Fiddler on the Rooftop? No, that's some nut with a paint brush...

Barrington Farm is a living history museum on the grounds of Washington on the Brazos State Park, just about a 30 minute drive south of College Station.  For anyone in the area who has never gone, let us highly recommend it – the museums related to Texas history are, of course, significant (Washington on the Brazos was the location where the Texas Declaration of Independence was approved and signed, and was the first capital of the Republic of Texas), but the real draw is the living farm.

There are interesting things to see and do on the farm all year round, but the most interesting, to us, happen in the summertime, when the weather is the most unbearable.  That’s because it is instructive to see how folk managed to survive at a time when there was no air conditioning, and Slurpee® was not even yet a dream.  There are inevitable comments, too, from any women in your tour about the unpalatability (to put it mildly) of wearing corsets under such conditions.

While we must admonish our ancestors for their foolish fashion choices, we also must admit there are numerous things they did to make use of what few cooling tools they had, and we would do well to emulate these strategies.  For starters, the orientation of their houses was often chosen more for the ability to capture prevailing afternoon breezes through the dog run that was a staple in early 19th century Texas farm houses.  On a 100°F afternoon, the porch would often feel 15-20 degrees cooler than the fields.

Similar effects could be found in the placement of arbors about the grounds.  At Barrington Farm, the slave quarters are surrounded by grape arbors whose purpose is less about fruit, and more about shade.  Again, taking advantage of orientation and the afternoon breeze, we once visited the farm during corn harvest, and despite the high heat and humidity, the guide was happily roasting corn over an open fire, from under the shade of a muscadine trellis.

Another thing we noticed at Barrington Farm the last time we visited was that “the big house” was painted the brightest white imagineable.  We particularly made note of this fact because we last visited about the same time that we decided to paint our tin roof white for the purpose of cutting our cooling costs.

Non-white roofs are the modern equivalent of the lunacy of wearing corsets in 100° weather.  To put it simply, the laws of physics are either your friends, or your enemies, depending on how stubbornly you adhere to social norms in the face of real needs for change.  Light colors absorb less heat energy and both reflect and emit more heat energy, while darker colors absorb more heat energy and both reflect and emit less heat energy.  In plain English, a dark-colored house with a dark-colored roof makes no sense whatsoever in a Texas summer.

Traditional roofing surfaces in the United States can reach summer peak temperatures ranging from 150-185°F (66-85°C), which not only makes it much more difficult to cool the building, but also contributing to something called the “urban heat island”.  When you consider that the average city is approximately 20% rooftop by area (per a survey done from 1998-2002), that means there is a considerable amount of heat being retained in our cities by black tar, gray slate, and other dark roofing materials which amplify heating problems, making bad situations worse.

There are several solutions to this problem, the best of course being to encourage the growth of trees tall enough to shade not just your yard and maybe a few windows, but also the roof of your home.  Sunlight which never reaches the surface cannot, obviously, contribute to excess heat.  Barring the advent of magic beans to make your trees taller, however, the next best solution is to change the surface of your roof to reflect more sunlight and emit more heat into the atmosphere and away from your home.  That’s where “cool roof” technology takes over.

Cool roofs are basically just like normal roofs, with one of two differences – either a coating which adds albedo (reflectivity), reduces absorption and increases emission; or else a basic material which accomplishes the same functions.  An example of the kind of coating we are talking about is the specialized white paint we used on our own home.  Available at all major hardware stores, and many of the minor ones, look next to the roofing materials rather than in the paint section because while this is technically “paint” it is not like other paints.

To begin with, most house paint is not designed to be applied to surfaces which regularly reach 180°F.  Further, this stuff is designed to be laid down in a fairly thick swath.  We used a regular roller to apply it to our metal roof, but it would not be amiss to suggest simply pouring out a quantity on the area you are wanting to cover and then using a push-broom to even it out at 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch thickness.

Once it is spread and dried, a roof painted white with an elastometric polymer will provide 65% or higher solar reflectance and have a thermal emittance of 80 to 90%.  We noticed almost immediately that the areas where we were standing while spreading the material were exceptionally hot (and it was still just March!) whereas the areas with the paint were almost immediately cool to the touch.  And as the satellite photos from Google Earth show, there is a tremendous amount of sunlight getting reflected straight back into space.  Our attic is kept cooler, and College Station is also a tiny fraction cooler.

