There are plenty of symptoms, but the real problem lies here

The Tale of diminishing freshwaterWhich side are you on? Native species and habitat restoration is a worthy cause, but will you deem it so when you’re raking the gravel where your lawn used to be?

Singlebarbed readers thrive on fear and pestilence, but this issue is so large it’s likely to have all of us switching allegiances. It’s a “plea bargain” scenario, where all the crooks rebuff the cops until one cracks, then it’s every man for himself.

Will you insist on un-dammed streams and wild trout habitat when your house loses half its value, or will you cave and let them add more dams and reservoirs to preserve the lifestyle you have?

I think you’ll cave, you’re going to fold so fast even you’ll be surprised.

It’s one thing to bemoan the loss of pristine habitat, but when it’s your swimming pool they’re talking about, the Salmon can fend for themselves.

It’s a juggernaut issue, and it’s headed your way.

Across America, the picture is critically clear — the nation’s freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

That’s means you – a 72% chance the state you live in will be adding dams, reservoirs, and a lot of underground pipe, in the next 5 years. If those years are “dry” years, you’ll be doing it sooner.

That’s not the end of it, water rights and the property that owns them will be going parabolic in value, which will cause fishermen additional grief as many small ranches and farms that hold water rights will be gobbled up by corporations that smell massive water profits.

It’ll yield additional fences and “No Trespass” signs, much litigation, and the rise of “Donny Beaver” angling associations. Thirty-Six out of fifty suggests none of us are immune, including Mr. Beaver.

Desalinization is still somewhat in it’s infancy, and will likely have the same issues that nuclear plants have, where do you dump the salt? Many desalinization processes remove salt from seawater, while the water is quickly used the salt has to be disposed of in some manner, and in high concentration its as toxic to the living as nuclear waste.

Desalinization technology will mature and be a boon to states with ready access to the ocean, but with deficit spending still the rage, coastal states will likely use this as a source of revenue, selling excess capacity to inland states that lack access.

That means the price of water goes up. It also means some high dollar beach real estate will be tapped for plant construction, as thousands of plants will be needed per state, a lot of beach will lose its scenic appeal.

Intakes to those plants will be posted with “No Fishing” restrictions, as nothing fouls pumping gear more than nets, crab traps, and fishing line.

The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, Pompano Beach’s utilities director.

This rabbit-hole just gets deeper and deeper, and even casual research reveals the potential for much disruption for all fishermen, both fresh and salt.

Of specific interest is how the “eminent domain” laws will be wielded by communities short on drinking water. Water rights and real estate close by could easily be pre-empted for the community good. Small truck farms whose only “crime” is proximity to a city, are the likely targets. 

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed.

Water conservation efforts will mean many more impoundments, canals, and underground pipes. Many will be covered to prevent evaporation, but wastewater reclamation will be considered “low hanging fruit.”

Florida’s environmental chief, Michael Sole, is seeking legislative action to get municipalities to reuse the wastewater.

“As these communities grow, instead of developing new water with new treatment systems, why not better manage the commodity they already have and produce an environmental benefit at the same time?” Sole said.

That’s the silver lining, plenty of Brownline fishing for warm water species. They may object to you wading in drinking water, but nobody will mind when you’re hip deep in crap.

I think we’re hip deep in crap already, and I’m just the fellow that remembered to bring tackle.

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7 thoughts on “There are plenty of symptoms, but the real problem lies here

  1. overmywaders

    Maybe we should take up golf when the rivers dry up. Oh, wait… golf is one of the reasons rivers are drying up!

    “In San Antonio, each time a golfer plays a round of golf it takes between 2200 and 3500 gallons of water to support his game based on golf course average water use.

    In summer, a golfer uses 3400 to 5400 gallons per round when water use peaks and our annual drought occurs.” And San Antonio has 56 golf courses, each with plush greens and fairways. (See http://hillcountrywater.org/GolfCourse.htm ) Of course, Las Vegas “Golf course facilities accounted for 28 of the top 100 users, second behind hotels and casinos, which at 39 made up the largest category.” of water users in that area.

    Let’s not even think about Florida, where sink-holes swallowing cars occur at a great rate; caused by drawing down the aquifer to support green lawns and golf courses in what was a semi-arid savannah.

    “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

    So, as long as we anglers just “stand in a river waving a stick”, we are not exacerbating the problem. Please inform SWMBO that you are replacing the front lawn with sand in order to conserve a valuable resource (fishing time).

  2. davem

    I’m as critical of water policy as anyone here, or there, and I’m not an industry flack; I’m a journalist and my hobby is hating oversimple infographics. This graphic, and the story it tells, is very hatable.

    True evaluation of water issues is far more complex than that silly infographic can possibly represent. In fact, this graphic blames the wrong people for the wrong problem adn won’t help fisherfolk at all.

    The graphic itself is compiled from several USGS tables here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/htdocs/text-total.html
    It combines several of the charts and tables on this page but is primarily built on their figure 2: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/htdocs/figure02.html

    Its conclusions are oversimplified and misdirected (with plenty of deniability, of course.)

    First, California, Florida, and Texas may use a quarter of all US water…but they also contain almost exactly a quarter of the US population (77 million out of 296 million as of 2005.) Smoking gun! you bet…since those states use lots of water for ag and power purposes, that means home use in those three states is actually quite modest. Plus, CA is among the top states for self-supplied (well, usually) water.

