Physical Limits to Food Security: Water and Climate
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Dorothea Lange Sons of Negro tenant farmer, Granville County, North Carolina July 1939 This is the second installment of Nicole’s series on food secur
[See the full post at: Physical Limits to Food Security: Water and Climate]Referring to our cultural/societal use of money as being part of “the human operating system” is inaccurate. That use is a choice, not a biological necessity, and “[f]ood is one of the vital factors that will be substantially affected in a financial crash where connecting producers and consumers will be extremely difficult due to lack of money in circulation” only because of that choice. The sane alternative is to abandon money use and the concept of exchange, globally.
This is interesting, but although clearly a lot of smart people wrote a lot of reports about this, I’m not so sure they’re they people who ever grew a head of lettuce–just thought about it on the inter-webs.
Water is an important resource that is being sorely misused. However, tracking it is absolutely, positively nothing like tracking, say, oil flows and use. So you water a cow, and that water goes…where? It isn’t lost. There’s a water cycle. It “emits” it, to be polite, into the air and ground. Therefore, it isn’t lost, it’s saved…in a way. Passed on if it’s in the damp climes, or dispersed a bit if in the dry. You water wheat, where does THAT water go? Again, back into the ground, the aquifer, or else up into the clouds for the next guy.
This does cause serious climactic changes of many varieties, but the water isn’t “lost.” Basically ever. Irrigating makes vapor, then makes clouds that would not otherwise have been, which rain elsewhere or don’t depending on terrain and highly complex factors that are extremely localized.
Next, every part of this can be remediated. Every article acted like there was no solution. It’s bald-faced, fatal, propagandaist nonsense. Pure poppycock. Rubbish. Garbage. The solutions have been excruciatingly well laid down by the Permaculture community, and it LOWERS the cost of food and IMPROVES the environment (as seen from a human point of view) almost immediately. In one season. In 6 months. It can be done with a shovel, and often is, and turns deserts into garden spaces. The only reason a society that knows about these solutions wouldn’t do it — as it’s economical, legal, productive, and valuable — is if they WANT themselves and others to die. …And I’m not discounting that desire as an agenda by any means. But it’s definitely 100% voluntary.
Water isn’t like other commodities. It isn’t “used.” Crucial to understand this. Anymore than your blood would be said to be “used” by the time it returns to your heart. It isn’t discarded: it’s circulated.
Water is horribly wasted in cities and other modern places where men have recently been mortally stupid. Saving water, so as not to depend on public systems and respond personally to the supply and source, is discouraged and mostly outlawed in the US West as well as many places worldwide. Fannie Mae loans prohibit cisterns, for instance. Instead, the water is run-off to no use at all, then bitterly complained about after. This alone is adequate to supply much of the drought relief, if used on a localized basis. Permie work in the driest Africa, Australia, US, etc, has demonstrated this.
The midwest are as bad, where the water is forced off roofs and parking lots into rivers to be lost to the sea instead of used to any purpose. Every inch is paved, hardened, channelled. Every wetland filled by billions in legal subsidies. Easy to believe that enough water falls in Iowa and Indiana to refill Oglala. But again, it’s discouraged and/or illegal. The incentives are exactly opposite to human need. Those who respond to the need are shut out, often violently, from gardening, cisterns, or anything else not centrally-controlled.
But all this is a CHOICE. It’s not an accident. It’s not a drought. It’s not unforeseen. It’s not inevitable or unchangeable. It could probably be reversed at home in 10-20 years if it were encouraged to save human life and make agricultural profit instead of the dead opposite.
So as Fitts sometimes says, what you have is not an economic problem, or in this case an environmental one, what you have is a political problem.
It’s about control. Nothing else. It can easily be changed if we, politically and personally wish it to be. Even if we buck it on the land where we’re sitting. The linked articles are a disservice, re-directing focus away from solutions and the real source of the problem, into more centralized redistribution and control that is causing — and I argue intentionally — the ecological and human catastrophe in the first place.
Go look up the $10 solutions on Permaculture sites. And pick your side. No time for distractions.
In AP Today on water wars in Mexico city…
https://bigstory.ap.org/article/mexico-city-residents-battle-police-over-waterHi Nicole,
Meant to post this on the article about your move to Atamai, and you probably know this already, but the area to which you’ve relocated in New Zealand is a seismic risk so considerable thought needs to be given to building life safety. That section of the “ring of fire” along with the Pacific NW of the US where I live, has not recently released its tectonic energy and pressure continues to grow. Please feel free to disregard if this is already on the radar screen.
