APRIL 12 2015
California always leads the way.
The last time I visited Los Angeles was in 2009 when one of our daughters lived there. While wandering in the Century City shopping Center on the edge of Beverly Hills, I noticed – as a man how could I miss it – that women there were showing a lot of cleavage, something not yet evident in more modest Ontario. Since then displaying one’s female attributes has become a pretty general phenomenon everywhere, especially among the more glamorous crowd. One look at the (British) Daily Mail confirms this. Also in California, now 40 years ago, Mega Churches were born, with the late Rev. Schuler leading the way in his Crystal Palace. This too quickly spread all over the USA.
Today California leads the way again, showing that water is a finite resource. Being deprived of adequate water will have major implications not only for the sunshine state but for the entire world. It is the first real Western casualty of Global Warming, with many more to follow. This past week I saw a map showing the exceptional drought conditions in the USA. More than half the country suffers from lack of sufficient moisture, either in the form of rain or due to depleting ground water, while the rest seems to be daily bombarded with violent storms. Bloomberg reported last week that “We aren’t nearing the end of California’s climate troubles. We’re nearing the beginning.”
Here is a small example what is on store for California homeowners.
I once had to appraise a property where the vendor had falsified the well’s water supply, from 0.1 gallon per minute to 10.1 gallon per minute. Naturally the purchaser sued the vendor and there’s where I came in. A single family dwelling with no assured water supply has a drastically lower value, as water must be trucked in at great cost, and a cistern is needed to catch rain water, if there is rain, that is. A well needs to be able to pump a minimum of 1.5 gallon per minute, or some 6 liters, to give homeowners sufficient water.
Just imagine that not only an entire state, California, not only several others, such as Nevada and Arizona, lack water, but more than half the USA land mass suffer drought conditions, and that exactly in those parts where most of the food – wheat, corn, soybeans – is grown. Next in line are the homeowners in the affected areas as all of them basically built their dwellings in the desert. Nature always wins.
For over 10,000 years people lived in California, but the numbers there were never more than 300,000 or 400,000. Now that state has 38 million people, with 32 million vehicles, living at the level of comfort that we all strive to attain. If California were a country it would have the eighth highest Gross Domestic Product in the world. We will soon discover in our pocket book that California supplies all of North America with the largest percentage of fruits, vegetables, almonds and nuts. To raise one single almond takes a gallon – 3.78 liter – of water. One walnut equals 5 gallons: plain nuts, of course, but so is our entire way of life. Watch our essential supplies shrink and prices skyrocket. The long-term outlook is for iflation.
When we visited Los Angeles every single family dwelling in our daughter’s neighborhood – on the edge of Beverly Hills – had a buried irrigation system because not having a green law was seen as unpatriotic. Palm Springs there is one of the more desirable locations, where, in the middle of the desert, the daily per capita water use is 201 gallons – more than double the state average. When I visited there the community offered a drought-defying tableau of burbling fountains, flowers, lush lawns, golf courses and trees. The noise and smell of mowed lawns were constantly in the air.
All this will change: drastically.
California again leads the way, and this time it means an exodus, the first and not the last of forced immigration from arid regions to the more habitable places. Already the lack of water has caused unemployment among farmworkers to soar as the soil turned to crust and farmers left half or more of their fields fallow.
“Climate conditions have exposed our house of cards,” said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and elsewhere. “The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can’t keep doing this.”
Why has this drought situation not earlier been detected? Everybody knew that there had not been nearly enough rain for years, and that the winter snowfall in the mountains had been minimal. Blame stupidity and inertia. Democracy presupposes citizens capable of thinking for themselves rather than being misled by propaganda. But with the average family now holding two full-time jobs that are often uncertain, plus raising kids, there is little time for keeping informed so many refuse to think about such complex issues. The same is true of Climate Change, of course. There too nothing will be done to prevent even greater catastrophes, because drought is just the start of a string of disasters. TV and the mainstream newspapers – except the Guardian – fail to inform. For most economists their only religion is believing in an expanding economy. With elections looming in the Western World – the UK in May, Canada in October, and the USA having a perpetual political program – false promises will fill the TV screens, obscuring the true nature of nature.
A book that opened my eyes to reality was The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. The entire world acts – and perhaps even believes – that we live in an Infinite World. There is only one unlimited concept in the world, and that is God’s love for creation, of which we are an important part. In the meantime we act as if all is well, even when every day those who have ears to hear and eyes to see notice that we are approaching – no, we have already reached – the Limits to Growth. Literally what we are now doing to the planet and to human society is akin to burning down the house while we are still living in it. Today a wooden partition goes into the wood stove, tomorrow part of the outer wall. Soon the roof will collapse, but never mind, the show – growth – must go on. Everyone needs fuel, especially during a bitter winter, but only a mad man starts deconstructing the house in order to burn bits of it in the stove or fireplace.
