The handy, if not especially dandy, U.S. Drought Monitor–provided by the wonderful water wonks at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln–graphically drives home the dire drought situation in California and elsewhere in the U.S. (Click on the map image atop our right-hand menu.) What looks to be about 35 percent of the Golden State is experiencing severe drought conditions while the rest is dealing with moderate dryness. A rather large swath of territory that abuts northern Nevada is in extreme drought. An alarmingly large portion of what is approximately south-central Texas finds itself in extreme to exceptional dry conditions. (These categorizations, extreme and moderate, etc., are not impressionistic; they’re precisely defined descriptive terms of a specific drought index. For a rousing read on drought indices, go to this page, also provided by NDMC.)
Before turning in desperation to the American Society of Dowsers, the parched inhabitants of these areas might simply consult Moby-Dick. According to the narrator–whom you may call Ishmael–water-divining is no big deal! Anyone can do it!
In the first chapter, as Ishmael marvels eloquently–if at too great length–at the mystical attraction of humans to the sea and water generally, he asserts:
There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
The likelihood that we are all water magnets aside, Waterblogged.info suggests that what’s generally wanting these days is a sense of mystery and humility about water and our relationship to it. For a contemporary reader, Melville’s writing can feel absurdly overblown, but there’s simple beauty in the above and what follows:
Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Visit the exquisite New York Moon and dogpaddle through their water issue. Below is a poem that kicks the issue off. Thanks to the equally exquisite BLDGBLOG for leading us to it at a serendipitous moment.
I apologize to those who might be offended, but it’s hard to think of a more stupid question. It’s a perverse–and lethally misleading–reversal of the real question: Do some individuals have the right to hoard and otherwise dominate a basic component of life and withhold it from others if they can’t pay for it?
Is there a right to air? This isn’t debated because air cannot as yet be sequestered and treated as private property. Thus there is no motivation to establish an intellectual narrative to support the absurdity that privatizing air and allowing the market to determine its distribution is the only rational approach. (Of course, as long as corporations dominate our lawmaking bodies, our right to clean air remains an open question.)
At this point, corporatism dominates not just the world’s economic network, but pretty much the entire edifice of thinking and discourse–the definition of what life is and should be about. They have us believing an endless array of absurd ideas about ourselves and our relationship to the planet and its resources. But the most laughable fiction is that they are there for us and that they should be entrusted with the stewardship of our most precious, elemental substance and that the insane drive to maximize profit above all other considerations is what should determine its distribution.
Witness this recent editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle (from which I ripped off the title) in which the writer frets that the skittish likes of international water conglomerates Veolia, Suez, and RWE may be frightened off by the specter of a universal right to water and as a result will withhold their water management magic from developing countries. There is so much wrong with this way of thinking–a logical implication, for example, is that definitions of human rights should now be vetted and approved by corporate boards. But let’s just ponder the basic fact that these businesses have a miserable record of failure across the globe.
Look, we–those who inhabit and more or less thrive in rich developed countries and are rarely more than a minute or so from torrents of clean, disease-free water, which is not, by the way, provided by corporations–have the luxury of daintily sipping from our bottles of Evian as we hold heady–and smug and condescending–parlor debates about what should and shouldn’t be a right. If we were suddenly forced to live like billions on the globe–with a meager daily ration of filthy water and watching our children die of malnutrition and dysentery–there would be no question in our minds about a human being’s right to water.
What do the water crisis, Dante’s Inferno, Hollywood movies, Sandra Bullock, the Mars Rover, cholera, have in common? Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute , arguably America’s foremost water expert, connects the unlikely dots in this fascinating recent talk at UC Berkeley.
You can skip the introductory remarks and go to 20:00 to hear Gleick being introduced. While his talk focused on California, Gleick puts the state’s problem in a global context, which makes this a good general introduction world water woes.
The good news is that California has plenty of water–scarcity is not the problem. At about 38:30, Gleick starts identifying the factors standing in the way of assuring that all Californian’s have access to clean and affordable water.
Having not posted since 11/1 for reasons too numerous and boring to mention, we feel guilty, remiss, and other emotional states that accompany a firm commitment not carried out. We’d like to note that, while we’ve been gone for over three weeks, absolutely nothing has changed. There is still water, and the water situation–wherever you look–still sucks.