-StacyWell there is one good thing you can say about Michigan, particularly the shoreline. Water. From a climate standpoint but nothing else, using bad to worst case scenarios, I can hardly imagine a better spot climate wise the next few hundred years particularly the Lake Michigan shoreline. In a northern clime anyway. The long mostly sunless winters do present a sustainability problem.
Of course that’s a long time frame, particularly for me.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fdwZkUNylV8/TBI5xy6LmvI/AAAAAAAAGPU/HP24ievHQmM/s1600/DSC_6767.JPG
Stacy, yes I know about the seismic risk. I cycled round the Christchurch CBD two years ago and the devastation was heartbreaking. The village designs for that risk. I suppose we’ll see one day if it was enough.
SteveB, you know I don’t consider it possible to do away with money and exchange globally. One can realistically come up with alternative means of exchange in order to address the artificial scarcity of a liquidity crunch, but getting rid of exchange altogether I regard as fundamentally unworkable. Like it or not, finance is currently our human operating system.
Dr Diablo,
I am very well aware of the hydrological cycle and the range of permaculture solutions. This essay was addressing the failings of the existing framework. It’s not that we can’t do things differently, but mostly we won’t, especially in the timeframe that matters, so we are going to hit these non-negotiable limits. Denying that is not useful. Much as I love permaculture, it’s not going to get over 7 billion people through a bottleneck. I’ll write more about solutions in a subsequent post.
Thanks Nicole,
I’ll send this out tonight.
To SteveB and Dr Diablo, I’ll say that picking technical faults with this essay is an immature ego-defense mechanism, which might reduce cognitive-dissonance in the short term, but probably not even that.
Embrace this truth.
There is no easy way out.
I’m creating a kitchen garden, where there was not one before last winter.
The whole back yard. It is a lot of continuous hard work. Permaculture takes decades to arrange. You eat from somewhere else in that time, and probably after.
All the permies I know, serious farmers in Texas and Hawaii, eat over half their food from grocery stores.
Get to work. Work hard.
Know what this is about. It is not academic.Dr.Diablo,
I think your assessment of water remaining in a never-ending cycle is theoretically true but in real terms not necessarily true. In Canada, we have huge man-made “lakes” that have for all intents and purposes been permanently removed from a usable water cycle as a result of being terribly polluted in the extraction of tar sands. Flocks of birds die when they land on these lakes because they are so polluted. Researchers have been trying unsuccessfully for decades to find ways to clean these “lakes” up, but they remain in a polluted state. As a second example, I have also read that, in the case of underground aquifers, once they are pumped out, they collapse, such that they are no longer able to store water, which again effectively removes a portion of water from the usable water cycle. A third example is the sallination of water from agricultural use which, owing to the high energy requirements to remove the salt, effectively means a loss of usable water contained in the water cycle. While at some time in the future, these problems may be resolved through technological improvements, this is not a given.
Time prevents me from reading the article right now, but can’t wait to dive into it. You are such a capable woman, Nicole, and an inspiration to my daughter and I. Thank you.
With our current practices, the water might not disappear, but the usable land will. Our bodies seek homeostasis (so does the environment), but when we muck around too much, we end up with clogged arteries, inflammation, and sickness.
I agree that these things could be changed, but that they won’t be, not until things turn critical. Too much money in short-term gain, and the people in control like it that way.
Keep smiling, Nicole.
<i>TAE Summary</i> the next generation: reloaded:
* Money is not a biological necessity. It is a choice, but we cannot help choosing it because of our evolutionary biology.
* This is interesting, but….
* Water goes nowhere, except when it goes into the cities. Then in goes somewhere, but we don’t know where; it is lost.
* Permaculture will solve all the problems, because it is cheaper.
* We need to finally make some agricultural profit, or else.
* This is good for sharing.
* Seismic activity is considerable. Considerable population crash is not.
* 300K plus living expenses, gives you at least some peace of seismic activity.
* 7 billion people will make quite a tremor when pushed through the neck of a bottle.
* Don’t bitch. Work hard. It worked for gramps.
* Water which is not lost should be wiped clean.
* Keep smiling. Clogged arteries lurk in the shadows.Climate change is a reality that is still being disputed by the neoliberals and capitalists, who refuse to recognize that our current economic system is inefficient and goes directly against life-supporting systems for all animals. This article contributed to my knowledge and provides an excellent summary of what is going on in the world, especially in terms of water security. I believe that the way how to protect us from climate change lies in increased localization in developed or developing countries, and in forming an alliance to help those countries that are no longer able to provide basic needs for their citizens.
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