[NYTr] Env: As the World Burns

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Nov 17, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071203&s=engelhardt


As the World Burns

by TOM ENGELHARDT

Georgia's on my mind. Atlanta, Georgia. It's a city in trouble in a
state in trouble in a region in trouble. Water trouble. Trouble big
enough that the state government's moving fast. Just this week, backed
up by a choir singing "Amazing Grace," accompanied by three Protestant
ministers, and twenty demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought
Society, Sonny Perdue, Georgia's Baptist governor, led a crowd of
hundreds in prayers for rain. "We've come together here," he said,
"simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and
respectfully pray up a storm." It seems, however, that the Almighty was
otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued to threaten
Atlanta, a metropolis of 5 million people (and growing fast), with the
possibility that it might run out of water in as little as eighty days
or as much as a year, if the rains don't come. Here's a little summary
of the situation today:

Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are
prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by
15 to 30 percent. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were
holding 5 percent of their capacity.

Oops, that's not Atlanta, or even the Southeastern US. That's Ankara,
Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have
had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.

Sorry, let's try that again. Imagine this scenario:

Over the last decade, 15 to 20 percent decreases in precipitation have
been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record
temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have
been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in--of the
hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a
day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car
washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows
and mirrors by hand.

Sound familiar? As it happens, that's not the American Southeast
either; that's a description of what's come to be called "The Big
Dry"--the unprecedented drought that has swept huge parts of Australia,
the worst in at least a century on an already notoriously dry
continent, but also part of the world's breadbasket, where crops are
now failing regularly and farms closing down.

In fact, on my way along the parched path toward Atlanta, Georgia, I
found myself taking any number of drought-stricken detours. There's
Moldova. (If you're like me, odds are you don't even know where that
small, former Soviet republic falls on a map.) Like much of southern
Europe, it experienced baking temperatures this summer, exceptionally
low precipitation, sometimes far less than 50 percent of expected
rainfall, failing crops and farms, and spreading wildfires. (The same
was true, to one degree or another, of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia,
Macedonia, and-- with its 100-year record scorching of Biblical
proportions-- Greece which lost 10 percent of its forest cover in a
month-long fiery apocalypse, leaving "large tracts of countryside...at
risk of depopulation.")

Or how about Morocco, across the Mediterranean, which experienced 50
percent less rainfall than normal? Or the Canary Islands, those Spanish
vacation spots in the Atlantic Ocean known to millions of visitors for
their year-around mild climate which, this summer, morphed into
104-degree days, strong winds, and fierce wildfires. Eighty-six
thousand acres were burnt to a crisp, engulfing some of the islands in
flames and smoke that drove out thousands of tourists?

Or what about Mexico's Tehuacán Valley, where, thousands of years ago,
corn was first domesticated as an agricultural crop. Even today, asking
for "un Tehuacán" in a restaurant in Mexico still means getting the
best bottled mineral water in the country. Unfortunately, the area
hasn't had a good rain since 2003, and the ensuing drought conditions
have made subsistence farming next to impossible, sending desperate
locals northwards and across the border as illegal immigrants--some
into Southern California, itself just swept by monstrous Santa
Ana-driven wildfires, fanned by prolonged drought conditions and fed
tinder by new communities built deep into the wild lands where the
fires gestate. And Tehuacán is but one disaster zone in a growing
Mexican catastrophe. As Mike Davis has written, "Abandoned ranchitos
and near-ghost towns throughout Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora testify
to the relentless succession of dry years--beginning in the 1980s but
assuming truly catastrophic intensity in the late 1990s--that has
pushed hundreds of thousands of poor rural people toward the sweatshops
of Ciudad Juarez and the barrios of Los Angeles."

According to the How Dry I Am chart of "livability expert" Bert
Sperling, four cities in Southern California, not parched Atlanta, top
the national drought ratings: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, and
Riverside. In addition, Pasadena has had the dubious honor, through
September, of experiencing its driest year in history.

Resource Wars in the Homeland

"Resource wars" are things that happen elsewhere. We don't usually
think of our country as water poor or imagine that "resource wars"
might be applied as a description to various state and local
governments in the Southwest, Southeast, or upper Midwest now fighting
tooth and nail for previously shared water. And yet, "war" may not be a
bad metaphor for what's on the horizon. According to the National
Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43 percent of the
contiguous US to be in "moderate to extreme drought." Already, Sonny
Perdue of Georgia is embroiled in an ever more bitter conflict--a
"water war," as the headlines say--with the governors of Florida and
Alabama, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, over the flow of water
into and out of the Atlanta area.

He's hardly alone. After all, the Southwest is in the grips of what,
according to Davis, some climatologists are terming a "'mega-drought,'
even the 'worst in 500 years.' " More shockingly, he writes, such
conditions may actually represent the region's new "normal weather."
The upper Midwest is also in rainfall-shortage mode, with water levels
at all the Great Lakes dropping unnervingly. The water level of Lake
Superior, for instance, has fallen to the "lowest point on record for
this time of year." (Notice, by the way, how many "records" are being
set nationally and globally in these drought years; how many places are
already beginning to push beyond history, which means beyond any
reference point we have.)

