What Happens When We Run Out

water scarcity
Map of current water scarcities (brown) from the NYT.

What happens when you just run out of something essential for life?

This is what happened during the ice ages. We ran out of food. The age of simple gatherer-hunter cultures immediately came to an end. The result was the invention of what Richard Manning in Against the Grain calls catastrophic agriculture — burning or flooding large tracts of land to harvest the hardy monoculture grains that appeared first as the land recovered. The process was so arduous, unreliable and miserable that we had to invent slavery and civilization to coerce people to stick with it. We do what we must, and when the ice froze us out, we had to do something radical. So we did.

Today we seem to believe that, if we run out, the answer is to import more. Simple. Run out of wood or metals? Just destabilize a bunch of faraway nations, bribe the officials, enslave the locals, poison the environment, and get the cheap wood and metals you need. Run out of oil? Just invade the Middle East and steal theirs. Run out of cheap labour? Import some, or offshore the work. Run out of money? Just print some more, and convince people it’s worth something.

The problem is, none of these ‘solutions’ is sustainable. We’ve run out of countries to rip off for their wood, metals and oil. We’re past the Oil Peak anyway. We’ve run out of third world labour to exploit, even we could still afford to ship stuff from them at $160/barrel oil. All of these quick fixes merely ratchet up the fragility of our economy and our planet, leave us less room to maneuver when our bandaid fix comes unsprung. Jim Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency tells us what will happen when we run out of oil, even with ecologically disastrous substitutes — massive tar sands mining, coal burning, and farms of nukes. It’s a horrific portrait.

But while some places (like the Northern US) are going to face devastating disruption when oil runs out, other places (like the Southern US, China, India and much of the Middle East) are going to face another crisis, even earlier — the End of Water.

Robert Sanford is a hydrologist who’s studied the growing water scarcity in Southwestern Canada. It’s not even on the map (above) as a water crisis site — yet. Even worse, the Southwestern US is counting on the glaciers of Southwestern Canada to solve their growing water crisis. In a recent interview on CBC radio, Sanford said there won’t be any to share.

The glaciers, which provide most of the fresh water in half the continent, are disappearing at an astonishing rate, thanks to global warming. Farmers alone have ‘claims’ on more river water in Southwestern Canada — a semi-desert at the best of times — than there is water. If all the farmers licenced to do so took out their quota, the cities of Southwestern Canada (like Calgary) would have none left. None. No water for people to drink and shower and flush. No water for industry. No water for lawns. No water for the voracious Alberta Tar Sands that will soon need ten times as much water as it already uses (plus all the natural gas in the Arctic plus energy from a farm of new nukes). None.

The consequence of simply running out of water seems unfathomable to us, in this age of hydro engineering. The problem is, we’ve already dammed up the rivers as much as we can. More fragility. There is no slack in the system. If Las Vegas and California’s cities can’t get fresh water, what will they do? Stop irrigating, so the foods that much of North America depends on can no longer be grown. Stop watering lawns and gardens, so dust and desert and massive wildfires will return. Stop all industrial and commercial activity, so the economy is plunged into prolonged recession. The situation is as bad in the Southeastern US, where Atlanta and thousand of square miles for states around, which usually get a lot of rain, are facing the worst drought in a century, leaving reservoirs dangerously low, in some cases with only days’ worth of reserves left.

In every such case, and in China (where the water table is dropping so quickly — eight to eighteen feet per year — that farmers are killing neighbours who dig wells deeper than theirs) and India and the Middle East, you cannot solve the problem by just ‘importing’ water from somewhere else. Towing ice floes is the stuff of fantasy. Desalination is extremely expensive (it would make water more expensive than oil) and ecologically destructive. And if you built aqueducts, where would run them to? No one has a surplus of water. Even the Great Lakes’ polluted waters are dropping at an astonishing rate.

If there is no water, you have two choices. Leave. Or die. This is what farmers did during the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. This is what farmers by the million are doing in China and India already. This is what the people of Atlanta may soon have to do. Sooner. Or later.

Why can’t we get our heads around this? The people in the suburbs of Atlanta, we hear, are perpetuating the Tragedy of the Commons problem by refusing to stop watering their lawns. Industry is rationing, but nowhere near enough. Everyone is just waiting, hoping that rain will solve the problem. There is no Plan B.

Imagine a refugee emigration from the Southern US ten times what Katrina produced. With no hope of resettlement. Imagine Las Vegas, that extravagance, as a desert ghost town. Imagine the impact on the economy. Imagine the Alberta Tar Sands, the great Western hope for a brief respite from the End of Oil, abandoned because there simply wasn’t enough water. Imagine fires burning in California as steadily,endlessly as they do in Brasil, leaving millions homeless.

This of course is our problem: We can’t imagine. And we refuse to let the lessons of history, and of other nations, teach us how to imagine, what if…?

Until it ceases to be a matter of what if? and becomes a question of now what?

