Using Water the American Way

Every year when I teach environmental science my undergraduates kind of roll their eyes when I talk about the Ogallala Aquifer and our misuse of water. Yesterday's New York Times featured a front-page story about the dangers the aquifer water supply faces. What is the Ogallala and why does it matter?

Aquifers are groundwater. In some places they rest close to the surface and in other places they are deeper down. Even deserts have aquifers under them. There is an aquifer under Cape Cod. Aquifers form when freshwater from any source, for example rain, snowmelt, and glacial melting, seeps through porous layers of soil and rock and is stored underground. The water in the Ogallala Aquifer (or the High Plains Aquifer as the New York Times labelled it) is ancient. We call it "fossil water" because it originated during and after the last ice age, when water west of the 100th parallel was abundant, thanks to melting ice and moist climatic conditions. The Aquifer runs roughly north and south for hundreds of miles, from South Dakota to parts of west Texas. The region gets about 8-15 inches of rain per year so very little of the today's rain reaches the aquifer. In that sense it is a finite, non-renewable resource. 

For several decades farmers have withdrawn water from the aquifer in enormous quantities. It was cheap and easy to withdraw and with it, they irrigated millions of acres. Incidentally they made enormous profits and of course, fed millions of people. The crop circles that you see in this photo are irrigated with water from the Ogallala Aquifer. Each circle is a mile across.

The next photo is even more amazing. It is a satellite image from NOAA's Earth Observatory site. This photo really provides a sense of the extent of irrigated land that depends on the Ogallala Aquifer.

Courtesy of NOAA Earth Observatory

Most of the water that is drawn from the aquifer is used for farming in conditions that are semi-arid to arid. And most of the crops that are raised are grain or fodder that is fed to cattle and other livestock. Livestock is raised to provide meat for the millions of people in the United States and elsewhere who choose to depend on it as part of their daily diet. So the critically low levels of water in the Ogallala Aquifer are attributable to our hunger for meat. 

The article in the New York Times touted the "miracle" of providing so much food grown in a dry but fertile place, and one commentator declared the problem of the aquifer to be "economic" at its heart. Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for meat is an economic problem but its scope is much larger. It threatens our ability to feed ourselves in the coming decades.

I have a student who stated that human inventiveness would find a way around this problem. But there is a certain bottom line. Where meat consumption and water consumption continue to grow, and where resources are finite, the end result transcends what we can invent our way out of. Either we must move away from meat consumption (we can't seem to break our habit and the rest of the world is following suit), move to exploit other localities and water sources (we have already done this at tremendous, ongoing, global ecological cost to places like Amazonia, where the rainforest was cleared for pasture). Or we will continue down the road to a system of food production and consumption that is ever more inequitable as we lose control over the right to feed ourselves. 
As the right to eat becomes a privilege, the devastating results are pretty horrible to imagine.

Human cultures have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without the gross consumption of meat that has become the norm for us. Human ingenuity from diverse cultures has come to the fore in managing water, collecting water, and storing water in ways that we are only beginning to learn. 

Back to the classroom. When I teach environmental science I inevitably discuss the demise of the Aral Sea, an example of mid-20th century ecological mismanagement by the former Soviet Union. The death of the Aral Sea was a slow motion disaster that unfolded over several decades. Abundance eventually gave way to disaster. In the United States we are seeing the end of abundance within our lifetimes. With potential disaster on the horizon, isn't it time we Americans took a lesson from the rest of the world on how to manage our resources more responsibly?

Hard and soft

When I take my landscape architecture students from the Boston Architectural College for a walk in the city I ask them what the plants are "doing." Inevitably they tell me that plants growing along the building, shrubs in front, vines growing up the wall, or green or flowering things are "softening" the architecture. I see their point. The curvaceous volume of the plants contrasting with the flat, angular spaces of the building are providing a kind of visual softness.

But if we look at soft and hard and hard and soft in another way, maybe we can come to understand things a little differently. This concept started to clarify itself for me when I visited Sri Lanka. There at the top of a mountain at the magnificent Kudimbigala Forest Monastery stood an ancient stupa made of bricks pummeled by the wind. The stupa looked solid against the sky and high clouds. All around it grass bent deep in the strong wind. In the distance the Indian Ocean, flat, impassive, and ethereal laid itself out toward the horizon. A vision of nature as soft and gossamer as could be against the strength and architectural determination the solid brick stupa.

The grass nothing, the stupa "something." But the stupa had areas where the bricks had loosened or fallen out. Countless pilgrims had walked up the hewn steps of the mountain with bricks for the stupa. All around the large structure they had built small cairns of brick and rock, insignificant piles that represented quantities of devotion. The cairns were small but they were numerous. It occurred to me that they represented the spiritual life of the people who assembled them. A life ongoing, flowing, growing. The grass and sky and ocean and wind all around the stupa also were eternal. It was structure itself that was constrained by materiality, by bricks and mortar, by its temporality, and by its hardness. It was there at Kudimbigala that I began to question the juxtaposition of monument versus moment.

Back here in the highly developed built environment of north America the same questions emerge. Azaleas flutter like clouds against a hard brick wall. In front of them the heavy metal of gigantic vehicles, a hot paved roadway. All of these built things will rot and rust over time. The soft flowers of the shrub will turn to seed and continue onward with species for longer than the wall will stand.

Unfolding

It seems so late in the season, racing past the middle of May, but the last frost date just sailed by so in a sense, the growing season here in Boston is just taking off. One signal of this is that the leaves of some plants are still unfolding.

The leaf, this wonderful structure that supports the mechanism for photosynthesis. Countless protein-laden chloroplasts inside, the dynamos that convert solar energy into chemical energy. The plant can't risk losing them, and the soft body of the leaf can't withstand frost.

So as the growing season goes into full swing we finally see the unfurling, the unfolding, the exploding of the photosynthetic universe. Its geometric forms are as amazing as the biochemical processes they enable.