One book I'd recommend for changing your perspective, especially to anyone in the Bay Area, is _Imperial San Francisco_. It ties together early San Francisco's extractive economy with late 19th century American imperialism and industrialization. The author argues that by the 1860s, Northern California and Nevada were already in San Francisco's hinterland, but city leaders sought to bring the entire Pacific basin under the city's dominion. The book covers mining, energy, armaments, and media as well as water. And it asks the same question as this essay: what were the costs, and was it worth it?
Imperial San Francisco is a great book. Years after reading it, I’m still shocked by the book’s account of how badly the environment was damaged by the gold rush. It was so damaging that billions in taxpayer money are still spent each year combating the effects over a hundred years later.
> Do you do nothing and impose a water famine on a teeming city, or do you pull the lever and shift the onus onto much more sparsely populated rural areas?
This is bogus: do neither.
The cities should have accepted Nature's limits on the population of that land. There is only so much water and therefore there can only be so many people. To put it simply: "sorry, New York is full. We cannot issue you a building permit or allow you to make a water/sewer connection." Bolinas, CA does this.
But oh, no! We the great and mighty Cities Of Humanity know better than Nature. We must not accept her limits. And so they grow without control, and then when Fire or Cholera exposes their overleveraged water account they fall back on Too Big To Fail. Sorry farmers, we know better, your land is ours now. We're Urbanists, we know what's best for you.
If you're interested in these issues, consider reading Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's long and scholarly and dry (heh) but it will change your perspective on the limits of Nature. Perhaps you'll move somewhere with 100 inches of rainfall per year, like I did.
Probably because water is (considered) a utility whereas food is (to a large extent) privately produced, transported, and sold.
> The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sorrow, anger. That land might have been in their families for generations, might have been the family’s sole support, might have been the only home they’d ever known. The city decreed and mobilized and condemned properties for seizure without asking residents’ permission; found all sorts of legal subterfuges for denying the value of their fields and homesteads as established by expert witnesses; lowballed every estimate; treated them with distant contempt. Since the politicians and commissioners were not running for office upstate, they felt no need to package their enterprise as a humanitarian mission; they spoke in numbers and legal precedents.
Do you think this is acceptable conduct if it was in the service of procuring food for city people, or people in a country that was a net importer of food?
I'm sure it sucked to be the guy whose land was taken. And I'm unsurprised that it wasn't done with maximum tact and local sensitivity.
But our civilisation does require large-scale infrastructure. Dams, railways, airports, highways. I doubt any of these have ever been built without compulsory purchase of land.
In fact, I think the legislation needed to do this was first designed for building canals. And it was controversial because it obviously clashed with property rights, which in the 18th C were pretty absolute. But if each guy who owns 5 acres right at a critical spot can hold the whole 100-mile project hostage, then it can never be built.
Growing food just doesn't have the same demand. It is completely routine to farm two patches of land separated by someone else's house, no big deal.
> But our civilisation does require large-scale infrastructure. Dams, railways, airports, highways. I doubt any of these have ever been built without compulsory purchase of land.
The point of the article is to question whether "our civilization" is worth treating people this way, or whether it would be better to craft a different civilization that treated people better.
Water is a natural resource. Food hasn't been a natural resource since the invention of agriculture.
You also seem to be unaware of the difference in scale. The average American uses between 500kg and 1000kg of water per day. The weight (and volume) of food they eat isn't even in the same ballpark. There is almost a 100x difference here.
Growing and raising food requires a huge amount more water than it's literal weight once it sits on your dinner plate. As another commenter has already mentioned, most water goes to rural areas for farming, and within farming most of the water is being used for producing beef, dairy, and pork.
Upstate New York, along with most of the country, used to be wilderness, sometimes huge forests, and is now farms.
Most farms only exist because they are subsidized. It's a welfare program. Economically and environmentally it makes no sense, farms in upstate New York or Wyoming, when food grows so much better in Illinois and California.
Another good book: An Indigenous People's History of the United States. There were people everywhere when colonists arrived, it isn't even accurate to really call it wilderness.
Anyway, the celebration of the farmer is preposterous, the best thing that could happen to farming is if fewer people farmed, because prices would rise.
I think a lot of upstate NY (and new england in general) used to be farms, and is now forest. Because most farming stopped making sense, once you could ship food from the midwest cheaply.
But how much water is consumed by the farming that remains in NY? I never had the impression any of it was irrigated, but haven't tried to look up numbers. Farming in CA is of course a wildly different story. Left without water it's a desert, not a forest.
I don't know, like I said, people lived in California before the arrival of colonists, it certainly wasn't a desert the way the Sahara was.
Nonetheless for some geographic reason, sure, it makes sense to send water there to grow things. The politics of it all are, if capitalism didn't deliver on efficiency in things that bring justice, like providing everyone with good food and shelter better than alternative governments, nobody would tolerate redirecting huge amounts of water to deserts in California or cities on Manhattan island.
Without capitalism, there would be something intrinsically valuable to pastoral, moneyless living, like the kind of farming people were doing when these reservoirs were built.
It's just ironic that, people have been living in the Americas doing just that, for at least millennia, and the same exact 1800s people and their descendants who felt they were entitled to do what they wanted with their upstate New York land, however inefficiently, will do nothing to remedy the same exact kind of losses for people who were there before them. Which is to say, just for the people who used to live on precolonized land, the "human costs" were not resolved by a free press, or laws, or money, it was resolved by simply ceasing to "account" for those costs.
Although, like I said, today you can go farm for subsidies if you wanted to, which is as good as a government-sponsored remedy will get, turning $1 tax into $0.10 of low cost of living and $0.90 in agricultural business income domiciled in... New York City.
Bullshit, SF never says "stop"; they just keep jacking up the cost with more planning and permitting red tape. Those costs just get capitalized into rising land prices.
When you say "stop no more water" land values plunge, and fast.
"No more growth" scares people like nothing else. It does NOT cause prices to rise.
> When you say "stop no more water" land values plunge
What? Why?
If New York were population limited, the permits would be worth their weight in gold. Any process put in place to ration them would be worth hiring lawyers and lobbyists and consultants to influence.
The second article mentions one of the odd side effects of all this: exposure in a quarry of wonderful Devonian tree fossils near Gilboa, New York, a town submerged in the filling of one of the larger reservoirs. This world-class fossil site has implications for theories of the late-Devonian mass extinction, one of the "big five" mass extinctions, where the colonization of land by large plants may have caused disruption of the global climate.
The plants were not able to have their equivalent of our current debate "Is is all right for our descendants to populate the planet even if it alters the global environment and climate" ? It's ironic that we are able to and that may only reduce our evolutionary fitness.
That doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I wrote. In particular, that animals can overpopulate would not make something of the scale of a "Big Five" mass extinction any less apocalyptic.
