OpEdNews - Diary: Water War as Civil War

Politicians in the Desert Southwest are looking to the Great Lakes for water even as they continue to support cancerous growth. People of the Great Lakes aren't buying that plan.

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"We need a dialog between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water." - Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, 2007

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It has been 15 years since the publication of Marc Reisner's ground breaking book "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water". This unnerving book, the title of which tells the basic story, was correctly seen as a warning and a reminder that nature must win in the end.

Since then, the warnings have gone unheeded, and the prevailing and unquestioned assumption of perpetual growth has had its way. Cities of the West have grown at a rate that some biologists have correctly seen as absolutely cancerous, even as water resources have been dwindling. The desert ecology in what is now the Phoenix-Peoria-Glendale-Scottsdale-Tempe-Mesa-Gilbert-Chandler Complex has been assaulted with so many lawns and pools of the masses - and this, of course, is ongoing even as you read - that the very climate of the region has been impacted. But with developers and Chamber of Commerce people making fortunes, who has time to think about tomorrow?

And what about the burgeoning human population, now past 300 million in the U.S, not to mention soon to be seven billion globally? And - oh,yes - climate change?

In this society, the freedom of individuals to move about, to build, to own, to consume, to procreate at whatever level is desired is considered inviolable right ("It's a free country, and I can do whatever I want"). But in the end, such devotion to individual freedom cannot trump the physical limitations of the planet. (Question: Don't you like individual freedoms? Short answer, this quote from "The Lessons of History" by Will and Ariel Durant: "[T]he first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute, and it dies in chaos.") There are also the all-important issues of self-control, both individual and collective, and the interests of the rest of creation.

And so to water. Yes New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, your politicians and your chambers of commerce will doubtless invoke flag-waving and eagle-soaring freedom and the glories of the "free market" so that growth and more growth forever and ever can go on, as if nature has no limits, and as if there will never be consequences. But, no, this most emphatically does not mandate that others must compensate for their stupidity and incompetence.

Although there are some internal disagreements within Great Lakes states regarding sharing, there is unanimity that water should never leave the ecosystem. The Great Lakes were formed largely from glacial melt, and recharge from precipitation and input from river systems amounts to only about 1% annually. The Great Lakes Basin is a discreet ecosystem with its own unique complex of physical traits and demands that shall be respected and overseen with a care one accords one's home, for it is in fact the homeland of a regional people and not some big bathtub to be drained by growth merchants and short-sighted politicians elsewhere.