There are other kinds of roofing paints, including a cementitious paint (paint with cement material), and a combination of cement and polymers.  The advantage of the polymers is that they provide a waterproof seal; the cementitious paints would only be practical on surfaces which are themselves already impermeable – we could have used one ourselves had that been our only option, but we painted our roof long before we learned all the different elements of cool roof technology.

In addition to paint, there is also the option of using a polyurethane foam barrier on a rooftop.  This is common on commercial buildings; Texas A&M started putting this type of cool roof on buildings as early as the early 1970s, and that same technology is fairly common all over the country even today on new school construction, as well as in some industrial and warehouse developments.

Finally, rather than using a coating, there are the cool roof building materials, where the roof itself is simply built from material which has high reflectivity and emissivity.  An example of this type of material would be a white vinyl sheeting, used instead of traditional shingles or metal sheeting.  By contrast to asphalt (which has a reflectivity between 6 and 26%), white vinyl rooftops reflect more than 80% of the suns rays, and emit at least 70% of the solar radiation the building absorbs.  Depending on roof tilt and latitude, a white vinyl roof is the cool roof champion.

One final strategy worth mentioning is the ‘green roof’ system.  Particularly common with rammed earth and strawbale houses, a ‘green roof’ is literally a roof with a garden on it.  While it takes some sound engineering to guarantee the necessary load-bearing qualities of the structure below, a ‘green roof’ provides some of the soundest thermal principles for environmental control of a building you could wish for – in summer, the solar energy is absorbed by the plants growing on the roof, and converted into leaves and (possibly) fruit and produce.  While the soil will undoubtedly absorb more energy than it can possibly emit back into space, it provides far better insulation than is found in most attic spaces.

And in winter, this natural insulation makes a green roof practical in northern climates in ways a typical cool roof might not – although heat loss in winter from the roof is greatly exaggerated; the greater danger is from excessive draftiness, not from albedo and emission.

The principal advantages of cool roofing technology apply to the individual buildings where these technologies are applied – whether a domestic building where a family lives, or a warehouse where goods are stored, or a factory, where people and machinery require constant environmental controls – but there are additional benefits to the greater community, as well.  Municipalities with the forethought to subsidize cool roof technology see almost immediate impacts in the mitigation of the phenomenon known as an “urban heat island”.

As long ago as 1818, amateur meteorologist Luke Howard described the effect in his seminal work The Climate of London, wherein his careful observations of wind direction, barometric pressure, temperature and precipitation led him to conclude that there was an ineffable something about the urban environment which made it warmer and drier than the surrounding countryside.

Thanks to the far greater scope of data available in the 21st century, modern meteorologists are able to model urban heat islands far more effectively.  Basically, the darker synthetic materials used in urban construction (asphalt roadways, dark colored bricks, dark tile roofs, the darker shades of cement) absorb far more heat and emit far less back out into space than would be true of the more natural materials found in greater quantities in suburbia and the countryside.

For an experimental confirmation of this idea, try standing barefoot at noon in a garden bed, say in the shade of a nice rosemary or basil plant, and then stand on the sidewalk – most sensible people would just take our word for it, we think.

Several factors combine to make this phenomenon worse in some cities than in others – “tunnels” created by skyscrapers focus heat energy in some downtown neighborhoods and prevent its easy escape; other cities get lucky in the orientation of prevailing winds, or maybe juxtaposition to the ocean gives the heat sink an easy drain for some, while being situated in a desert basin causes others to simply sit and bake.

And sometimes seemingly unrelated weather events are the direct result of this island effect.  There is an unofficial term related to College Station weather, the so-called “Aggie Dome” which prevents rainfall on relatively small scale.  We cannot count the number of times we have sat in front of the radar, watched massive storm systems move into the area, headed directly towards us, only to see those same systems break apart just outside the College Station city limits, only to reform once the system reaches the other side of town.  This happens whether we are talking about Pacific moisture streaming up from across Mexico and the Rio Grande region, or Gulf moisture streaming up from Houston and Galveston, or with a Pacific cold front sliding in from the Northwest.