    If we Clintonize the word “use” we find some interesting subtexts. By far the largest category of “withdrawals” (48 percent) come from diversions for power generation–not hydroelectric, but cooling of nuke and fuel-fired plants. Most of that “use” is called “once-through” cooling–circulate the water through the plant and then put it back, not contaminated at all but warmer.
    Total that up and Florida, Texas, and California and you have a huge total, almost sverdrup-sized. But the three offender states use vastly more salt water for this application than fresh water. California uses 344 mgd of fresh water and 12,600 mgd of salt for once-through cooling; Arkansas uses almost four times as much fresh water for this purpose as California. I don’t argue that using saline is any less damaging, but these facts impeach the power of the original graphic. How many people looking at the chart guessed or knew that the “use” described included salt water?

    We should also consider how the water is used and put back. Clearly “once-through” cooling creates thermal pollution. But most municipalities in the US are stable or improving in the environmental impact of withdrawal and treatment of home-use water supplies. If it were showers and toilets flushing, the chart would show a very different (and politically inflammatory) set of villain states.

    If you consider only agricultural use, you have the real culprit on the run. Big Ag (biggest of all in FL, CA, and TX) does terrible damage to watercourses with near impunity. It wouldn’t be so bad if they just took the water, but they put it back in vastly more destructive form than they take it. In Virginia they’ve killed the Shenandoah river and blamed it on toilets and parking lots. FL of course is the poster child for this process (though also among the worst offenders for home use.) Given that the highest point in South Florida is the Dade County landfill mountain, it is relatively simple to divert the entire state’s water flow for human use, and now taxpayers will pony up to put the whole thing back again.

    Under the current meteorological averages, those three states have widely varying ratios of population to rainfall. Texas and Florida, even in droughts, still have reasonable water supplies for home use if you relate rainfall or surface water availability to population. They use a lot of water, sure now, but if the graphic implies that Texans are more wasteful than others, it is wrong on purpose.

    That does not address the central issue to us, of course, which is the installation of reservoirs on our watersheds and the resulting damage to natural ecosystems and the resulting pestiferous multiplication of personal watercraft.

    all three target states have enormous agricultural industries–California is one of the largest agricultural nations in the world. They make more cheese (a water-intensive value-added food industry) than Wisconsin, much to the chagrin of Wisconsin. If you differentiate “water use” and agriculture, you have an infographic with pop (and one that would never get in newspapers because of advertising backlash. Kiss Kraft Foods goodbye.)And of course agriculture is far and away the worst damager of fishing-quality watercourses.

    But we can’t complain about farmers with our mouths full, now, can we.

    Worse yet is the continuing mania for ethanol, which is nothing more than a government-sponsored handout–a gigantic handout–to large agricultural interests. Ethanol production requires enormous quantities of water, most of which is consumed or returned in industrial-treatment condition. It is a net energy loser over petroleum (even at OPEC prices) and the spike in corn prices has led to retilling of fallow and buffer acreage and to continued degradation of streams in farming country. All this is excused under the mantle of energy conservation and self-sufficiency.

    But you don’t divert water for ranching, now, and hamburger is good and so good for you. No, you let those cows go into the creek and get their own water. If they make a mess in the process, well, it doesn’t count…

    The infographic is the bane of thoughtful, informed discussion. The stated purpose of the infographic is to combine multiple pieces of information in simple form, which may be pleasing to people who pander to fifth-grade intellects or hope to deflect criticism or conceal the truth. Simple infographics are almost always wrong, and often intentionally so.

    PS I’m not always so crabby–there are some fantastic infographics out there, but they tend to be complex. Try this one:
    http://tastyresearch.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/popvssodamap.png And if you want to have a good conversation, mask off the key and the heading of the chart and ask people what it represents.

    Dave

  3. overmywaders

    Dave,

    You make some great points. However, I think we as a nation can forgo certain luxuries in order to conserve water. Thus my jab at golf and green lawns. (Xeriscaping is, IMO, attractive and much more practical in most areas than lawns.)

    Further reductions could certainly be made in agricultural use of water. We don’t “need” some of the expensive fruits and vegetables grown in what was desert or semi-arid land in CA. Use that land for appropriate un-irrigated agriculture and entire river systems would be re-watered.

    We will need to rethink our agricultural applications. I agree about ethanol, however ethanol could be made from grasses and plant waste rather than human-consumable corn.

    I once worked on a hog farm in Manitoba. The farmer harvested vast acreages of flax, wheat, and other cereal grains only to feed it to hybrid hogs. For each pound of Canadian bacon, you could have fed a small village in Africa for a week. [I know that the complexities of world trade make the above statement sound naive, but it is illustrative of the waste, not practical economics.]

    There are many ways for us to conserve, but we don’t, as a nation, have the will. To acquire that we first need to “hit the wall.”, I suppose.

  4. KBarton10

    Dave,

    Your response is not at all crabby, I would characterize it as lucid, well thought out and educational.

    This is likely to be one of the biggest issues we face in the next couple of decades, as it pits many competing interests against each other, with the fishery an afterthought.

    Conservation is an easy first step, with subsequent efforts possibly bound up in litigation for many years.

    I appreciate the commentary greatly, feel free to be “crabby” anytime, as all of us benefit.

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