What a great idea: devote a month to reading as much as possible about one subject, then share the big ideas.
- Water development in the United States is fascinating. I knew nothing about any of it. There’s no way I’m going to be able to teach you everything I learned this month, but I’m going to try and give you the highlights...
• California is pretty much a desert. It has no right to be an agricultural wonderland. Most of the state gets less than 20 inches of rain a year, mostly in the winter. The big cities receive less than a fifth of an inch of rain each summer. Our decision to make it an agricultural powerhouse had forced us to spend ungodly amounts of money and waste insane amounts of water in an effort to maintain that illusion.
• Most of the water that was used initially was drawn from an enormous aquifer that filled up underground over tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. We’re on track to drain it dry soon. It’s almost impossible to quantify how much water we’ve gone through in 100 years.
• ...much of the water for Southern California these days comes from the North. Dams collect the water and then release it in a controlled manner into the Sacramento River. It moves South for about 200 miles, irrigating some farms, until it joins a delta with the San Joaquin River, where it’s pumped into the Delta-Mendota Canal. It’s then pumped and moved another 150 miles UPHILL to get over the mountains in the way.
• This water isn’t for drinking. People don’t need that much. It’s for irrigating farmlands in the desert.
Reisner shows how the Bureau of Land Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, in a pissing contest, dammed up the whole country. In doing so, we destroyed ungodly numbers of species and ruined wildlife and the land. I always pictured companies and pollution as the enemy of the environment, but they’re not. The real bad guys are dams. We did this.
It’s also established the craziest form of welfare I’ve seen in recent memory. Our tax dollars paid for these dams. Billions. Then we pump the water to farms where we sell it to farmers at hugely subsidized rates. We make it so cheap (again with tax dollars) that people HAVE to waste water. It just makes economic sense. There’s so much cheap water around that they grow water-wasteful crops we don’t need. It’s horrific. Some companies have found ways to create paper farms to rig the system.
...One more thing before I move on. As much as you might hate dams, there’s an argument to be made that we won World War II because of them.
#learnnewthings schedule:
January 2016 – Water and growth in California
February – Wine
March – Game theory
April – Cryptography
May – Art history
June – The history of railroads in the U.S.
July – Oceanography
August – Football (strategy and theory)
September – Chaos theory
November – Linguistics
Please keep posting this guy's stuff. I'm looking forward to his upcoming topics. Gives me an idea of what I'd learn each month if I had the time. In addition, it convinces me to start looking for the time to do so.
Here's an idea,"Let's learn and discuss "x" topic this month on Hubski" might make a cool post.
Will do, as long as later topics are as good as this one. He has inspired good conversations before.
- Let's learn and discuss "x" topic this month on Hubski
We could use Dr. Aaron's schedule. I don't think I'll be able to catch up this month, but I might try to get ahead on game theory.
I've heard Cadillac Desert recommended a few times. I haven't read it simply because it isn't on Audible and I can crush an Audible in a day or week while printed matter takes me months.
Not mentioned, unfortunately, is Chinatown - which despite being an oscar-winning noir is actually a brief and insightful history into William Mulholland and water rights in Southern California.
The why of overdevelopment isn't mentioned in this analysis, unfortunately. Why irrigate the desert to turn California into farmland? Why create a massive overabundance of hydroelectric power? The answer is "geopolitical strategy" - American food production has been used as a club since the end of WWI and our ability to refine more materials than any other nation makes our possession of resources irrelevant. We may not have the world's greatest strategic reserves of oil but we sure as fuck have the greatest refinery capacity, which means the world's oil flows through America. Likewise aluminum; as an undergrad I got to tour the Intalco Works, which is a place you've never heard of, which refines aluminum from all over the world, which uses more electricity than Los Angeles.
This is why the Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea in order to turn Uzbekistan into cropland: we never had to send bombers or troops, we could just turn off the flow of grain. Afghanistan was met with "hedgerow to hedgerow". All that copper the Chinese used up, driving up prices? They bought it from us.
Dams make more sense if you view them as a civil defense project. Our interstate highway system, after all, was created to facilitate the rapid mobilization of troops against Soviet invasion...
Any chance of creating a tag for this particular subject? I haven't been posting long enough to add my own tag.
You can follow #learnnewthings to follow the series.