Likewise, the folk wisdom that if there is a trailer park in a town hit by a tornado, you can be sure the tornado will find it, has more truth to it than one might imagine.  Trailer parks, you see, are more likely to be on the outskirts of a town… and thanks to the urban heat island, that is also where storm systems are most likely to be.  The air over the heat island is hot and dry relative to the air in the neighboring environs; as a consequence, there is updraft and an outward force pushing against any incoming downdraft and incoming force.

Cool roofs help counter these effects by muting the initial warming quality of the urban surfaces.  Over twenty years ago now, the City of Atlanta started working with cooler technologies, and they are just one of dozens of communities where engineers have discovered that replacing blacktop roads with lighter colored materials can reduce urban temperatures by several degrees.  The difference between 100° and 97° may not sound like much to a Yankee, but to us at Myrtle’s it sounds like a pretty huge difference.

It’s the sort of thing 19th century farmers in Texas would have paid attention to, as well.  Barrington Farm doesn’t have a special roof, but I guarantee you in 1830s Texas, if they had the opportunity to use a roofing material that would have dropped the summertime temperature of their houses by any amount at all, they would have jumped on it – assuming we are only talking about 1830s Texas farmers not wearing corsets, that is; we can’t vouch for how they could possibly have jumped in those ridiculous clothes.

Anybody who doesn’t currently have a cool roof, you’ve been placed on notice – next Spring, we expect to see you climbing a ladder, carrying a big white bucket with a paint roller.

Keep cool, and

Happy farming!

Beef... It's Why There Is No Dinner!

“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.”
--Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, reviewing Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Dust Bowl drought gets mentioned on a regular basis every summer in the plains states, not just in a year like this one where a horrid drought has everyone talking about peak water, but every single year, because every summer we get hot and dry and we wonder when will it ever end.

And then along comes Pollyanna,  reminding us that we actually have it pretty good. Sure, there’s a drought, and our economy seems on the verge of a double-dip recession, and there’s rioting in the streets of London, but for the most part, Americans have roofs over our heads and food on our plates. So cheer up, right?

This, of course, is a selfish point of view, because what we do affects how other people live. The choices we make regarding how we dress, how we eat, how we get to work, have a direct impact on the lives of people halfway around the globe, whom we will never meet.

That bears repeating. It’s not just a bumper sticker, it is a moral code to guide our behavior:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

In context of drought, then, we at Myrtle’s place have made arguments in the past for direct improvement of individual lives by collecting rainwater, passively cooling homes, and eliminating unsightly turf grass from urban landscaping palettes. Now we would like to make an argument for indirect improvement of the lives of those in developing countries by a cessation of the consumption of beef.

This is, so to speak, the sacred cow of American (and, in particular, Texan) dietary arrogance. We like meat, so we say we will never give it up. But, as with so many other things we know intuitively we ought not be doing, we develop monumental psychological barriers to facing up to the truth. There is not a single living soul who does not know, deep down, that eating red meat causes obesity, heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, lethargy, ulcers, and gude kens wha’ else.

In addition, though, cattle raising is the most prolific waste of water ever devised. Eating beef literally means that somewhere in the world, someone will die either of dehydration or of starvation. When The Smiths wrote Meat is Murder, they were thinking of the cows. But they may as well have been thinking of villagers in the Tibetan plateau, or in Sudan, or in Yemen, or in any one of dozens of water stressed countries around the globe. And someday soon, the same fate will await the citizens of Las Vegas, and of Memphis, and of dozens of other communities in the United States where water consumption (for personal use, for agriculture and for industry) far outpaces the ability of Mother Nature to play catch-up.

It takes tremendous quantities of water to raise animals for food. According to an estimate from David Pimental, professor of ecology at Cornell University, it takes 900 liters of water to raise a kilogram of wheat; it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise grain fed beef. Translated into units most Americans can understand, one pound of wheat requires around 108 gallons of water; one pound of beef requires 12,008 gallons of water. Given that within half a century, finding a city in the United States (let alone in the world generally) which is not in some state of water stress will be the exception rather than the rule, consuming that much water, that inefficiently, seems criminal.

Yet we are culturally prepared to eat our way into oblivion. Beef – it’s not “what’s for dinner.” It’s why there may be no dinner. Even the recently revamped food pyramid (and how often does the food pyramid really need to be revamped, anyway?) is a “My Plate” featuring “protein” as a prominent part of the plate.

Why?

When was the last time you heard of  someone having to be hospitalized for a protein deficiency?

Protein is perhaps the single easiest portion of our diets in which we may reach a satisfying stasis. Sufficient sources of protein may be found in legumes (beans, peas, certain nuts), in spinach (especially in combination with mushrooms), even in potatoes – really, in virtually all foods. “Protein” is actually the basic building  block of all DNA, so there is protein in every living cell. Not all of it is assimilable, of course, so vegetarians pay attention to how much comes from which plants. And not everyone is amenable to a vegan diet, but even if you limit your meat consumption to an occasional fish or game bird, you don’t need nearly as much
protein as the Beef Council would have you believe.

The U.S.D.A. daily recommended protein intake is orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, and it is not difficult to figure out why. There are not millions of dollars being spent in Washington, D.C. by broccoli growers, or by peach farmers, or the onion lobby, or by farmer’s markets or community supported agriculturalists, with all their organic turnips and greens and potatoes and what-all-else, all of which is sufficiently high in protein to produce big beefy cattle, but evidently insufficient to support weak, flabby, addle pated weekend warrior “dittoheads” who order male-enhancement supplements from the back of Golf Digest and talk about how those vegetarians can’t possibly be getting enough to eat – wonder if they were chanting “USA! 
USA!” while vegan Carl Lewis was winning gold medals?

No, we have “protein” and “dairy” featured prominently in our daily recommended allowances precisely because we have such hefty (obese?) beef and dairy lobbies. One has to suspect that in addition to continuing to heavily advertise and push their addictive and destructive product, the Beef Council and their friends will in the future continue to advocate for their clients not just in terms of corrupting our nutritional standards, but also when it comes to allocating water.

During the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010, the concept of rationing got more airplay than just about any other hot button keyword. It seems Americans do not ever want someone to tell us that we can’t have something – to tell us that there are limits to anything we desire.

Unfortunately, as many communities in the desert southwest know all too well, water is something which will have to be rationed at some point, regardless of how long we manage to stay in denial. There simply is not enough of it to go around, but until the actual time comes when scarcity is not just staring us in the face, but actually beating down our doors, we don’t seem capable of recognizing the plain and simple truth – fresh water is not a renewable resource. And since beef production takes a disproportionate amount relative to other healthier foods, the logical conclusion is…. Come on, put down that hot dog and answer, we know you
can do it…

Sigh.

To return to our opening theme, we are in the midst of a drought which reminds people yet again of the Dust Bowl era. Some people wonder whether the Dust Bowl was a trial sent by God to test the resolve of the American people. Anyone wondering this should seriously turn in their driver’s license, turn over their voter registration card, and admit themselves to the nearest mental hospital. God(s) had nothing to do with it.

The Dust Bowl was caused by farmers. By monocropping, not rotating, deep tilling and not using cover crops, farmers allowed topsoil to lose its ability to retain moisture. Prior to the 1930s, a drought would be bad, but it wouldn’t be devastating. Several pioneering soil specialists foresaw the danger of growing nothing but miles and miles of wheat and corn, but American farmers knew better than “those eggheads” and planted mile after mile anyway. After ignoring all the evidence before their eyes in the name of convenience and economic growth,  though, farmers all across the Great Plains watched their fertile lands literally just blow away.

Now, in spite of all the accumulated evidence, we are watching ranchers let their intransigence and greed shrivel our watersheds. Cows are slurping away our future, and we are looking the other way. Maybe we’re staring at our pretty emerald green lawns. We’re certainly not watching our aquifer levels.

It will be quite some time, we are afraid, before people reach the right conclusion on this one. It would be nice, though, if just once we could say that our society thought long enough with its collective head rather than its collective belly to solve a long-term problem before it overwhelmed us. Oh, well.

Happy farming!

Little Girls are Sometimes Very, Very Mean

While global warming features prominently in Myrtle’s gardening lexicon, the largest climate impact on vegetable growers comes from a different phenomenon sometimes in the news – the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Effect.  In short, for Texas, years featuring El Niño are moderately cooler compared to average, and much wetter.  Years featuring La Niña are aggravatingly warmer, and much drier.  In addition, El Niño has the tendency to thwart tropical storm development, while La Niña tends to encourage it.

