[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
dam-l Re: Water resource development for LA
I have forwarded your comments and questions to the
international email listserv, dam-l, which I manage.
The listmembers range from water resource experts to
dam impact specialists to students.
I expect you will get some rather erudite mail from
which flies in the face of what you currently hold
to be the case.
I will reply at more length when I have the time.
I will say this, howevber. It is rather illogical
and hypocritical or perhaps just plain old naive for you
to hold forth on ecological impacts on importing water
from the north yet not have any sense
Please go and read some of the water impacts literature
before assuming things can't change.
The major problme in human history that has brought civilizations
to their knees are threefold: poor land use and stewardship,
likewise poor resource use, as in water, and further poor
all brought about by a short-range vision of what was possible.
It is this simple: we either use our water resources wisely within
the limits set by nature, and spelled out through plain old physics,
and biology - or we die from lack of water and oxygen.
We need those phytoplankton and we're really not smart enough as a species
to be saving everytyhing through restoration ecology.
We have no choice but to change or else we kill our own species off the
face of the earth.
This is not a radical view... this is commonly held amongst scientists.
I suggest you not let your training in standard economics blind you
to the fact that economics has a bad habit of coming up with measures
which do not measure much very well becasue they leave out "externalities"
ie long-term costs.
Economists and resource use planners are in no position to be killing
off the algae on which we depend for our oxygen.
There are HARD limits. You and your loved ones face limits. Hard
limits - if I deprive you of oxygen for 5 minutes you will die.
That is reality.
Likewise if we kill off the algae and ruin our water su0ply and flood our arable land we will all die - fighting amongst ourtselves for the last scraps.
That is the way that no limits to growth leads.
Have you never studied what happens in a system when exponential and
superexponential growth lead?
I think you must not have to be having such peculiar and naive ideas about
growth in the natural world to hold to such ideas.
Economics and human desires are ephemeral and can be changed. Laws of nature
cannot be. This is just plain old hard science.
We cannot chnage gravity nor the laws of Thermodynamics. That is just the
way it is. But people can change their attitiude.
That is the nature of humans, thoughj they fear change, and that is the
nature of the universe. There ARE limits and we must attend to them or
suffer the consequences.
We have an obligation if we are to be fully human and not just crawl
around on our bellies and see as far as say.. oh - take some of the Roman
emperors... we have an obligation to others, to ourselves in old age, to
future generations if we are not to be remembered if at all.
Go and read some oceanography an impacts peer-reviewed stuff and you will see what I mean.
What exactly gives the people of LA the right to go plunging ahead
destroying resources and demanding others make up fior their wastage?
Think about it. I think the answr is no one has the right to be foolish and then stick their hand out and go - oh, you must save me becasue it
is my right to know no limits and refuse to change.
That is pure narcissism or worse.
We need - all of us - the resources provided by aquatic systems
and we need arable land to grow our food or we will die. All of us.
-Dianne Murray
References: