Water... It's All Wet

天下莫柔弱於水。而攻堅強者、莫之能勝。以其無以易之

There is nothing softer and weaker than water,

And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.

For this reason there is no substitute for it.

--Lao Tse, Tao te Ching

Shortsightedness with respect to our place in the world seems to be the human condition, and there are sound evolutionary reasons for that.  We won’t go into the nuts-and-bolts of Myers-Briggs personality profiling, but just as a “fer instance” the ratio of those whose primary data processing mode is “sensing” rather than “intuitive” (that is, based on sensory perception, tactile solidity, and temporal contemporaneousness rather than on a holistic and fluid understanding of patterns and trends) is somewhere on the order of a 70/30 split by percentages.

Sensors, naturally, are more concerned with “how things are” whereas intuitives tend to focus on “what things are becoming”.  One of the nicknames for sensors is “guardians” which more or less explains why they are so well adapted for their evolutionary niche – humanity has clearly done well (in terms of evolutionary success) with a wide array of culturally oriented adaptations (see: all technology since the invention of the pointy stick)… but we remain physically vulnerable as individuals, and many of the changes we have foist upon ourselves have made us more vulnerable still (see: pollution, industrial accidents, snowboarding, etc.) 

In general, sensors tend to limit these dangers – for themselves and others – by enforcing conformity, norms, and other social and personal barriers to excessive changes.  And up until such time as the only agents of change capable of global harm came in the form of avoidable innovations, this was a useful (if frequently irritating, especially to visionaries in the arts and sciences) trait for the majority of humanity to display.  Nietzsche may have railed against conformity-masquerading-as-morality, but in general, it has been a good system.

Times they be a’changin’, though, and it is likely that the majority of humankind is (sadly) incapable of philosophically/emotionally/cognitively keeping pace.  “It takes all kinds,” the saying goes, but it unfortunately doesn’t tell us in what proportion each of those kinds ought to be served up.

Nowhere is this more evident than as relates to the problem of water scarcity, exacerbated as it is by the pressures of climate change, urbanization, pollution, expanding agribusiness, and at least a half dozen other factors we haven’t even yet gleamed.

The CEO of the Nestle Corporation recently made news for stating that “access toclean water is not a human right.”  We’ll pass over why he would even wade into such unfathomably muddy moral waters for now, at least as pertaining to the issues at hand in his case, but the why and wherefore of his attitude is fairly self-evident as it relates to human psychology.

Basically, he is refusing to allow the debate over whether access to clean water is a human right to be framed by those who argue that there are teleological (cause-and-effect reasoning) implications in a moral debate – essentially, he is arguing that the fact that something changes (as an intuitive knows is true of everything) should have no impact on what is “right” or “wrong” with respect to that thing. 

Water is scarce?  “Move.”  So say the innately deontologist (a priori moral framework) sensors, like our exemplary CEO (and like a great many people in business and accounting).  Even when a sensor has some compassion, however, their essential reasoning will be similar – and similarly flawed.  A sensor who believes that access to clean water is a human right will face difficulty in accepting the clear evidence that not everyone can have it.  “Human right” or not, there is quickly going to be a day when it will simply not be possible for everyone on planet Earth to have access to clean water.

And we are not psychologically equipped, as a species, to come to terms with what this is going to mean.

To see some of the psychological trauma involved in the evolution of the human relationship with water supplies, a denizen of the Brazos Valley need not travel far.  In fact, though residents of Bryan/College Station like to think of ourselves as “the” Brazos Valley, the name applies to a far larger group of communities, ranging as far north as the Texas panhandle and even into eastern New Mexico.  And many of the cities and townships which draw their water from the Brazos River (particularly those in the northernmost regions of the Brazos Valley)… are running short.  Their neighbors outside the Brazos watershed are faring even worse.

Wichita Falls, as an example, has recently begun not only recycling grey water, but has actually begun reuse of all treated wastewater.  Their potable water supply comes from a number of sources, but among them are waters which at one time were part of the so-called “black water”.  (You’re not really going to make us spell that out for you, are you?)

Now…. It’s perfectly safe insofar as it is chemically and biologically virtually identical to other West Texas tap water.  We’re not going to get into the tap water vs. distilled vs. filtered debate at present, we’re just pointing out that something most Americans think of as “icky” has become a part of daily life in one particularly conservative community.  Exactly the sort of community where you would least expect radical changes to every day life to be welcome, in fact.  But they have bent to necessity, and are now making full use of every form of water available to them.

What would happen, one might wonder, if even reusing toilet water did not provide enough potable water for the community’s needs…?  What if they simply ran out?  This is the case in more than one West Texas community, in fact.  And what those towns have done is to ship in water from other places.  If you were to search the world over, it would be difficult to come up with a better example of the concept of unsustainability.  Yet “just move” is not an answer that most of these people will apply to themselves.  That is what they might say to someone else, from somewhere else, because nothing like that happens here.

The answer most sensors have had to this crisis over the last 100 years (and yes, strange as it may seem, we have known for even longer than that about the idea that getting enough water might be a problem for people living in arid places like, say, most of the region of the United States between the Mississippi River and Seattle) has been to “drill a well”.  When asked where well water comes from, their answer would typically be “from the ground.”

This was, is, and ever will be, what those focused on global issues call a problem.