El Niño occurs when the Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are warmer than normal in certain zones near the equator associated with changes in atmospheric patterns, and La Niña is the description given to the phenomenon of cooler than normal temperatures in the same regions.  Neither is good or bad in isolation – they each have more or less opposite effects in different places.  El Niño may bring lots of rain to the American southwest, for example, but it causes drought (and sometimes famine) in parts of Asia and Australia.  On the other hand, El Niño causes increased wind shear in the Atlantic, reducing hurricane development, while La Niña causes reduced wind shear, making Atlantic hurricanes more likely.

Obviously, while weather impacts elsewhere affect other people in sometimes devastating ways, it is nevertheless true that as a general rule, Texas gardeners do better in El Niño years than otherwise, and we suffer harsh conditions during La Niña.

The recent drought is coming at the tail end of a La Niña.  To say that the Niña event “caused” the drought would be, perhaps, a bit of an overstatement, but it certainly did not help.  Even when ENSO-neutral conditions were reported starting in May/June, the Niña effects have lingered, and so has the drought.  This is part of the self-sustaining pattern of high temperatures and drought – heat bakes the soil, making moisture less available, and ensuring that the soil retains still more heat.  The best way to break the cycle is to add a significant amount of moisture in the form of rain from a tropical storm, which is a “solution” replete with its own dangers.

And now, as we bake in the dog days of August, comes word from the Climate Prediction Center in the form of their 4 August 2011 El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion, that “ENSO-neutral is expected to continue into the Northern Hemisphere fall 2011, with ENSO-neutral or La Niña equally likely thereafter.”

What does this mean, exactly?

For starters, we have a small window of opportunity to receive normal (or at least normalish) rainfall, starting in September and running for a few months, up to about December or so.  Otherwise, we can expect drought conditions to continue probably through at least next summer.

This second La Niña event is not altogether unexpected; historically, a weaker “little sister” Niña frequently accompanies a stronger first wave.  This makes sense if you picture what we are really talking about when we discuss the ENSO phenomenon – we are looking at an area of energy, more or less, in the form of either lower (Niño) or higher (Niña) temperatures in the water roughly riding the equator in the Pacific, from Asia to the Americas.  Water moves in waves, right?  And when is the last time you ever saw a body of water with just one wave in it?  So this is not a static phenomenon – ENSO undulates, more or less, like water in a bathtub after you plunk a baby down in the middle of it.  (It’s about that messy, too, but that’s a whole other discussion…)
The second Niña will probably not be as strong as the first, which is good news for people living on coastlines – Summer 2010 saw the development of a large number of exceptionally powerful hurricanes, assisted by Niña conditions.  Only shear dumb luck kept them away from land, because landfall from any of last summer’s hurricanes would have been a major calamity.  This summer still has the chance to produce some Katrina-esque storms, even though we have returned to ENSO-neutral at the moment, meaning atmospheric conditions are basically “normal” instead of being overly hurricane-friendly, as is true in Niña conditions.
However, as it relates to drought, a weaker Niña event won’t really help much.  This is because one of the primary drivers of our drought is now the lack of soil moisture from having been in drought for so long – literally, we are more likely to be in drought because for so long we have been in drought.  And dry soil warms up much more quickly than moist soil, so in addition to having no rain, we can expect a repeat of this year’s record temperatures, too.  A strong Niña would be worse than a weak one, but not really by all that much.

The City of College Station is starting to discuss the possibility of water rationing, which is good, we suppose, because water use is at all time high levels.  Water rationing probably should have started long before now, though, particularly given that this is not going to be a “one and done” water shortage.  The time for short-term thinking has been over for many, many moons.  Delaying rationing rules until we reach the limits of available water guarantees that rationing will cause maximum pain to everyone involved; coming up with smarter water use rules before reaching crisis point makes much more sense.

We are not the only community facing this problem; the time has come to get serious about water use and reuse.  We need revised city codes making it easier for residents to recycle gray water; we need increased subsidies for rainwater collection.  Lawns should be discouraged; xeriscaping should be incentivized.  Low-flow toilets (or even composting toilets), low-flow showerheads, and a host of other water saving gadgets ought to be subsidized.  Dishwashers should be sent the way of the Edsel – handwashed dishes are not only cleaner, more water and energy efficient, but also have the advantage of not throwing a lot of chemicals into the air you breathe.

