I know negotiations among states that draw from the Colorado River are ongoing with water rationing measures being discussed, but it feels like the threat of water shortage doesn’t align with booming growth in this part of the country. Is the threat overstated? Are there solutions available when things get really dire? Or is it just hubris of prioritizing short term profits instead of long term sustainability? All the above?
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Long-term threats are things people are fundamentally not wired to handle well. Things like climate change, risk of eventual (often lung) cancer, pollution, and eventual resource shortages (such as water) are things people naturally have more issues wrapping their heads around being ‘urgent’ when compared to immediate things like hunger/thirst, being confronted with a dangerous situation (a la a violent person), not having enough money in your account to make ends meet this week/month, lacking a fundamental need or security in your own life that you feel effecting you NOW, and so on.
But, that’s an important thing to know and account for with human nature: slow, obscure threats are naturally going to feel not bad or not very ‘real’, but often they are some of the worst out there, as we often have power to change them–after all, we see them coming much more easily–but often we fail at do much about them by comparison.
A big thing related to the water use is the aquifer that supplies a huge portion of the US–it’s not renewable, or at least, it takes a LONG time to renew, and we’ve been steadily draining it to where people might potentially see it run out in their lifetime. People use it for drinking water, and for crops, but also things like watering their lawn in places that water-hungry lush green grass has no place naturally being. Tapping into this aquifer was huge in allowing towns and cities to flourish in much dryer areas across the great plains where rainfall and river water are not enough to sustain what we currently have there (or, what is being used currently) by a large amount. Yet it goes on. A distant-feeling future point where this becomes an issue is something people are wired to be more comfortable being a future problem (which, will very much become a problem). Same with the river issue.
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