Letters to the Editor
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And we're going to heat those houses, how?
People in the desert don't have to heat their houses in 20 degree weather. Also, none of the states mentioned have the tax advantages for retirees like Texas and Florida and none have the exploding job growth like Nevada.
Let the pheasants take Detroit.
I say tear up the stupid golf courses, drain the pools, and charge more for water.
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The invisible hand rules
I always get a kick out politician's claims of how many jobs they have created. Likewise for how we must keep our economic growth alive and well. And how we must always be number 1. ( well, that one bit the dust some time ago).
Politicians and business leaders act as if the only thing that matters is growth. Well, we've had unprecedented growth for some time now, and I haven't noticed the environmental problems going away. In fact . . . you might even say they have gotten worse.
Now these observations will hardly qualify me for a Nobel Prize.(Damn- someone beat me to it!), but they do illustrate a very simple and profound bit of truth. The systems we live under are not subject to our desires. Is that so bad? Smaller cars, smaller families. natural shrubs etc.
A simple solution: stop bitching about the invisible hand that rules all of us and start thinking smarter. Notice that many of the global problems exist either because of overpopulation and/or environmental degradation. We should talk about this at a local level and stop worrying that someone might get upset if we have to change our ways.
Actually the earth will survive no matter where the water is or the nature of our air. But our children and grandchildren will care. They may well ask: why didn't you pay more attention, and take better care of our home?
We spend enormous amounts of money educating our children. Shouldn't we think just a little further out and make sure they have a decent home and environment to live in?
I think the bottom line of dealing with the invisible but inevitable laws we live by will ultimately rest on how much we care and how we are willing to conserve for future generations.
As always, all politics is local and the question always is: what will I do?
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Don't Move Here for the Water!
We live 35 miles west of Lake Michigan in an already overbuilt, but still spreading Chicago suburb. They keep extending the rail line, so developers keep adding more houses. Trouble is, we are all on wells. You can sink only so many wells per acre, and some of these developers are so greedy that they ignore the capacity of the water table to keep up with all the demand. The result is that some developments run out of water in dry summers, by which time the developers are long gone. If you must move here, don't do it for the water.
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the water...
is not going antwhere, except in the nestle bottles and related pothole john corporate give aways. the economics of transporting water over long distansces is daunting. the politics is overwhelming.
as a michigan resident who depends on a well for water, and lives adjacent to huge gravel mines which abuse the aquifers locally, my immediate concerns lie there.
but my previous invitation to the good folks of georgia remains...
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What About Flooding The Desert With Sea Water?
Humans have been harvesting salt by evaporating seawater forever- why couldn't we harvest rain instead?
Theoretically, you could build (relatively) short pipelines and use smaller-scale pumps to flood barren desert with seawater from the coast. By managing the depth of the water for optimal evaporation 'turnover' while vastly increasing water-surface area in the region, you could conceivably alter the local weather patterns.
The increased moisture would be pinned against the mountains by easterly winds (right?), squeezing the water from the air as it rises. This would 'purify' the water naturally, filling the coastal plains reservoir's.
I don't know if it's possible, or what the necessary square miles you would need to flood to be viable, or if you could get past desert-lovers' objections- but it's an idea.
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The Nigeria of North America?
It's a pretty lousy time to be a Michigander. Our economy is in shambles. There's exactly one major presidential candidate (John Edwards) whose willing to address how NAFTA and "free trade" has destroyed our way of life. The ecological destruction that Nestle has caused in northern Michigan, with streams running dry, is dismissed as a "minor issue". Of course, our state government sucks and politicians in southeast Michigan would rather indulge in petty race-baiting than substantive issues.
So here we are, a weak economy, a shrinking population, a corrupt and incompetent state government and enormous reserves of an increasingly valuable natural resource. You only have to look at the oil rich countries in the developing world to get a pretty chillling picture of what that could mean for us.
Of course, we've also got a lot of angry people with guns and boats.
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Bottled Water
Reading about Michigan's environmental problems makes me sick. I live in Minnesota and we have some drought, unrestrained city growth and the slow degradation of our state forests. Water pollution is alive and well from small communities dumping sewage directly into the rivers and streams. And of course, there is corn pesticide and fertilizer runnoff. Hello, Louisiana dead zone! Stil, Michigan I think has us 'beat.'
But the point the Michiganders are making about bottled water depleting the aquifer seems to be 'easily' avoidable, if a politician actually stood up to a corporation. Desani, which is made by Atlanta's Coca Cola company, is taken from public water systems in Georgia, and then sold in plastic bottles at a profit to people who think their tap water is bad. (!!) Pepsi does the same thing with their 'water' product - using public water systems. And now Michigan is allowing this to happen on a massive scale under thieir own feet.
This robbing of the public's water is also going on in India on a massive scale. Bottled water should be outlawed.
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Nullus Again Re: Shipping
All trains lead to Chicago...(check a map if you've forgotten where that is). There are direct lines in constant use from Baltimore/NYC/Boston to Chicago (and points in between) and points north from there. The claim that the upper midwest Great Lake States are dependent on shipped goods from the south/SW is uninformed.