Groundwater does, in fact, come from the ground.  It typically comes from naturally occurring reservoirs called aquifers, where water has collected (usually over hundreds and thousands of years, though in the case of the largest – and most used by humans – these zones took millions of years to develop) and most of which provide forms of natural filtration that make aquifer water among the cleanest naturally available sources of water on the planet, behind only a handful of glacier-melt sources in purity and desirability.

The problem (and trust us, it is a huge problem) is that aquifers are a limited resource.  They for the most part do not recharge especially quickly, particularly when compared to the rate at which it is possible to pump water out of them.  The largest aquifer system in the United States from which water is pumped is the Ogallala Aquifer, which spans the plains from South Dakota down through Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and the headwaters of the Brazos River high

up on the Edwards Plateau in the Texas panhandle. 

The population dependent on the Ogallala for drinking water is not especially large by percentage – roughly 2 million people out of the 300+ million citizens of the United States – but that does not begin to tell the whole story.  See… about 27% of the irrigated land in the U.S. lies atop the Ogallala.  Just over 1/4^th of all agriculture in the United States is dependent upon well water from an aquifer which is shrinking, has been shrinking for a long time, and will continue to shrink until it disappears.

Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by 9%; to make matters worse, the rate of decline is accelerating.  Between 2001 and 2009 alone, the aquifer declined by 2%. 

The rate at which the aquifer recharges is exceptionally slow.  Scientists are extremely sure of their classification of most of the water being drawn by wells as paleowater.  That is, it is water which got into the aquifer no more recently than the end of the last ice age roughly 10,000 years ago, and most likely far earlier than that.

It is, in short, foolish to make any plans based on the availability of water in the Great Plains, which just so happens to be the region we also call the nation’s “bread basket”.  It’s not a question of if this system will collapse.  It’s a question of when.

So…

What’s the good news?

We like to present solutions where possible.  Leave ‘em laughing, it’s said, or when they leave, they’ll never come back.  Myrtle likes visitors, so we’ll do our best to not end on a glum note.

There are several strategies for dealing with water scarcity and the coming of “peak water” (a concept about which much needs to be said, though we’ll say it later).  Some are obvious, some a little less so, and all fit with our general philosophy which is smaller is better.

To start with, it should be obvious to everyone (though obviously for some, it’s going to take a little longer to catch up with this reality) that the old industrial agriculture paradigm is doomed.  Big agribusiness can’t last, and it won’t last.  GMOs (about which we have written before) are a dangerous nuisance, but they ultimately won’t succeed because they are the philosophical equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 

GMOs are just the latest in a series of stratagems put forth by agribusiness to try to make farming profitable in environmental niches where large-scale farming is not even sustainable.  Like every other stratagem, modifying crops to use less water, or to be more pest resistant, ignores the reality that eventually there won’t just be less water in these places, there will be no water in these places.   So the “big” model is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.

What replaces it?

The small model, of course!  Not merely in the Ogallala region, where it will be the only viable model, but also in the places currently feeding off the degradation of the Ogallala (that would be everywhere else in the U.S., including places not currently experiencing water stress).

When you stop to think about it, this will be a necessity-driven change, as well.  What happens when 27% of the agriculture sector simply vanishes?  People will still need to eat, right?  Who will feed them?  The only people equipped to do so.  Market farmers.  People who grow fruits and vegetables (and eggs, and frequently milk and dairy) in their backyards, in vacant lots near their homes, on their roofs, in their converted garages/greenhouses, etc.)

Ecological and environmental economists (and weird as it sounds, trust us, those are two separate groups altogether) agree on very little, but one thing they both agree on is the idea that feeding people in the future is a very complicated, difficult task.  They’ve got all kinds of numbers and graphs and pie charts explaining why.

They are all full of poppycock.

It’s not a complicated question at all; the model is simply wrong.  We have been searching for almost a decade now, and we have not seen any serious academic investigation on the root question of how much food can be supplied for the world’s needs on a subsistence-plus scale – that is, production by those whose only aim is to grow “enough for my family, plus a little extra”. 

Urban homesteaders are more than a novelty, now, though, and it is time for their methods and philosophy to get more attention.  There are some things that urban homesteaders do which directly impact water consumption – rainwater collection systems, for example, or the use of hydroponic growing systems – but there are others, most notably the raising of large quantities of produce on small plots of land, using less water than large producers use, that do not get enough attention.  It is our strong belief that the numbers (should they ever be taken) would support the idea that more people worldwide can be fed from smaller plots than from the large ones.

California...as is so often the case... is leading the way.  There is a state law there which subsidizes the use of vacant lots as urban farming land; essentially, a new form of homestead law that allows urban residents to make use of undeveloped urban spaces for market farming projects.  So far, San Francisco is the only place where the model is being actively used, but we envision success there quickly becoming the model for the rest of the state.  Once California has success with urban farming, we suspect it won’t take that long for the rest of the country to see a good thing and copy it.

When human beings have no other choice, we at Myrtle’s place are certain we (as a species) will eventually get around to seeing things from the intuitive point of view.  Long term, it is not only the only choice for survival, it is also (happily) the most sustainable choice, offering the greatest degree of personal happiness and satisfaction.  So… we guess the good news is, yes it’s going to get worse before it gets better… but it is going to get better.

Happy farming!