Almost as mad as that is stealing bits of other people’s houses to burn, but that at least is not soiling your own doorstep – well not right away. In a world of limited resources and limited space we’ve now reached the point where raiding our neighbors’ houses – China and Africa come to mind – is the same thing as raiding our own house, because the net effect is the same – disaster on an unprecedented level.
Of course it’s easier to live in denial and keep on cannibalizing the world’s vital resources at an ever-increasing rate and pretend that it’s business as usual, but in reality it is anything but that. The alarm bells from commentators from all sectors: science, economics, religion etc. are getting louder and more frequent, better argued and with the raw data to back it up, but we are still not listening.
We are blind to reality, perhaps because we no longer have a choice, so we pretend.
It is beyond my capability to understand the economic mind. A few decades ago the tobacco industry fought tooth and nail to convince the nation that tobacco was not harmful. Now Capitalism is waging war against the “Limits to Growth” scenario. This anti-Limits apparatus is so strong now that it even dares to oppose science in order to defend growth. This is most evident today in the denial of climate change, especially among North America’s church-going people, with the fossil fuel industry leading the attack on climate scientists. The American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Club for Growth, the Heartland Institute, etc. can be counted on to conduct “independent” studies that reach conclusions supporting deregulated international trade, deregulated finance, repeal of environmental and welfare legislation, etc., all in the name of growth.
There used to be a song called “All you need is love.” Now the words have changed: “All you need is growth.” Where will it come from in a world where we are running out of water and arable land? The only growth is in war and war-like attitudes.
It’s the age-old battle again. When the Satan approached the first humans in the Garden of Eden, he or she convinced them that by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would be like gods, with access to unlimited riches, able to exploit all earth’s treasures. In other words: infinite growth. That false religion still rules the world. The church has a song: “Christ shall have dominion over land and sea.” We in our daily dealing follow the Satan rule where we practice “Humanity shall have dominion over land and sea,” with the inevitable result that we destroy both land and sea.
I once was part of that corrupt crowd, not on purpose by through ignorance. Just imagine: in 1965 Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring”. I got the book as a member of a book club, but gave it away without ever reading it. Now we know that what she said was entirely true, except the disaster zone is not only DDT but the entire world.
The evidence is clear that we are depleting all of our resources far too quickly, especially the land we use to produce food and draw raw materials from. What is the good of land when water lacks? The last few years land prices have skyrocketed. Now watch them plunge. Water shortages devastate the quality of land, just as deforestation exacerbates water loss and soil erosion. Couple this with increased damming of rivers, pollutant run-off into rivers, fracking and mining and we’ve a recipe for a water crisis, which will, in turn, lead to a food crisis.
Without fresh water we cannot have agriculture – this is the basic fundamental industry that keeps most people on this planet alive. But almost everybody in the world increasingly relies on intensive agriculture to provide vegetables, grains, fruit and meat. Instead of preparing to avert a major disaster, the political powers are gearing up for water wars rather than making a cooperative effort to save or increase our existing water resources and manage the use of water to reduce ridiculous wastage levels.
Some people in China are aware what’s happening. They wanted to warn the one-fifth of the world’s people there so they produced a film ‘Under the Dome’, highlighting the problem of water pollution and over-use in the unstoppable march of China towards economic supremacy. But the people on the top banned it. What these rulers cannot avoid, which will bring China’s economic miracle to an end, is the ultimate collapse of the environment that will force them to stop the machine. Bad air, bad water, bad land and total reliance on imported food will inevitably take its toll.
Of course these problems are not restricted to China: China is simply the canary in the coalmine. Across the Middle-East, Asia, Africa, southern Europe, USA and central and southern America there are increasing difficulties relating to the basics of food, water and the condition of the land.
While many of us are worried about ‘the economy’, whether or not we can afford that holiday or a new car, we should be far more worried about what we are going to eat and drink in a few short years from now.
The Bible – even for those who are not believers – contains a lot of wisdom. Paul, the apostle, wrote to his protégé Timothy that “The lust for money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6: 10). That today is truer than ever. All crimes, including polluting, are driven by the love of money, without regard for the future. Solomon had some wise words to say stating that ‘a wise person looks ahead.’ That’s exactly what we are missing: wisdom. A wise person notices that our house, the ‘oikos’ on which the word ‘economy’ is based is on fire. Most of the people continue to watch the silliness offered on television, too pre-occupied, too tired, too uninterested in what’s really goes on in the world out there. To be wise is to look ahead and prepare for a different tomorrow.
For the future to come, look no further than California.
Next week: Is God dead?