6 ms·

An Account of Human Costs: The reservoirs that provide water to New York City

77 points by daddy_drank 6y ago

pfdietz 6y ago
The second article mentions one of the odd side effects of all this: exposure in a quarry of wonderful Devonian tree fossils near Gilboa, New York, a town submerged in the filling of one of the larger reservoirs. This world-class fossil site has implications for theories of the late-Devonian mass extinction, one of the "big five" mass extinctions, where the colonization of land by large plants may have caused disruption of the global climate.
- ovi256 6y ago
  The plants were not able to have their equivalent of our current debate "Is is all right for our descendants to populate the planet even if it alters the global environment and climate" ? It's ironic that we are able to and that may only reduce our evolutionary fitness.
  - wil421 6y ago
    Plants and animals are natural parts of this world. Humans burning everything they can get their hands on is not.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      And it's not a moral question, really, it's purely practical. Pushing the world into something like a Big Five extinction would be horribly painful.
      - wil421 6y ago
        Animals can be destructive and overpopulate. Deer and pigs are a good example of species that can overpopulate and destroy nature.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        That doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I wrote. In particular, that animals can overpopulate would not make something of the scale of a "Big Five" mass extinction any less apocalyptic.
    - ovi256 6y ago
      AFAIK, humans are still part of the animal kingdom, just one with an overdeveloped sense of the self and self-importance.
octoberfranklin 6y ago
> Do you do nothing and impose a water famine on a teeming city, or do you pull the lever and shift the onus onto much more sparsely populated rural areas? This is bogus: do neither. The cities should have accepted Nature's limits on the population of that land. There is only so much water and therefore there can only be so many people. To put it simply: "sorry, New York is full. We cannot issue you a building permit or allow you to make a water/sewer connection." Bolinas, CA does this. But oh, no! We the great and mighty Cities Of Humanity know better than Nature. We must not accept her limits. And so they grow without control, and then when Fire or Cholera exposes their overleveraged water account they fall back on Too Big To Fail. Sorry farmers, we know better, your land is ours now. We're Urbanists, we know what's best for you. If you're interested in these issues, consider reading Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's long and scholarly and dry (heh) but it will change your perspective on the limits of Nature. Perhaps you'll move somewhere with 100 inches of rainfall per year, like I did.
- smallnamespace 6y ago
  > Nature's limits on the population of that land Every city must import food. By that argument, all cities exceed the biological carrying capacity of its land and therefore shouldn't exist. Many nations also have a greater population than their capacity to grow food (e.g. UK, Germany). Should we forcefully remove half their population? Anyway, if you accept that cities can exist and can import goods, why is water somehow the exception?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Probably because water is (considered) a utility whereas food is (to a large extent) privately produced, transported, and sold. > The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sorrow, anger. That land might have been in their families for generations, might have been the family’s sole support, might have been the only home they’d ever known. The city decreed and mobilized and condemned properties for seizure without asking residents’ permission; found all sorts of legal subterfuges for denying the value of their fields and homesteads as established by expert witnesses; lowballed every estimate; treated them with distant contempt. Since the politicians and commissioners were not running for office upstate, they felt no need to package their enterprise as a humanitarian mission; they spoke in numbers and legal precedents. Do you think this is acceptable conduct if it was in the service of procuring food for city people, or people in a country that was a net importer of food?
pkkim 6y ago
One book I'd recommend for changing your perspective, especially to anyone in the Bay Area, is _Imperial San Francisco_. It ties together early San Francisco's extractive economy with late 19th century American imperialism and industrialization. The author argues that by the 1860s, Northern California and Nevada were already in San Francisco's hinterland, but city leaders sought to bring the entire Pacific basin under the city's dominion. The book covers mining, energy, armaments, and media as well as water. And it asks the same question as this essay: what were the costs, and was it worth it?
- ChrisLTD 6y ago
  Imperial San Francisco is a great book. Years after reading it, I’m still shocked by the book’s account of how badly the environment was damaged by the gold rush. It was so damaging that billions in taxpayer money are still spent each year combating the effects over a hundred years later.

