[Scpg] Fire is just another word for drought -- this summer around the world

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

_http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175113/chip_ward_the_ruins_in_our_future_ 
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175113/chip_ward_the_ruins_in_our_future)   
 
 
posted 2009-09-13  
Tomgram: Chip Ward, The Ruins in Our  Future
 
All of us have been watching drought in action this summer. When it hits 
the  TV news, though, it usually goes by the moniker of "fire." As we've seen, 
 California, in the third year of a major drought, _has  been experiencing_ 
(http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wildfires/2009-09-09-california-fire-season
_N.htm)  "a seemingly endless fire that has burned more than  250 square 
miles of Los Angeles County" (and that may turn out to be just the  beginning 
of another fire season from hell). 
Southern California has hardly been the only drought story, though. For 
those  with an eye out, the southern parts of Texas, _the  hottest state_ 
(http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wildfires/2009-08-16-txwildfires_N.htm)  in the 
union this year, have been in the grips of a  monster drought. Seven hundred 
thousand acres of the state have _already  burned_ 
(http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-fires_09met.ART.State.Edi
tion1.4bcfd39.html)  in 2009, with a high risk of more to come. 
Jump a few thousand miles and along with neighboring Syria, Iraq has been  
going through an _almost  biblical drought_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-dust30-2009jul30,0,3137832.story)  which has 
turned parts of that country into a  dustbowl, sweeping the former soil of the 
former Fertile Crescent via vast dust  storms into the lungs of city dwellers. 
In Africa, formerly prosperous Kenya is withering in the face of another  
fearsome drought that has left people desperate and _livestock,  crops and 
children_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08kenya.html) , as 
well as _elephants_ 
(http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnfZzOmjbSuh2nib_pBTF2s3mqrAD9AJUI780) ,  dying. 
And, if you happen to be on the lookout, you can read about drought in 
India,  where _rice_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125239897903591591.html)  
and _sugar cane  farmers_ 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125243878212193385.html)  as well as _government  finances_ 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125240768912592065.html)  are suffering. Or consider _Mexico_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-drought7-2009sep07,0,6988447.st
ory) ,  where the 2009 wet season never arrived and crops are wilting in a 
parched  countryside from the U.S. border to the Yucatan Peninsula. 
Everywhere water problems threaten to lead to water wars, while _"drought  
refugees"_ 
(http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090904/FOREIGN/709039936/1011/NEWS)  flee the land and food crises escalate. It's a 
nasty brew.  But here's the strange thing -- one I've _commented_ 
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175035)  on _before_ 
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174863) : there has been some  fine reporting on each of these drought 
situations, but you can hunt high and  low in the mainstream and not find any set 
of these droughts in the same piece.  There's little indication that 
drought might, in fact, be an increasing global  problem, nor can you find anyone 
exploring whether the fierceness of recent  droughts and their spread might, 
in part, be connected to climate change. The  grim "little" picture is now 
regularly with us. Whatever the big picture may be,  it escapes notice, 
which is why I'm particularly glad that environmentalist and  TomDispatch 
regular Chip Ward has written a drought piece in which, from his  perch in Utah, 
he takes in the whole weather-perturbed American West. 
Tom 
Red Snow Warning
The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the  West
By Chip Ward  


Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert --  
specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot n' dry 
means  dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid 
landscape,  redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward 
until it  settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, 
giving the  snowpack there a pink hue. 
Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the  
San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the  
pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and 
 frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a 
 typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow  
layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and 
white  stripes alternating against the sky's blue field. 
The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud 
Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in  
new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer 
 to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or  
laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past  
spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction,  
Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those  
previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to  
read price stickers under opaque windows. 
All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery:  
Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid  
West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than 
 simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing 
these  past several years. 
The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high  
plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike  
eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, 
lakes,  and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on 
snowpack  for about 90% of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its 
 headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is 
the  principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, 
New  Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well. 
While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became  
the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its  
development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as  
well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors 
to  keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex 
infrastructure  of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive 
and  ambitious public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled 
the  Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom. 
The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the 
 Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, 
and  the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If  
Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as  
Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to  be 
more like Death Valley. 
If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most  
three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles,  San 
Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it  
alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with  
each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant  
future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of  
slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked,  
blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the  
impact on the nation's agriculture and economy would be comparable to an  
asteroid strike. 
Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late 
Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we 
 practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, 
and  abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be 
not just  abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words  
"predictable," "reliable," and "water" go together ever less comfortably in  
our neck of the woods. 
 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) Here's 
the problem. Despite  the existence of the Colorado River's famous 
monster-dams like Hoover in  Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs 
-- Lake Mead and Lake  Powell -- that gather behind them, we really count on 
the vast snowfields that  store fresh water in our mountains to melt and 
trickle down to us slowly  enough that our water lasts from the first spring 
runoff until the end of the  fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, 
however, absorbs more heat, melts  sooner, and often runs down into streams and 
rivers before our farmers can use  it. In addition, as the temperature 
rises, spring storms that once brought  storable snow are now more likely to come 
to us as rain, which only makes the  situation worse. 
This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only 
 is snowpack shrinking as much as 25% in the Cascades of the Northwest and 
15%  in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's arriving in the 
lowlands as  much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can't just tell their 
crops to  adjust to the new pattern. Even California's rich food basket, the 
Central  Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation  
infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and 
 predictable runoff. 
We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence" would  
describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for  
example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold.  At one point, we 
went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three  short days. Not 
so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by  a dimmer 
switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it's  more like 
a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off. 
To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early  
this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger  
picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time  
getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so  
quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed,  
according to local gardeners and farmers. 
The West at Your Doorstep? 
Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has  
touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time  
or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly  
bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this  
summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic -- more like a  steady 
drumbeat year after year. 
A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in 
 June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the 
band  of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the  
waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the  reservoir. 
Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will  
refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal"  
levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100  feet 
of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into  
lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A  
view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on  
the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the  
retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended  
boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs  
between them. 
After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the  
states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped 
supply  and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a 
debate is  building over what to do if there isn't enough water to fill both 
Lakes Powell  and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the 
seven states  that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs 
or a single full  one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now 
realized that both  massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the 
middle of a desert  and only more so as average temperatures climb. There 
is no sense in having  twice as much water surface as necessary, which means 
twice as much  evaporation, too. 
Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough water is 
 playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the 
reality  actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will 
be  winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail  
because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew  
bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed  
Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will 
surely  muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing. 
Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that  
straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who 
ekes  out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty 
surface  of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering 
of brush,  sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and 
it all dies.  The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched 
landscape like  that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. 
After decades  in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American 
West, the West may be  traveling east. 
Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a  
future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is  
being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up 
like  so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West's  
heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however,  
that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit -- the river 
 canyons that could easily be dammed -- were picked decades ago and, unlike 
in  the good ol' days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our 
western  states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams 
and ever  more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on 
unreliable water  sources. 
Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and  
easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of  
irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton  
farming in the Arizona desert. 
Rip Your Strip 
All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are  
loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our  
water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but 
 everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your  