And then there's the Southeast, 26 percent of which, according to the
National Weather Service, is in a state of "exceptional" drought, its
most extreme category, and 78 percent of which is "drought-affected."
We're talking here about a region normally considered rich in water
resources setting a bevy of records for dryness. It has been the driest
year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, for instance, while
eighteen months of blue skies have led Georgia to break every
historical record, whether measured by "the percentage of moisture in
the soil, the flow rate of rivers, [or] inches of rain."

Atlanta is hardly the only city or town in the region with a dwindling
water supply. According to David Bracken of Raleigh's News & Observer,
"17 North Carolina water systems, including Raleigh and Durham, have
100 or fewer days of water supply remaining before they reach the
dregs." Rock Spring, South Carolina, "has been without water for a
month. Farmers are hauling water by pickup truck to keep their cattle
alive." The same is true for the tiny town of Orme, Tennessee, where
the mayor turns on the water for only three hours a day.

And then, there's Atlanta, its metropolitan area "watered" mainly by a
1950s man-made reservoir, Lake Lanier, which, in dramatic photos, is
turning into baked mud. Already with a population of five million and
known for its uncontrolled growth (as well as lack of water planning),
the city is expected to house another two million inhabitants by 2030.
And yet, depending on which article you read, Atlanta will essentially
run out of water by New Year's eve, in eighty days, in 120 days, or,
according to the Army Corps of Engineers-- which seems to find this
reassuring--in 375 days, if the drought continues (as it may well do).

Okay, so let's try again:

Across the region, fountains sit "bone dry"; in small towns,
"full-soak" baptisms have been stopped; car washes and laundromats are
cutting hours or shutting down. Golf courses have resorted to watering
only tees and greens. Campfires, stoves, and grills are banned in some
national parks. The boats have left Lake Lanier and the metal detectors
have arrived. This is the verdant Southeastern United States, which,
thanks in part to a developing La Niña effect in the Pacific Ocean, now
faces the likelihood of a drier than ever winter. And, to put this in
context, keep in mind that 2007 "to date has been the warmest on record
for land [and]... the seventh warmest year so far over the oceans,
working out to the fourth warmest overall worldwide." Oh, and up in the
Arctic sea, the ice pack reached its lowest level this September since
satellite measurements were begun in 1979.

And Then?

And then, there's that question which has been nagging at me ever since
this story first caught my attention in early October as it headed out
of the regional press and slowly made its way toward the top of the
nightly TV news and the front pages of national newspapers; it's the
question I've been waiting patiently for some environmental reporter(s)
somewhere in the mainstream media to address; the question that seems
to me so obvious I find it hard to believe everyone isn't thinking
about it; the one you would automatically want to have answered--or at
least gnawed on by thoughtful, expert reporters and knowledgeable
pundits. Every day for the last month or more I've waited, as each
piece on Atlanta ends at more or less the same point--with the dire
possibility that the city's water will soon be gone--as though hitting
a brick wall.

Not that there hasn't been some fine reportage--on the extremity of the
situation, the overbuilding and overpopulating of the metropolitan
region, the utter heedlessness that went with it, and the resource wars
that have since engulfed it. Still, I've Googled around, read scores of
pieces on the subject, and they all--even the one whose first paragraph
asked, "What if Atlanta's faucets really do go dry?"--seem to end just
where my question begins. It's as if, in each piece, the reporter had
reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look,
lest we all go over.

Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted
that the Bush Administration hasn't the slightest desire to glance
down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the
thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others,
top Administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009
without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government,
shouldn't somebody be asking? Shouldn't somebody check out what's
actually down there?

So let me ask it this way: And then?

And then what exactly can we expect? If the Southeastern drought is
already off the charts in Georgia, then, whether it's 80 days or 800
days, isn't there a possibility that Atlanta may one day in the
not-so-distant future be without water? And what then? Okay, they're
trucking water into waterless Orme, Tennessee, but the town's mayor,
Tony Reames, put the matter well, worrying about Atlanta. "We can
survive. We're 145 people but you've got 4.5 million there. What are
they going to do?"

What indeed? Has water ever been trucked in to so many people before?
And what about industry including, in the case of Atlanta, Coca-Cola,
which is, after all, a business based on water? What about restaurants
that need to wash their plates or doctors in hospitals who need to wash
their hands?

Let's face it, with water, you're down to the basics. And if, as some
say, we've passed the point not of "peak oil," but of "peak water" (and
cheap water) on significant parts of the planet... well, what then? I
mean, I'm hardly an expert on this, but what exactly are we talking
about here? Someday in the reasonably near future could Atlanta, or
Phoenix, which in winter 2005-2006, went 143 days without a bit of
rain, or Las Vegas become a Katrina minus the storm? Are we talking
here about a new trail of tears? What exactly would happen to the poor
of Atlanta? To Atlanta itself?