77 points by daddy_drank 6y ago

The second article mentions one of the odd side effects of all this: exposure in a quarry of wonderful Devonian tree fossils near Gilboa, New York, a town submerged in the filling of one of the larger reservoirs. This world-class fossil site has implications for theories of the late-Devonian mass extinction, one of the "big five" mass extinctions, where the colonization of land by large plants may have caused disruption of the global climate.

ovi256 6y ago
The plants were not able to have their equivalent of our current debate "Is is all right for our descendants to populate the planet even if it alters the global environment and climate" ? It's ironic that we are able to and that may only reduce our evolutionary fitness.
- wil421 6y ago
  Plants and animals are natural parts of this world. Humans burning everything they can get their hands on is not.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    And it's not a moral question, really, it's purely practical. Pushing the world into something like a Big Five extinction would be horribly painful.
    - wil421 6y ago
      Animals can be destructive and overpopulate. Deer and pigs are a good example of species that can overpopulate and destroy nature.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        That doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I wrote. In particular, that animals can overpopulate would not make something of the scale of a "Big Five" mass extinction any less apocalyptic.
  - ovi256 6y ago
    AFAIK, humans are still part of the animal kingdom, just one with an overdeveloped sense of the self and self-importance.

octoberfranklin 6y ago

> Do you do nothing and impose a water famine on a teeming city, or do you pull the lever and shift the onus onto much more sparsely populated rural areas? This is bogus: do neither. The cities should have accepted Nature's limits on the population of that land. There is only so much water and therefore there can only be so many people. To put it simply: "sorry, New York is full. We cannot issue you a building permit or allow you to make a water/sewer connection." Bolinas, CA does this. But oh, no! We the great and mighty Cities Of Humanity know better than Nature. We must not accept her limits. And so they grow without control, and then when Fire or Cholera exposes their overleveraged water account they fall back on Too Big To Fail. Sorry farmers, we know better, your land is ours now. We're Urbanists, we know what's best for you. If you're interested in these issues, consider reading Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's long and scholarly and dry (heh) but it will change your perspective on the limits of Nature. Perhaps you'll move somewhere with 100 inches of rainfall per year, like I did.

smallnamespace 6y ago
> Nature's limits on the population of that land Every city must import food. By that argument, all cities exceed the biological carrying capacity of its land and therefore shouldn't exist. Many nations also have a greater population than their capacity to grow food (e.g. UK, Germany). Should we forcefully remove half their population? Anyway, if you accept that cities can exist and can import goods, why is water somehow the exception?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Probably because water is (considered) a utility whereas food is (to a large extent) privately produced, transported, and sold. > The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sorrow, anger. That land might have been in their families for generations, might have been the family’s sole support, might have been the only home they’d ever known. The city decreed and mobilized and condemned properties for seizure without asking residents’ permission; found all sorts of legal subterfuges for denying the value of their fields and homesteads as established by expert witnesses; lowballed every estimate; treated them with distant contempt. Since the politicians and commissioners were not running for office upstate, they felt no need to package their enterprise as a humanitarian mission; they spoke in numbers and legal precedents. Do you think this is acceptable conduct if it was in the service of procuring food for city people, or people in a country that was a net importer of food?

pkkim 6y ago

One book I'd recommend for changing your perspective, especially to anyone in the Bay Area, is _Imperial San Francisco_. It ties together early San Francisco's extractive economy with late 19th century American imperialism and industrialization. The author argues that by the 1860s, Northern California and Nevada were already in San Francisco's hinterland, but city leaders sought to bring the entire Pacific basin under the city's dominion. The book covers mining, energy, armaments, and media as well as water. And it asks the same question as this essay: what were the costs, and was it worth it?

ChrisLTD 6y ago
Imperial San Francisco is a great book. Years after reading it, I’m still shocked by the book’s account of how badly the environment was damaged by the gold rush. It was so damaging that billions in taxpayer money are still spent each year combating the effects over a hundred years later.