December 29, 2002 Ranchers Bristle as Gas Wells Loom on the Range By Blaine Harden and Douglas Jehl @ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/national/29METH.html
GILLETTE, Wyo. - As it runs through Orin Edwards's ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river. In conjunction with the above article posted about new land battles in the West while exploring for natural gas, here is more to read about the coming water crises. Book Review: Out of Sight, Out of Mind: An oncoming crisis over misuse of a hidden resource-- America's aquifers By Douglas Jehl at Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E0D9E-B4FE-1DF7-9733809EC588EE DF&catID=2 Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and The Fate of America's Fresh Waters by Robert Glennon Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2002 Two Excerpts: 1) Now comes Robert Glennon to puncture this illusion, in a book as rich in detail as it is devastating in its argument. Its focus on groundwater brings overdue attention to a category that accounts for nearly a quarter of American freshwater use. Its title, Water Follies, sets the tone for tales that can be tragicomic; this is a book about water being squandered, so it is also, as the author puts it, a book about "human foibles, including greed, stubbornness, and especially, the unlimited human capacity to ignore reality." Take, for example, his story of the fast-food French fry. It used to be that potatoes were grown on unirrigated land, he writes, but Americans' love of processed foods changed that. Uneven moisture leads to small, knobby, misshapen potatoes, so most American growers, even in places such as Minnesota, routinely irrigate their lands, to produce products acceptable to the industry and customers like McDonald's. But in Minnesota the groundwater that farmers pump for potatoes turned out to be the same water that helps to sustain the Straight River, a major trout fishery. Even modest pumping for potatoes, a federal study eventually concluded, had the potential to reduce the river's flow by one third during irrigation season, with adverse impact on the brown trout. For now, the trout are not in danger, but that could change if Minnesota were to approve applications from farmers still eager to see potato planting and irrigation widen. 2) The cumulative picture painted by the author is a grim one. Already four states-- Florida, Nebraska, Kansas and Mississippi-- use more groundwater than surface water, and more and more are looking underground to support growing populations. Becoming equally apparent are the consequences in dry rivers, land subsidence, and aquifers drawn down far faster than they can ever be recharged. "The country cannot sustain even the current levels of groundwater use," Glennon writes, "never mind the projected increases in groundwater consumption over the next two decades." Why is it that groundwater has become subject to such abuse? One reason, of course, is that buried below the surface, it is hidden from the kind of relentless monitoring that in recent decades has helped clean up rivers such as the Erie and the Hudson. But Glennon, a professor of law at the University of Arizona, finds buried in the law some further reasons for the neglect. Even now, he says, most American laws affecting groundwater do not recognize any connection between underground and surface waters, despite abundant evidence of such links. They remain rooted in 19th-century ideas that underground flows were something so mysterious that they could not be understood, an assumption that has been translated into lax or nonexistent regulation. Karen Watters Cole East of Portland, West of Mt Hood Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
