Michael and Rob are right to emphasise the importance of water and no-one
who has made a study of the fate of the Ogallala aquifer can fail to be
impressed by the profligacy with which modern capitalism uses up our common
birthright. But study of the relative issues does suggest that energy crisis
is more serious, dramatic, and full of social content as well as political
immediacy. They are both aspects of the same common process of the
devastation of nature, but energy famines are more serious, even given the
horrors of salinisation, topsoil loss and the known propensity of a warmer
atmosphere to dry out topsoils orders of magnitude more rapidly.
To hang or to be shot are neither of them inviting prospects.
Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Rob Schaap
> Sent: 01 July 2000 17:10
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:21120] Re: water water everywhere
>
>
> G'day Michael,
>
> >Let me suggest that I suspect that the crisis in water will hit
> before the
> >energy crisis. For many, it already has.
>
> I think I agree with you. And farming is THE focus here, I think. After
> all, farming is responsible for 70% of global water use, and fully one
> quarter of the world's irrigated land is salinised (Oz is already
> in crisis
> on this criterian, but we'd blown what little top soil there was in these
> areas anyway). Water tables are falling in North America (whereas Oz,
> incidentally, seems just to have discovered a whopping aquifer under West
> Australia - where mining companies are pushing for the royalties;
> I'm told),
> the Euphrates River in Iraq is at the mercy of the new Turkish dam; the
> Sudnaese marshes aren't marshes any more, India's feted Ganges has as much
> e-coli in it as it does H2O; world grain is, according to those Gaia
> rhetors, going down as a direct consequence at 14% per capita per
> decade.
>
> And each and every Yank and Ozzie uses 34000 litres of clean
> water per year
> to force a measly 500 litres of do-dos round the S-bend ...
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.
>
>
