The Grapes of Wrath Meet the Apes of Math

by Jim Washburn

When it comes to recessions/depressions, I keep coming back to the same formula that doesn’t add up:

Pre-recession/depression, people make things from stuff to vend to other people desirous of having the things. The butcher gets his big screen TV and the TV assembler gets his pork loin and everybody’s happy except the pig.

Then, blammo!, the recession/depression hits. There is still the same amount of stuff from which to make things; there is still the willingness and skill to make those things, and there is an undiminished desire to acquire things from each other.

dust storm, 1930s Oklahoma

Yet nobody is able to make, vend or acquire things, solely due to a shift in perception. The abstract system we use to organize all this commerce gets constipated, and rather than do what it seems any intelligent species in the universe would do—revise that abstract or at least give it an enema—instead everything grinds to a halt, the money’s gone and nothing works. If someone were observing our goofy primate species from space, it must look like invisible pixies determine our fate, since there’s nothing in the physical world that’s keeping us from prospering.

We get so caught up in the economic mumbo-jumbo that we sometimes forget there was also a real-world component to the Great Depression. I see Little Jimmy has his hand up. That’s right, Jimmy, it was the Dust Bowl, and, no, it had nothing to do with college football. Human activity—in the form of poor soil conservation—combined with vengeful-God activity—drought and windstorms—to create a six-year period in the 1930s when the prairie lands of the US and Canada dried up and blew away. People couldn’t even see three feet in front of them when the dust storms were blowing; crops wouldn’t grow; the banks repossessed family farms and, quicker than you can say Donna Schoenkopf, a generation of “Okies” piled out of Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states heading for California’s fields of plenty.

Where today, amidst our current recession/depression, a new Dust Bowl may be developing. It’s an underreported story, particularly in California’s “paper of record” the L.A. Times, but years of drought and civic lassitude have resulted in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project now telling farmers in said valley that they’ll be getting zip in the way of water from them this year, while the State Department of Water Resources will only be able to deliver 15 percent of its promised water.

As a result, farmers are letting fields go fallow and crops wither, and are making hard choices about which orchards will live and which they’ll have to let die. Plants aren’t the only thing withering: Unemployment in the valley is at three to four times the national average. With farm workers’ $8 an hour dropping to $0 an hour, the local businesses that serve them are going under. And we on the receiving end can expect shortages of some foods and higher prices overall.

Those in the paved-over parts of the state should also expect water rationing by this summer, officials say, with a mandatory 20 percent cut in water use to be the norm. The Times has been covering this in drips and drops, below the fold in Section B. The New York Times, on the other hand, thought it sufficiently calamitous that they ran a lengthy article, top and center on the front page of its Sunday edition. There’s dry days ahead, folks.

St. Simon the Stylite

I wrote a while back about Costa Mesa resident Kevin Doane, who had killed his lawn, contrary to a city law requiring residents to keep their yards presentable, yet in accordance, he claimed, with a councilwoman’s plea for folks to save water. Doane had pledged he’d neither capitulate nor pay the city’s $400 fine, but he did pay up, and in late January agreed to replant a lawn in return for getting his $400 back from the city.

Not exactly Simon Stylites when it comes to standing steadfast, Mr. Doane, but the guy most certainly had a point: lawns, pools, Water Wiggles and other things we considered to be part of the good life’s package may just have to go by the wayside.

Rationing, of course, always favors gluttons. Your neighbor who automatically waters the sidewalk and gutter daily, who refills the pool after every swingers’ party: that guy can easily cut his consumption 20 percent and still have plenty left for overwatering the topiary garden. Meanwhile you, who fills watering cans with the water you run in the kitchen while it gets hot enough to do the dishes, who only showers when you’re getting too crusty to move: you are going to get hosed. Such is the price of virtue.

And if the drought continues? Look to Australia, where they’re having to get used to the idea of fires that engulf communities in 130-foot high amber waves of flame. No one’s predicting that here yet, but there also is not one expert who is saying there are good times ahead. California and the other western states—most of which are vying with us for dwindling Colorado River water—are headed into dry decades, they say, with no respite in sight.

Remember Sam Kinison’s bit about Ethiopia? He said, of course everyone’s starving, because they live in a desert! Go where the food is, idiots!

I know people who actually took that seriously, who thought it was some character flaw that caused people to live in a drought zone. They may catch on soon that Southern California was pretty much a desert before we pumped all this water into it, and so it shall be when the pumps stop running. Good thing everyone has handguns.

Not all the water news is apocalyptic, but there is this other bit: The L.A. Times on Feb. 22 ran a good long piece on a bad, long-lived problem: In the polar regions, massive amounts of methane, a major greenhouse gas, are locked in frozen lakes and permafrost, where the gas was trapped ages ago. I dunno, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

As climate change causes these frozen zones to melt—and that’s already happening—the methane is released in the atmosphere. In the years ahead, that might mean 55 billion tons of it, which is ten times the methane load presently in the atmosphere. This is what scientists call “a bad, bad thing.” It’s also what they call a “tipping point,” a result of global warming that itself causes a dramatic increase in warming. It’s like a ramjet engine: the faster it goes, the faster it goes.

The Times did run one hopeful water story recently, on water that’s had electrolysis. If your current water has unsightly hair, you might want to look into it.

Actually, it’s not that sort of electroysis. Rather, they were talking about a mixture of water and salt that’s been treated with an electric current. Depending on how that’s done, it produces hypoclorous acid or sodium hydroxide. The first is a fabulous sanitizer—it kills anthrax, salmonella and E. coli, yet is gentle enough for a woman—while the latter is a swell cleanser. The treated water can take the place of bleach and other harsh chemicals, is environmentally friendly and only costs about a penny per gallon.

desalination plant, Perth, Australia

There are downsides, such as its effectiveness not lasting long after it’s produced, so it’s not something you’ll be finding on supermarket shelves. Plus, the machines that produce it at present are geared for the commercial market and run about $10,000.

I maintain the hope that we’ll think our way out of our problems, and technology such as this—which is already in widespread use in Russia and Japan—can certainly play a part.

Suppose your community association bought one of the electrolysis machines. The water it produces could take the place of chlorine in the community pool; meanwhile every time you drop by the clubhouse, you could fill up on the cleaning and disinfecting fluids you need, helping both your pocketbook and the environment.

Maybe the “magic water” could also be a byproduct of desalination plants, because it’s looking like we’ll need them in our future. Though desalination has its own environmental problems, there may not be many sources left to us for the water we need for living, farming and industry. Plus, if the polar icecaps keep melting, we’ll need to do to something with our rising seas. We might as well try to drink them.

We’re slow to recognize threats unless they’re wearing keffiyeh, but strategists are already predicting that water is the new oil, that the increasing demand for potable water and its increasing scarcity are going to impact geopolitical affairs.

It certainly is going to impact housing. When there isn’t water to supply the homes we have, the government bodies that control construction are going to limit new housing. When there isn’t water to fight fires, that’s going to limit where houses are built and how they’re made. And when there isn’t water for jobs or agriculture, or even to drink, that’s going to limit where people can exist. Maybe there’ll be a generation of Calies hitting the road looking for greener pastures.

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