WaterChanging human behavior key to tackling California drought: Expert
California is experiencing a drought that has gone far beyond a “dry spell,” and the state has imposed the first water restriction in state history, aiming to cut back on water consumption by 25 percent. One expert says that strict water conservation measures are long overdue, and that “what is happening is a realization that you can’t simply transplant another ecosystem onto a California desert system or arid southwestern system. In a sense, California and much of the U.S. southwest are living beyond their ecological means. Certain lifestyles have been adopted and crops are being grown that are not endemic or sustainable for this particular bioregion.” He adds: “This is a moment for not just cutting off personal water use and turning the tap off when you’re brushing your teeth, as important as that is. This is a moment of reflection, invitation and, I hope, legislation that will cause people to think about water use in the industrial sector too. This is for the long-term prosperity of the state and sustainability of the ecosystem.”
California is experiencing a drought that has gone far beyond a “dry spell.” In fact, the drought and related water shortage are so profound that Governor Jerry Brown is enacting measures to have Californians cut back on water consumption by 25 percent and the state is offering citizens ways of changing their green lawns to gardens of cactus. San Diego County is building a $1 billion plant that will bring water in from the Pacific Ocean and take the salt out of it (see “California imposes first mandatory water restrictions in state history,” HSNW, 2 April 2015; and “San Diego to build largest ocean desalination plant in Western Hemisphere,” HSNW, 16 April 2015).
There are wider issues, however. Writer Paul Fraumeni, who is Director of Research Communications at the University of Toronto, explores these issues with Professor Stephen Scharper.
A U of T release notes that Sharper is an associate professor of anthropology at U of T Mississauga and at U of T’s School of the Environment. He is also cross-appointed to the department for the study of religion. Scharper focuses his research and teaching in the areas of environmental ethics, religious ethics and ecology, ecological values and world views, and the ethics of violence and nonviolence. He is the author of Redeeming the Time: A Political Theology of the Environment (1998) and co-author with his wife, social-cultural anthropologist Hilary Cunningham, of The Green Bible (2002). He is also a columnist for the Toronto Star.
There is, of course, science tied to the global climate change behind this drought. But what is your take on the human behavior that will need to change to deal with this problem?
Many people have been predicting this for a long time. The Colorado River, which has been diverted and helps a lot of the agriculture in the southwest United States, including California, has been running very low and some of the reservoirs will never come back, according to the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. Seventy per cent of the Colorado River is diverted for farmland and 70 percent of the water used in California is going to farmland.
