By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue Senior Editor
(posted from Modeshift.org)

The era of global climate change has produced such rainy and warm conditions in northern Michigan that a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted completely here over the last two days. Meanwhile it’s dry, desperately so, in several huge and significant regions of the country.

The striking contrasts are putting strains on the culture and economy in ways we’re only starting to understand. Yesterday I stood in a driving January rain talking to Jim MacInnes, the chief executive of Crystal Mountain, our local ski resort. He was interested in new economic data he’d read online. I was watching the deep gullies forming at the bottom of Buck, the resort’s steepest slope.

The signs of changing climate and an economy that has been slow to respond, are everywhere.

Judging by the thickening white sashes of salt lining Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the United States, the drought on the Colorado Plateau is not only deepening, it is pushing water supply conditions for roughly 25 million people from serious toward dire. The moment of reckoning over water supplies, anticipated since the 1960s, appears to have arrived.

Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California form the fastest growing region in the country. All are served by the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and hundreds of smaller communities. Lake Powell, north of the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, which lies just south, are less than half full and dropping steadily. Both are 105 feet lower than their full pools, and dropping about eight to ten feet a year.

The ring around the reservoirs is beginning to be seen as a noose around the neck of the region. Not surprisingly it’s become politically palatable to consider changes in water management and use once deemed impractical. Conservation measures were put into effect in Phoenix, and in Las Vegas the water district is paying homeowners $1 a square foot to tear up their lawns and install desert plantings.

The Colorado Plateau states and California last month finished an agreement that provides both more flexibility and certainty in who has the right to what’s left in both reservoirs, and sets triggers for declaring emergencies that dramatically cut use. The Metropolitan Water District, southern California’s major water provider, announced in November that they will buy 65 billion gallons of water annually from Central Valley farmers north of Sacramento.

Orange County is preparing to turn on a new waste treatment plant that will pump “highly treated wastewater from their new purification plant to percolation ponds in Anaheim. Eventually, the recycled water will be delivered to about 2.3 million people.” And all the desert states are more intensely eyeing the Great Lakes.

Hot Atlanta
The other region of the United States where water demand is outrunning supply is the Southeast. There’s been more rain there this week; Nevertheless, for the first time in the lives of most of the 10-county Atlanta region’s 4 million residents, turning on the tap is an invitation to consider the limits of growth. The U.S. drought map continues to show that precipitation, soil moisture, and lake and river levels are in “extreme” dry condition.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a nice piece on the region’s inability to plan and invest in water supply infrastructure. And Atlanta Water Shortage keeps a near-daily update of conditions.

Texas Too
Water authorities in the Texas Panhandle late last month said they were cutting the water supply from Lake Meredith to 11 cities, including Amarillo, Plainview, Lubbock, and Brownfield. The reason, according to the Houston Chronicle: “brutal drought conditions in two of the past three years.”

At the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Circle of Blue’s commitment to ‘to elevate the freshwater crisis to a global priority and to generate the knowledge, civic will, technology, and resources needed to solve this crisis’ was recognized. J. Carl Ganter (l), Circle of Blue director, and Keith Schneider (r), Circle of Blue senior editor, represented the project, a nonprofit initiative of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Pacific Institute, one the leading research organizations focused on water, climate, energy, environment and security. President Clinton was joined at this year’s meeting by “1,300 leaders of business, government and non-governmental organizations, who traveled to New York from six continents, including 50 current and former Heads of State.”

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States, the world’s great space powers, celebrated the eve of the first satellite launch 50 years ago with a pact to use Russian technology on NASA missions to seek water on the moon and Mars.

Perhaps through this potent partnership humanity can find clues how to better manage — and hold onto — this live-defining resource here at home.

Dr. Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute, weighs in on the importance of water and its crucial role for all living things

As we race the dawn to complete the details for this exciting week at the Emmys and the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, I thought I’d point out a most significant modeshift within our midst.

Click over to Keith Schneider’s Modeshift blog entry, “You say goodbye, I say hello.” Thank you, Keith. It’s an honor to say hi.

As a lifelong member of the tribe of career adventurists it’s time to announce another turn in the journey. I am leaving the Michigan Land Use Institute to take a new position as senior editor and strategist for Circle of Blue, an independent online journalism, research, and movement building organization focused on helping to solve the freshwater crisis. What’s especially keen, along with the great promise of a new way to influence a global environmental and economic crisis, is that I won’t have to leave home. Circle of Blue, based in Traverse City, is the second organization devoted to public interest journalism, research, and social organizing in northwest Michigan.

Keith will be blogging daily on Modeshift from the Clinton Global Initiative. We’ll be mirroring his posts here.

As if we didn’t need more sobering news, USA Today reports that “half the nation is either abnormally dry or in outright drought from prolonged lack of rain that could lead to water shortages, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly index of conditions.” This is addition to dropping levels of freshwater lakes in Africa.
Across the U.S., stress from drought spreads

NEW YORK - The closing sessions at the Time Global Health Summit, I hope, left the audience with a feeling of hope and a call to action. Bono appeared above our heads as a giant projected image, likening the summit to a health Woodstock fest, but with a critical mission. I loved his words — that these challenges and days ahead are an “adventure” to be embraced and a time to define ourselves as citizens of the planet.
Pat Mitchell, president of PBS, called for a more engaged media. Her comments are worth taking to heart.
Ironically, though, most every session called for more public engagement and political leadership. However, besides the over-sized Time Magazine cover images and Time’s hosting of the event, the media continues to fail to deliver on these long-term, urgent issues.