Sunday, August 16, 2009

Goodbye Pools, Lawns and a Whole Lot More: Why Life in the Southwest as We Know it Will Be History


Goodbye Pools, Lawns and a Whole Lot More: Why Life in the Southwest as We Know it Will Be History
By Alex Steffen, Worldchanging
August 10, 2009 Link to full article below

This piece first appeared in Worldchanging.

It is likely to be a source of unhappiness for us that we have taken natural bounty for granted in designing our civilization. But it is likely to prove tragic that we have assumed not only the indestructibility of nature (heck, some fossils still argue that climate change is impossible because it is not within human abilities to wreck the climate), but also that the particularly beneficial circumstances of the 20th century are what is ecologically "normal." Nowhere is this more evident than in arid regions, and nowhere is it better studied than in the American Southwest.

There, in the deserts and mountains, we Americans have built huge cities, farms and ranches, and one of the world's leading tourism industries (think Vegas) predicated on the reliability of cheap, plentiful water. This was a mistake. Water in the very near future will be neither cheap nor plentiful, and much of the Southwest is destined for real trouble.

To read the full article:
http://www.alternet.org/story/141887/

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