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12 Responses to What Happens When We Run Out

  1. Doug Alder says:

    Then there’s the SPP Security and Prosperity Partnership that the US is trying to con Mexico and Canada into signing and which Harper will be only too traitorously pleased to do so. The prime purpose of the SPP is to gain access to Canada’s water resources in a way that we can not stop. Alex Atamaneko, NDP MP for my riding recently sent a letter to all of his constituents, part of which reads”Documents that were leaked to the Council of Canadians revealed that bulk water exports are being discussed as a part of the SPP under the name

  2. That is probably the scariest article I have ever read and I have no reason to doubt its plausibility.If we finally accept the problem, what are the possible solutions, if any?

  3. Jules says:

    There are no solutions. It will inevitably lead to population die-off. It’s the planet saying to us “enough is enough”.

  4. Tom Clifton says:

    I have always thought that make a great story/movie: What would the 1.5 million people in the Phoenix area do, if their water were suddenly cut off. How would California handle a migration that dwarfs the dust bowl? How would the US handle two of its states at war with each other? Alas, I’m not much of a writer.

  5. Matthew says:

    As a resident of suburban Atlanta, let me say that (excepting those on wells) I have not seen a lawn sprinkler running in months.It’s bad here, to be sure. And a few people are probably cheating in the dark of night. But on the whole I think people are working together as well as one could reasonably expect.The bigger problem is that they continue to send huge volumes of water downstream to keep mussels or something happy. That’s just silliness.

  6. Judith says:

    Why do you think that is silliness, Matthew? Personally, I view cutting down on personal water use to help protect an entire species speaks to the “better angels of our nature.” That said, it is probable that as the crisis worsens, decisions will be be made to sacrifice entire species to keep the human engine going. I would hope, however, that folks – individually and collectively – would first do their best to share resources with other species. Contrary to Madison Avenue, we do not need to bathe everyday; we do not need to flush pee everytime; we can beging to capture grey water and storm run off; etc.

  7. Why hasn’t anyway mentioned desalination? I’m an American living in Australia, and Oz has embarked on several desalinayion projects. Israel is a big leader in this area too, as well as hydroponics for their vegetation. I realize desalination is still encroaching on other water resources (our oceans), and this isn’t a full solution.

  8. Jon Husband says:

    I seem to remeber that there was some wag named Thomas Homer-Dicxon that wanted to suggest that we collectively were experiencing an Ingenuity Gap ?I would argue (as I think he has) that most of us are complacent and selfish …

  9. Enci says:

    I posted a short blog about “How to Help With the Fires” here in California and one of the points suggests a few ways to save water.Your article is great and scary, however I wish you would offer some “How To” ways to reduce water usage. I see people water their driveway, I see businesses water the sidewalk, and people water their lawn. It is all useless watering and nobody does anything about it. (If you water it, you should be able to eat it.) But the city only tells us to take shorter showers and it asks homeowners to time their sprinklers a certain way. Why? So people can water the leaves off their driveway?

  10. Rainwater tanks, greywater and blackwater recycling, desalination – these are all things being done here in Perth Australia in addition to pretty serious restrictions. Unfortunately people are still allowed to water grass :(Also, one of the biggest impacts you can have as an individual regarding water usage is to reduce or completely stop eating animal based foods especially meat. A typical meat-eating diet requires around 15,000L per day versus around 1,200 for a vegan diet.See http://www.goveg.com/environment-wastedResources-water.aspfor more details and references.

  11. Okay, I obviously no expert on this subject and I’m certainly not a polemicist but water isn’t exactly like oil, is it. One day we’ll run out of oil but we’re never going to run out of water because it isn’t a finite resource, even if it has to be expensively produced in desalination plants. I guess what will happen is that the world economy will suffer through water shortages, there will be massive population shifts, there will be wars, many people will die, maybe some wet countries will become rich (and overcrowded or impregnable), there will be huge political upheavals, and eventually a new world order will emerge based on weather patterns. And it may well be a downsized version of the bad old world we have now with another set of problems to face. Perhaps that’s a contemporary example of evolution in action.

  12. Matthew says:

    Why do you think that is silliness, Matthew?I’m in full agreement that cutting down on water use for the benefit of other species is a fine thing. I suppose I wasn’t clear, but the silliness is that we’re continuing to send a full ration of water downstream, when less would probably still be sufficient to keep the mussels and whatnot alive. In the worst case scenario, we continue to do this while the politicians dicker, and Atlanta ends up in a situation where it simply has no water. Sure, we can all do with less bathing and toilet-flushing, but there is a certain minimum that *is* required for sanitation. I don’t particularly relish the idea of living around here with 5 million germy, unwashed other people. Consider this: if it wasn’t for Lake Lanier and the dam, the mussels would currently be experiencing the effects of the drought for natural reasons alone. It seems reasonable to me that they should share the pain with the rest of us.

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