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Landlocked on Purpose

In the fall of 1922, Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl paddled a canoe into the delta of the Colorado River and found a wilderness of green lagoons, a hundred channels braiding through two million acres of cottonwood and willow, egrets standing in the shallows, deer in the cane, and somewhere beyond the firelight the jaguar they never saw and never stopped feeling. Leopold wrote about that trip a quarter century later and confessed that he never went back. He preferred the delta as memory held it, because he understood what was coming for it. He was right to stay away. In November of that same year, in a lodge outside Santa Fe, commissioners from seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river on paper. The canoe and the signature belong in the same paragraph because one of them canceled the other.

Continue reading → Landlocked on Purpose

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Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst

We have a severe and dangerous water problem in the Unites States.  We’re running out of that liquid gold and there’s no way to replace what we’re using at the rate we’re using it.  We can live without oil or natural gas or electricity.  We cannot survive a week without water.

Sure, we lived through the Dust Bowl Days and the horrific droughts of the 1930’s — but that didn’t stop us from building cities in the middle of the desert and the lack of such a precious resource didn’t stop us from planting tons of trees and lots of agriculture that our water tables could not naturally support.  Now, we’re not only in danger of growing fewer crops, we’re tempting the death of our Empire in total loss swaths of our nation as water wells and aquifers naturally dry up and die. Continue reading → Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst