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Woah, Paolo Bacigalupi wrote "Water knife" only 7 years ago and I thought it depicts a scenario our grandkids will face. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_W

Woah, Paolo Bacigalupi wrote "Water knife" only 7 years ago and I thought it depicts a scenario our grandkids will face. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Mississippi is not in drought. At least not drought of water.
- greenie_beans 4y ago
  you're right that this isn't a problem of drought. it's a problem of infrastructure, money, and power. but north mississippi is in a drought. jackson isn't in north mississippi
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
Its kinda bonkers that golf courses and grass lawns are things allowed to thrive in areas of the US where they are not naturally occurring. I also think its kinda crazy that humans have brought agriculture to a desert via irrigation and think that's sustainable. This is the type of thing where Federal laws/rulings are needed because there are like 4 states over consuming the water.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Irrigation agriculture has been a primary source of life in places like Arizona for millennia. Reducing it down to "irrigation is unsustainable" is both incorrect and unproductive. It can be made sustainable, as long as we understand the system and respect appropriate limits within that. It's likely those changes will need to be larger than anyone wants, but they're still possible in a less dramatic way than "everyone is forcibly removed from the area".
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    Also, that water is shipped to other countries in the form of alfalfa. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    > It can be made sustainable, as long as we understand the system and respect appropriate limits within that. I think this illustrates that its sustainable on paper but the current sets of humans using the Colorado river water aren't using it sustainably though when its all added up. We can get pedantic about it but something has to change, right?
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      I don't think there's any disagreement that things have to change. The difference is whether we're talking about negotiating a difficult balance of competing interests within reasonable limits, or engaging in a political knife fight to decide who gets all the remaining water. We need to make a conscious decision to recognize a balance is possible though and negotiate it. If we don't, the situation eventually devolves into the knife fight regardless.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    > places like Arizona for millennia. Millennia? Do you have any references for this? AFAIK the natives did not do large scale irrigation, I'll be interested to know if that was the case. Further, my understanding is that we are getting out a multi-hundred year wet period for California and the Southwest. Before then it was particularly arid, and we are returning to that and then some. Which is all really unfortunate as most of the concentrated population settling there has been since the 1800s, when the climate was maximally accommodating.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Yes, I used to work as an archaeologist in the southwest. Canal irrigation in the Santa Cruz watershed is found from the late archaic period (<2000 BCE), as a well-established example. Those networks remained mainly small regional networks until the Hohokam classic period, when they built massive canal networks irrigating tens of thousands of acres and sometimes draining entire rivers dry. Many of these later canals remain still in use today (in greatly modified states), like Phoenix's Grand Canal.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-is-our-obsession-with-lawns/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-is-our-obsession... This is a good listen/read.
aaroninsf 4y ago
Its future is already becoming reality in the watershed of the over-subscribed Colorado. 2022 is a remarkable year, one of a striking tipping point: in which a large number of climate change cautionary tales moved from speculative to the front page. As with the rapid evolution of AI txt2image tools, the notable stories, milestones, data points, are coming too quickly to keep up with. Jackson has its own specific problems, and they aren't drought-specific as others noted ITT; but the story is nonetheless a useful addition to the growing list of examples of where our institutional and structural response to ecological and climatological challengs is grotesquely inadequate. As in Kim Stanley Robinson's fantasies, hope seems to lie in something which today seems as unlikely as our current headlines did a few years ago: an intervention of some kind which puts actual decision-making power in the hands of policy makers and scientists who understand what is happening and the scale of response required to ride it out as a civilization.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

Mississippi is not in drought. At least not drought of water.

greenie_beans 4y ago
you're right that this isn't a problem of drought. it's a problem of infrastructure, money, and power. but north mississippi is in a drought. jackson isn't in north mississippi

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

Its kinda bonkers that golf courses and grass lawns are things allowed to thrive in areas of the US where they are not naturally occurring. I also think its kinda crazy that humans have brought agriculture to a desert via irrigation and think that's sustainable. This is the type of thing where Federal laws/rulings are needed because there are like 4 states over consuming the water.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
Irrigation agriculture has been a primary source of life in places like Arizona for millennia. Reducing it down to "irrigation is unsustainable" is both incorrect and unproductive. It can be made sustainable, as long as we understand the system and respect appropriate limits within that. It's likely those changes will need to be larger than anyone wants, but they're still possible in a less dramatic way than "everyone is forcibly removed from the area".
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  Also, that water is shipped to other countries in the form of alfalfa. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  > It can be made sustainable, as long as we understand the system and respect appropriate limits within that. I think this illustrates that its sustainable on paper but the current sets of humans using the Colorado river water aren't using it sustainably though when its all added up. We can get pedantic about it but something has to change, right?
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I don't think there's any disagreement that things have to change. The difference is whether we're talking about negotiating a difficult balance of competing interests within reasonable limits, or engaging in a political knife fight to decide who gets all the remaining water. We need to make a conscious decision to recognize a balance is possible though and negotiate it. If we don't, the situation eventually devolves into the knife fight regardless.
- seadan83 4y ago
  > places like Arizona for millennia. Millennia? Do you have any references for this? AFAIK the natives did not do large scale irrigation, I'll be interested to know if that was the case. Further, my understanding is that we are getting out a multi-hundred year wet period for California and the Southwest. Before then it was particularly arid, and we are returning to that and then some. Which is all really unfortunate as most of the concentrated population settling there has been since the 1800s, when the climate was maximally accommodating.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Yes, I used to work as an archaeologist in the southwest. Canal irrigation in the Santa Cruz watershed is found from the late archaic period (<2000 BCE), as a well-established example. Those networks remained mainly small regional networks until the Hohokam classic period, when they built massive canal networks irrigating tens of thousands of acres and sometimes draining entire rivers dry. Many of these later canals remain still in use today (in greatly modified states), like Phoenix's Grand Canal.
zikduruqe 4y ago
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-is-our-obsession-with-lawns/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-is-our-obsession... This is a good listen/read.

aaroninsf 4y ago

Its future is already becoming reality in the watershed of the over-subscribed Colorado. 2022 is a remarkable year, one of a striking tipping point: in which a large number of climate change cautionary tales moved from speculative to the front page. As with the rapid evolution of AI txt2image tools, the notable stories, milestones, data points, are coming too quickly to keep up with. Jackson has its own specific problems, and they aren't drought-specific as others noted ITT; but the story is nonetheless a useful addition to the growing list of examples of where our institutional and structural response to ecological and climatological challengs is grotesquely inadequate. As in Kim Stanley Robinson's fantasies, hope seems to lie in something which today seems as unlikely as our current headlines did a few years ago: an intervention of some kind which puts actual decision-making power in the hands of policy makers and scientists who understand what is happening and the scale of response required to ride it out as a civilization.