That being the case, there is no choice but that the Waterblogged.info editorial team continue its dreary mission–tomorrow. Until then, we offer the little tidbit for your meditative consideration, lifted from the page of statistical information in Harper’s Magazine called the Harper’s Index. If you don’t know Harper’s, its the U.S.’s oldest monthly, “. . . an independent, monthly literary magazine that does politics,” according to its publisher. A good test to determine if Harper’s brand of journalism suits you is to keep track of the number of times you refuse to acknowledge, read, or discuss something because it’s “too depressing.” If it’s more than say, once a year, you’re most likely not Harper’s target audience.
Estimated portion of all freshwater drawn from U.S. sources each year that is used to cool power plants: 1/2
Ditch to Nowhere, Falluja, Iraq courtesy NY Times, 2008
Thanks to the wonders of Evernote, which rocks like Barack, the Waterblogged.info will not have to laboriously cut and paste the url’s to 13 or so current stories about Iraq’s water situation, thus freeing up time for us to make phone calls for Obama.
Go HERE to visit our public Evernote folder containing current news stories and other articles about Iraq’s increasingly desperate water situation.
All were written in 2008, most from summer to October. Scroll down to see the articles/pages, or, to view them as they were meant to be seen, click on “clipped from” followed by a url at the top. For the sake of balance, we’ve included boastful and what just seem to be misleading articles from America.gov and Sandia National Labs about all of the progress that has been made helping the Iraquis rebuild and manage what we’ve destroyed.
The World Wildlife Federation imagines the consequences of ignoring global warming in this short video. Water plays a leading role, thus it’s part of Waterblogged.info’s beat.
Scroll down to view yet another slew of useful Web resources about everyone’s favorite using-technology-as-a-panacea-for-averting-catastrophe solution: Desalination! These will be duly added to our ever-expanding compendium, Getting serious with Waterblogged.info: desalination. We note that recent developments appear to indicate that proponents of reverse osmosis (RO) are being challenged here and there by desal technologies based on solar distillation and deionization.
We’re on record as not being big on massive-scale desalination here at Waterblogged.info. At least not RO, which is energy-intensive, environmentally destructive, and excessively complicated.
Today’s idiosyncratic, ecentric rant from the picky people who bring you Waterblogged.info: Reverse osmosis (RO) is from our point of view, a misleading misnomer. Osmosis is a basic, natural process; so-called reverse osmosis is really power-assisted filtration. Why do we call it osmosis? There’s nothing osmotic about it. Just had to get that off our chests.
More desalination resources on the web:
Desalination: A National Perspective: A 2008 comprehensive report on the current state and prospects for desalination in the U.S. from the National Research Council
The World View Desalination Project: A commercial venture that aim to develop, in their words, a scalable desalination and purifying system powered by the sun. Looks at first glance like a passive system based on distillation and use of recycled plastic.
Seawater Greenhouse: Another commercial venture that uses a passive distillation method to desalinate ocean water and produce mini-climates for horticulture.
Teatro del agua: Visionary project proposed for the Canary Islands. A combination water desalination plant and beautiful outdoor theater. Our chief archivist just realized that we’d already posted something about this, linking from the glorious Pruned. YouTube marketing video here.
Barack Obama!!!!!!!!!!! Oh, no, wait, not yet. But, soon, real soon, coming to a White House near you. . . .
In the meantime, on behalf of the Waterblogged.info editorial team, I want to congratulate Abigail Brown of Water for the Ages, who has successfully harnessed the innocent wonder and total lack of skill of her inner child to snag the grand (and only) prize for the winning (and only) entry in Waterblogged.info’s first (and last) coloring contest! Woo-hoo, indeed!
Water Is Cool by Abigail Brown
Participation was a tad disappointing, but I imagine that after seeing Abby’s entry, other would-be artistes threw up their hands and quietly closed their crayon boxes in resigned acknowledgment of certain defeat. Abby will soon be leafing through her own copy of the information-permeated pages of Tara Lohan’s Water Consciousness, which I will personally bestow on her in an informal ceremony in New Orleans.
Why New Orleans? Both Abby and I have the honor of having been invited to participate in a panel discussion on waterblogging at theAmerican Water Resources Association Conference, to be held this year in the Big Easy. Michael Campana, waterblog guru and the sole proprietor of the essential WaterWired, will moderate, which I guess means he will try to keep us from splashing, bickering amongst ourselves, hogging the discussion, or wandering off topic to talk about President-elect Barack Obama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other panelists include: Robert Osborne,Watercrunch
Noah Hall, Great Lakes Law
Kaveh Madani, WaterSISWEB
Jane Rowan, AWRA Blog, President, AWRA
Before turning in desperation to the American Society of Dowsers, the parched inhabitants of these areas might simply consult Moby-Dick. According to the narrator–whom you may call Ishmael–water-divining is no big deal! Anyone can do it!