front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants  
instead. 
Everyone is increasingly expected to do his or her part. In my little town  
of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when 
the  tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud 
off  their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping with drought-resistant native 
plants  instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs -- is now 
fashionable as well  as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign 
that at long  last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert. 
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will 
 be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter 
showers.  After all, 80% of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow 
alfalfa  to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal 
grants and  tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public 
lands and have  successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the 
costs of  maintaining the allotments they use. 
Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture  
precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear  signal 
that the agricultural interests in the state don't have any intention  of 
changing their water-profligate ways without a fight. 
Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond  
of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and they 
couldn't  be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. 
The fact  is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water 
truly costs  and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to 
conserve it. Behind  all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and 
how  independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam 
and  pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring 
artificially  low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare 
water. 
The Ruins in Our Future 
A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff  
dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco  Culture 
National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we  weren't 
the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly  civilization-challenging 
aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture  flourished between 900 
and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon,  New Mexico, that 
until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings  in the Americas, 
now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde  with its 
"skyscraper" cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth  century and was 
similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years. 
The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the reasons  
they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable  
though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past  
sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the  desert, 
prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic  
drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken  and 
battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare  
followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave  
homes, and a struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine 
in  a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and 
Phoenix. 
Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system  
under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest 
the  runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the 
sandstone  cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells 
of their  time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those 
reservoirs do the  Colorado River's flash floods. 
The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually it  
clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn't be sustained  
because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to tame. The descendants  
of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top villages of the Hopis in  
Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. They learned to live on a  
smaller scale, with scant rain, and after many hundreds of years, they (unlike  
their once living and magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It 
is  no less possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and 
to  build resilient communities. 
Smoke Season 
When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering, it's not 
 just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having trouble  
adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native vegetation  
suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before temperatures are warm  
enough for seeds to germinate, they don't. The native grasses on my land  didn't 
thrive despite our cold, wet spring. Invasive cheat grass, however,  blooms 
early, grows quickly, then dies and dries. It ignites easily and burns  hot. 
When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they become drier 
 in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable to insect  
infestations. The vast expanse of mountain I can see out my window may seem  like 
a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock here every summer. A  
closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of gray and brown as beetle  
infestations kill off entire dried-out mountainsides. More than 2.5 million  
acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands have been destroyed by bark beetles so far.  
The once deep-green top of Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a 
gray,  grim dead zone, a ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless 
human  to ignite it. 
Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive wildfires you  
now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few of those wildfires  
this summer in Utah, but -- what with southern California burning -- they  
didn't make the evening news anywhere but here. That statement can be made 
all  over the West. Both the frequency and size of fires are on the rise in 
our  region. Early in the summer of 2008, while more than 2,000 separate 
wildfires  raged across his state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point 
that many  Western governors might soon be making. He claimed that 
California's fire  season is now 365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of 
the Los  Angeles basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine. 
Smoke is dust's inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos, and the  
lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of the new normal. 
A  few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric  
Administration website to see when winds might shift and bring relief. This  
summer, like last, there were so many fires and they were so widely  distributed 
that it hardly mattered which way the wind blew: smoke was in our  lungs 
and eyes one way or the other. 
All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species, from  
the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at the top of 
 the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead zone, whether 
 it's a dust bowl or a desiccated forest. 
Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When soil  
dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die or move  
uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The creatures that  
depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follow the plants --  if 
they can. Animals normally adapt to slow change, but an avalanche of  
challenges is another matter. When species begin living at the precarious edge  
of their ability to tolerate the stress of it all, you have to expect 
wildlife  populations to shift and dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far 
 different and diminished landscape emerges. 
Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with jarring  
consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly that watersheds  
have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable climates. The land also 
 needs water. And such problems aren't just "Western." Dust storms and 
smoke  won't just stay here. 
There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing their  
best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic climate.  
Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are working  
hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and urging government  
land management agencies to include global warming in their plans and  
projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the specter of a diminished  
Colorado River and is challenging water managers to get innovative and adopt  
policies that reward water conservation and punish waste. Across the West,  
people are waking up and learning about their own watersheds -- where their  
water comes from and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time,  
unfortunately, is not on their side. 
So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies, and  
fabled canyons. It's all still here right now. Take pictures. Enjoy. But  
hurry... 
Chip Ward told of his adventures as a grassroots organizer of campaigns  to 
make polluters accountable in _Canaries  on the Rim: Living Downwind in the 
West_ (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843212/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) . 
In _Hope's  Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1559639776/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) , he described 
the  visionary conservation projects that are the focus of his current 
activism. He  is a TomDispatch.com regular and a _former  library administrator_ 
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174799/ward_how_the_public_library_became_hear
tbreak_hotel)  who now lives next to Capitol Reef National  Park. His 
on-line essays are collected at his _website_ 
(http://www.chipwardessays.blogspot.com/) .
(See _When  the Rivers Run Dry: Water…_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/When-Rivers-Run-Dry-Water/dp/0807085731/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1) , the  Defining Crisis of 
the 21st Century)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Thanks to George Vye for passing this  along to  us.









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