Water, what is it good for?

I t holds that a large pole, aimed at a small piece  of fruit, high up a limbless tree, on a very windy day could best describe the circular reasoning that many people are engaging with respect to water allocation and management of the United States Midwest. With consideration of the overall issue, Steven Chu’s comment “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster and that’s in the best scenario”, may be the best gauge to guide a “which way should we go?” type question. Even before we do exhaustive data collection and analysis, we may be better served by envisioning if there is even a problem. With all of our current data and predictive modeling tools, even the most conservative evaluations have deemed a better than 50% chance, that needed water access will become a crisis; leading to a catastrophe if unaddressed.  It’s almost funny, not quite, that people in such areas like Las Vegas feel money can buy their way out of future hardships as they arise, and it also seems they would be willing to place an “all in bet” on what basically amounts to betting against the “house”.

Ideally we as a culture will break down the root issue and collaborate as a national community to inherently ward off the harmful scenarios which seem to be looming just around the corner. Every engineer knows the foundation to any system analysis where quantification is sought, needs to address an energy or mass balance. If we look at the realism of our future dilemma, it can be traced directly to the “out” portion of such a balance. This is to say quite bluntly that we must reform our understanding of what an acceptable amount of use is. So many functions of agriculture incur the use and or production of fuel that in turn creates economic cycles, but they don’t incur real additive benefit to the community at large.

We are capable of increasing our food production and decreasing the agricultural water drain, however, this would have impact on large stockholders who garner the majority voting power amidst a system of supposed equality. If a diligent interaction between what we as consumers use per day and what is provided, took place, we may have a model to account for allotment of water in a manner consistent with sustainability. Incorporation of infrastructure upgrade and reengineering of existing ideology will also boost the repair of, what in all reality, is not a crisis. When we are talking about a foundational staple of life, like water, even the remote threat of its extinction, should be emphatically labeled a catastrophe.