Certainly, you've seen the articles about what global warming might do
in the future to fragile or low-lying areas of the world. Such pieces
usually mention the possibility of enormous migrations of the poor and
desperate. But we don't usually think about that in the "homeland."

Maybe we should.

Or maybe, for all I know, if the drought continues, parts of the region
will burn to a frizzle first, à la parts of Southern California, before
they can even experience the complete loss of water? Will we have
hundred-year fire records in the South, without a Santa Ana wind in
sight? And what then?

Mass Migrations?

Okay, excuse a terrible, even tasteless, sports analogy, but think of
this as a major bowl game, and they've sent one of the water
boys--me--to man the press booth. I mean, please. Why am I the one
asking this?

Where's the media's first team?

In my own admittedly limited search of the mainstream, I found only one
vivid, thoughtful recent piece on this subject: "The Future Is Drying
Up," by Jon Gertner, written for The New York Times Magazine. It
focused on the Southwestern drought and began to explore some of the
"and thens," as in this brief passage on Colorado in which Gertner
quotes Roger Pulwarty, a "highly regarded climatologist" at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

"The worst outcome...would be mass migrations out of the region, along
with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies.
But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture,
farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado's largest
industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle
during summertime."

Mass migrations, exfiltrations... Stop a sec and take in that
possibility and what exactly it might mean. After all, we do have some
small idea, having, in recent years, lost one American city, New
Orleans, at least temporarily.

Or consider another "and then" prediction: What if the prolonged
drought in the Southwest turns out, as Mike Davis wrote in The Nation
magazine, to be "on the scale of the medieval catastrophes that
contributed to the notorious collapse of the complex Anasazi societies
at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde during the twelfth century"?

What if, indeed.

I'm not simply being apocalyptic here. I'm just asking. It's not even
that I expect answers. I'd just like to see a crew of folks with the
necessary skills explore the "and then" question for the rest of us.
Try to connect a few dots, or tell us if they don't connect, or just
explain where the dots really are.

As the World Burns

Okay, since I'm griping on the subject, let me toss in another
complaint. As this piece has indicated, the Southeastern drought,
unlike the famed cheese of childhood song, does not exactly stand
alone. Such conditions, often involving record or near record
temperatures, and record or near record wildfires, can be observed at
numerous places across the planet. So why is it that, except at
relatively obscure websites, you can hardly find a mainstream piece
that mentions more than one drought at a time?

An honorable exception would be a recent Seattle Times column by Neal
Peirce that brought together the Southwestern and Southeastern
droughts, as well as the Western "flame zone," where "mega-fires" are
increasingly the norm, in the context of global warming, in order to
consider our seemingly willful "myopia about the future."

But you'd be hard-pressed to find many pieces in our major newspapers
(or on the TV news) that put all (or even a number) of the extreme
drought spots on the global map together in order to ask a simple
question (even if its answer may prove complex indeed): Do they have
anything in common? And if so, what? And if so, what then? To find even
tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist
and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of
Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a "world on
fire." Flannery offered the following observation:

"It's not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its
great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a
drought that's almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a
global picture. We're just getting much less usable water than we did a
decade or two or three decades ago. It's a sort of thing again that the
climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the
same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic
atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single
fire event, it's really hard to make the connection, but take the
bigger picture and you can see very clearly what's happening."

I know answers to the "and then" question are not easy or necessarily
simple. But if drought--or call it "desertification"--becomes more
widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already
bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole
regions no longer have the necessary water, how many trails of tears,
how many of those mass migrations or civilizational collapses are
possible? How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to
experience? And what then?

These are questions I can't answer; that the Bush Administration is
guaranteed to be desperately unwilling and unprepared to face; and
that, as yet, the media has largely refused to consider in a serious
way. And if the media can't face this and begin to connect some dots,
why shouldn't Americans be in denial, too?

It's not that no one is thinking about, or doing work on, drought. I
know that scientists have been asking the "and then" questions (or
perhaps far more relevant ones that I can't even formulate); that
somewhere people have been exploring, studying, writing about them. But
how am I to find out?

Of course, all of us can wander the Internet; we can visit the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has just set up a new
website to help encourage drought coverage; we can drop in at blogs
like RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress.org, which make a habit of
keeping up with, or ahead of, such stories; or even, for instance, the
Georgia Drought website of the University of Georgia's College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; or we can keep an eye on a new
organization of journalists (well covered recently on the NPR show "On
the Media"), Circle of Blue, who are planning to concentrate on water
issues. But, believe me, even when you get to some of these sites, you
may find yourself in an unknown landscape with no obvious water holes
in view and no guides to lead you there.

In the meantime, there may be no trail of tears out of Atlanta; there
may even be rain in the city's near future for all any of us know; but
it's clear enough that, globally and possibly nationally, tragedy
awaits. It's time to call in the first team to ask some questions.
Honestly, I don't demand answers. Just a little investigation, some
thought, and a glimpse or two over that precipice as the world turns...
and bakes and burns.