It will eventually rain again.  And one of these years, we will probably even get too much rain – it may be difficult to remember such times, but they have happened before, and will come around once more.  But the new normal, at least in Myrtle’s neighborhood, is hot, and dry, and plenty of it.  The sooner we adapt to this reality and move on, the better.

Happy farming!

The Pray for Rain Brain Drain

Texas Governor Rick Perry believes we should pray for the end of the Drought of 2011.  We would say “Couldn’t hurt anything,” except that in order to get to his Day of Prayer event, the simpleminded, unscientific, superstitious fools who will be doing this praying will be driving predominantly low mpg pickup trucks and SUVs, so, in fact, in can and will do harm.
For the record, cause and effect are far too complicated a set of notions to say that our current drought is “caused by” global warming and anthropogenic climate change.  But get real; we all know it is consistent with global warming and anthropogenic climate change, and that increasing droughts of increasing severity are part of the forecast model.  A few short decades from now, a year with as much rain as we have had this year will not be described as “dry” but rather as “exceptionally wet.”

For a sense of perspective, we’ve lifted the attached pictures of the Aral Sea from Wikipedia – check there if you want to see licensing info, etc.  In 1989, two years before Mr. and Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance met each other, people living on the shores of the Aral Sea were, by and large, from small fishing villages, and were living much as their parents, their grand parents, and great-, great-grandparents had lived, in generations stretching back beyond the times of the Czars and the Khans and who knows what other unnamed rulers in prehistory.

Now?  Good luck finding any fish other than, perhaps, a few petrified examples in the dry, cracked salt flats which used to be deep under water.  The Aral Sea used to be slightly bigger than Lake Michigan – imagine, though, if Lake Michigan were to shrink by 90% in just 20 years.  Apart from the Port of Chicago being shut down, it is difficult to imagine the sea of troubles such a change would make; Illinois, though, would look less like the Midwest, and more like the Middle East.

It isn’t really all that difficult to conceptualize such a scale of change actually happening – probably not in the Great Lakes, at least not any time soon, but in a variety of other watersheds around the country, where self-inflicted stupidity has closed-minded political fools praying for deus ex machina.

Here in Texas, the northern half of the state is hydrated either directly or indirectly by pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted at an unsustainable rate.  This underground water reserve stretches from the High Plains in Texas all the way up to the Dakotas.  The nation’s corn belt swells precisely because farmers take water that they cannot replace out of holes in the ground.  And the Ogallala Aquifer going dry is not a question of “if” but a question of “when”.

This is almost exactly the formula followed in Central Asia, where Russia and surrounding states took too much water from the Aral Sea over decades of exploitation in the name of economic growth, until the logic of hydrological extraction tipped towards desertification.

“But Myrtle,” you’re saying, “What choices do we have?  We have to feed people something, and they have to drink water from somewhere.”

Too true.  However, if you’ve been paying attention for any amount of time at all, you can probably already guess Myrtle’s answer.  Feed people from their own back yards, front yards, porches, kitchen windows, rooftops, etc.  And provide them water from their own cisterns – and while you’re at it, provide them the water which would otherwise have gone to grow your indefensible grass lawns, which (being the nice people you are) you dug up and replaced so very long ago with more sustainable and less water-insatiable edible landscaping.

Depending on where you live, the coming age of water scarcity will take varying spans of time to truly come home to roost, but rest assured, this is an issue which will ultimately affect everyone now drawing breath in one way or another.  Some areas will likely not see overall scarcity – New England, for example, is likely to be wetter, according to many climatologists, over the next century. 

However, changing global patterns will even affect those whose water supply is increased rather than decreased.  Why?  Changing sea levels will mean that water tables will see rising salinity boundaries – New York City is a good example of a community currently drawing water from wells which may not have more than 50 years at most of viability left in them (some estimates are much shorter and gloomier, depending on polar ice melting and sea level rise).

All of which means potable water will be the real gold standard of the coming century.  The ability to collect water from what rain does fall (when it finally falls!), and then make it as productive as possible while it is under our stewardship, will be the real test of character for our species as we head into the next phase of the anthropocene.

So Governor, pray if you’d like, but it’d be more productive if you’d grab a shovel and some PVC pipe.  Judging from your collected speeches, you’re pretty handy with a shovel.

Happy farming!