Madeline Albright, speaking at the Carter Center last spring, had some scary words for the audience when asked what she foresaw as the biggest source of conflict in the future. “If you think we fight over oil now, wait till we start fighting over water.”
Few things in the political sphere gross me out more when there is some sort of crisis and politicians ask their consitutents to do something that, a) they should have been doing anyway, b) doesn’t really do anything to ameliorate the problem but through some roundabout reasoning the politician has invented it’s justified, or c) all of the above.
After 9/11, President Bush asked Americans to shop more to bolster the economy. And when he finally confessed we are addicted to foreign oil, instead of telling people to conserve fuel, drive less, carpool, etc, he said the answer is alternative energy, specifically from corn. Far be it for us to be asked to consume less! No, we’ll use the same amount, but of corn ethanol instead of fossil fuels, so that the price of corn in the developing world shoots up dramatically. PERFECT.
HAPPY “TAKE A SHORTER SHOWER MONTH”, Y’ALL!!!
In the case of our drought and impending complete lack of water, Governor Sonny Perdue asked Georgians to take shorter showers. Hey, that’s a whopping 3 to 7 gallons per person! But there’s way more at play here than the state’s residents’ personal use of water. Way more. Residential use accounts for only about 30% of Georgia’s water consumption.
So when you turn off the faucet to save water while you lather your hands, keep in mind that there have been no restrictions to commerical, industrial, or agricultural use in the state. And as you watch your tiny intown yard and garden turn brown, think on the houses on golf courses and the golf courses themselves have that no watering restrictions because they’re considered agricultural.
The city, state, and entire region failed to plan effectively for such a disaster. Consultants brought in to look at the problem said they’d never seen a landlocked city stay oblivious for so long about a completely inevitable fact. And Atlanta has the highest elevation of any major city this side of Denver, so gravity is working against us even when it does rain. This is not a sudden problem, but has been a creeping disaster.
“It’s been develop first and ask questions later,” says attorney Gil Rogers at the Southern Environmental Law Center in an interesting article on the southeast’s water crisis in The New York Times today. Creative Loafing also has a story this week about the influence of development interests in the slow actions taken by local and state government in the drought (and the unavoidable Samuel Taylor Coleridge allusion!).
Far be it from us to get the government involved in water conservation, right? Let’s keep it voluntary, so people can choose to conserve! So management for this resource, which cities in the midwest have been proactively micromanaging for decades, has been very laissez-faire. The extraordinary drought finally triggered some kind of reaction, but it’s been playing out in slow-motion. You know what happens if our faucets run dry? Um, well…officials aren’t sure yet. They’re just hoping it doesn’t happen.
Meanwhile, the rest of us get to gaze at photos like this:
(via NYT)
So much for dropping that extra couple million for the lakefront property.
Well, I’ll try to end on a positive note: perhaps the number of children conceived in hot tubs will drastically decrease.
Previously: Water conservation made easy
Tags: conservation, drought, hot tubs, nobody asked for my opinion, sonny perdue, water
I have beef with that NYT article about the South’s profligate growth and lack of foresight. The growth occurred partially because people were leaving major cities in the North and Midwest. It’s not like we just refused to use birth control down here or something. Ok, bad example. But I’m pretty sure that, when exporting their discontented citizens, the old industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest didn’t hand out chunks of their infrastructure to the passing station wagons on their way down the Jersey Turnpike.
The Times‘ hissy fit about unconstrained growth smacks of paternalism. Were we just supposed to languish in our agricultural squalor down here, while the more developed regions of the country used us as their breadbasket and penal colony? It seems to me that it’s real easy for New Yorkers to wag their fingers at the Southeast and say, “Tsk, tsk. Shoulda slowed down all that economic development,” without considering that the Southeast was desperate for jobs and industry about fifty years ago.
I totally agree that we’re doing a crap job of conserving and planning, but I just get ruffled by the NYT, a monied paper in a gilded city, boxing our ears and accusing us of what amounts to a heap of stereotypical lunacy. I mean, doesn’t the whole world already know that the South is slow, backwards, mystical, anti-science, and self-deceptive? The Times could have done a much better article if they had examined the reasons why the South has a history of poorly centralized local government, which leads to powerful land developers making bank at the expense of the publicly funded infrastructure and urban planning.
And that, ladies and ladies, is my scattershot screed of the day.
GOOD POINT! In elementary school, all my friends were born and raised in Georgia or at least the south. By senior year of high school all my best friends were from Michigan and Philadelphia and NY. VERY PECULIAR.
Corrections:
First: New York had the same issues with growth/land speculation, etc. at the turn of the 20th century that cities like Atlanta have had more recentrly. While the modes of transportation available at the time are clearly different than what we have now, the biggest difference is that New York city planners PLANNED for growth. We did not. They subdivided the land for miles before anyone even thought for a second about developing it. We let people destroy our farmland and bottleneck our highways. When they complained about traffic, we built more lanes. Metro Atlanta is bigger than the state of Delaware and has grown at a rate never seen since Rome. But Rome had quaint little thing called a GOVERNMENT. People in the south don’t like government. They didn’t like government when they said “you can’t have slaves”, they didn’t like government when they said “you can’t keep black kids out of your public schools,” they didn’t like government when they said “you can’t force your religion on people,” and they hate government when they say “you have to pay taxes” almost as much as they hate government when they say “you can’t do whatever the hell you want with your property.” No, the southern ethos has much deeper problems than the mean old “land developers”–not that they get a free ride either.
Second: Ethanol is not the answer, but the biggest problem with agricultural prices when it comes to the developing world is not they they are too high, but that they are not high enough. Farm subsidies in the western world, mostly going to huge consolidated corporate farms, encourage overproduction which results in a flooded global market reducing prices to extremely low levels. In turn, farmers in the Third World can get very little for their products. We should be much more concerned with increasing production and exports from the developing world and less on increasing consumption and imports into those countries. Production increases can result in reinvestment in infrastructure and capacity which will cause increases in purchasing power and consumption.
Aw, come on. It’s too easy to blame these problems on southern people just being stupid and rebellious. While I certainly defer to Holden’s urban planning expertise, I don’t think it’s very intellectually rigorous to say that the root problem is the character of the southern white population, past and present. People react to very hard-to-quantify forces, both market and otherwise, and I have a hard time believing that southerners are and have always been congenitally anti-government.
What if southerners are really anti-government in all of those instances that Holden listed? Why might that be? Maybe these were all instances in which the federal government, largely representing the desires of the citizens of other regions of the country, attempted to impose unpopular policies on the South.
I’m not saying the feds weren’t absolutely right to do so; ending slavery, integrating, and collecting taxes were absolutely good moves in the grand scheme of things. I guess what I’m trying to say is that southerners developed this allegedly inborn mistrust of government through long experience with having unwanted change forced down their throats.
Why might the changes have been unwanted? Partially because the South was an academic backwater compared to the North for most of history which resulted in a poorly educated population, and partially because slavery, in particular, threatened the South’s economic livelihood. People fear poverty and the unknown, and the federal government has repeatedly forced changes that could understandably be perceived by white southerners as threatening. The North, to my knowledge, has never been invaded by the South, nor had southern troops force social change in its institutions. Again, I’m glad these changes happened, but I think the manner of implementation has a lot to do with what you’re describing as southerners’ anti-government bent.
Furthermore, I don’t see the connection between southerners’ resistance to federal enforcement of abolition, integration, and taxes and local urban planning. Are southerners really that resistant to local government too? I kind of always thought that weak local governments in the South had a lot to do with the historical concentration of wealth in the capitalist class and a lack of labor unions. And I never said developers were mean, but my experience, which I admit might not be generalizable, is that they can have a lot of power over local government.
As for Rome, I would assume that, though a republic, government in Rome was a bit more authoritarian than our form of democracy. I also think that New York at the turn of the 20th century was vastly different in composition and industry than the South during its recent population boom. But again, I defer to Holden’s superior knowledge of history.
I totally agree on ag subsidies.
Maybe we should save the rest of this discussion for the next time we’re drunk in the back of Mark’s car. Then we can force everybody else to care too.
I don’t like government and I have been voluntarily conserving water via multiple methods for over 2 months, now. Where does that leave me? Oh, yeah, I also hate nearly all development and all bureaucracy.
Holden, I’m not eating 3rd world corn. sorry. How ya been?