Letters to the Editor
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A view from Canada
Michigan's protectiveness towards the Great Lakes reinforces what I've often thought--especially after seeing that map in 2004 that divided North America into "United States of Canada" and "Jesusland." Culturally people in the upper Midwest and the Northeast have much more in common with Canadians than with sunbelters.
But the Sunbelt and its lifestyle--especially the massive automobile dependency of it--bodes poorly for Canada's water supply even if it doesn't get piped south. The Alberta tar sands, currently being exploited to produce synthetic crude oil, are voracious consumers of water. Each barrel of synthetic crude comes with about two or three barrels of seriously polluted water (not to mention the natural gas we have to burn to produce the oil.) A bunch of one-sided trade treaties "negotiated" in the 1980's make it very difficult for us to not supply the U.S. with gasoline. The motoring addiction of sunbelters is driving a goodly chunk of the massive pollution of Western Canada's water.
So, to all those poor folks in Georgia and Phoenix and Vegas who can't keep their big-ass lawns and golf courses watered: Fuck y'all. Your greedy, stupid way of life (not to mention your neanderthal politics) has already inflicted enormous consequences and stripped the resources from people far away. Maybe you thought Jesus would come back and make the whole issue irrelevant before the chickens came home to roost but it turns out you were wrong.
I take comfort in the fact that, with the popping of the last suburban housing bubble, it's the big-ass suburban bungaloids of the sunbelt who will feel the triple whammy of peak oil, climate change and a collapse in property values first and hardest. In the future there will be a lot of need for farm labourers and people to dig coal out by hand--you know, the hard and dangerous way, the way they used to do it back before there were massive oil-fired machines to strip away mountain tops--and it's nice to know that a self-created horde of destitute losers will be the first to have to go down into the hole.