion that there is no length that people won't go to when they want to use up the last bit of land, water, fuel, trees, plants, animals or fish. I had already thought so before, but seeing such a concrete example of how we keep messing up again and again, just made it all seem a lot clearer. I've seen this kind of thing going on all over down in the states during past travels, and now I'm seeing the same thing happening up here. Being a paddler, the "disappearance" of rivers is just a little hard to overlook.
Anyhow, one thing I do know is, that you're right about the "greater fall" thing. When supplies start to run out, things are likely to get mighty ugly because very few people will have any idea of how to get by with next to nothing. Well, that's probably enough doom and gloom for one post, dontcha think?
(o: |
