Environmentalists get a bad rap in farm country. Many farmers complain that environmental regulations interfere with their property rights and ability to feed a hungry world. To that end, these farmers want unfettered access to chemicals and genetically engineered seed. On the semi-arid High Plains, where I grew up, they also want all the water they can pump.
Yet only those who ignore science news can deny the human threat to every natural system on which life depends, be it climate, water, air or soil.
Carl Jung, who pioneered our understanding of the subconscious, wrote that when humans are unaware of their “inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”
We externalize the side of us that we do not want to own. We look for scapegoats. Instead of getting upset about the possibility that humanity’s present course could end civilization as we know it, we get angry with those who name the problems.
Environmentalists speak the other side of our own consciences. We vilify the messenger to drown the message. If we heeded the message, few of us would avoid implication.
I should know. If I wish to place blame for the most disturbing crisis on the High Plains, I need look no further than myself.
That crisis is depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, the huge groundwater reserve underlying the Plains all the way from South Dakota to Texas. In some areas of western Kansas and northern Texas, the water usable for irrigation is already gone.
My family sold our Sherman County, Kansas, farm last year, but up until then, we were irrigators. Most of the water accumulated in the aquifer over 10,000 years ago. It took us only four decades to reduce the reserves under our irrigated fields by one-third. If the new owners keep pumping at the rate we did, drawing the water table down one foot per year on average, they can continue only approximately 60 more years.
In most years the 158 irrigation farmers in Sherman County, only one of several dozen High Plains counties where irrigation predominates, use more than half the amount of water consumed by the 1.12 million people served by Denver’s main water utility. And for what? To grow a notoriously thirsty crop — corn — which is mainly used for livestock feed and ethanol.
If farmers continue pumping at current rates, they’ll be forced to revert to dry-land agriculture and livestock grazing within decades. With encouragement from government farm policy, they could make that switch now. Then, limited primarily to domestic uses, the aquifer could continue supporting life on the High Plains for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
My father embraced irrigation’s arrival, as did most of our neighbors. The water seemed limitless, and it removed one of the many wild cards that make farming such a gamble. Before and after he died, I complained about the waste. But he left other heirs as well, and not irrigating would have reduced our farm income by two-thirds. I found it very difficult to war against my family’s financial interests.
Not only are farmers implicated in environmental problems. Many city dwellers water lush lawns in desert climates, spray those lawns with chemicals every time a dandelion appears, and buy unsustainably grown food that travels 1,500 fuel-consuming miles to reach the supermarket. They drive SUVs to work for companies that also waste resources and pollute.
Yet most of us would like a healthy environment and want our resources conserved. A 2005 Roper poll found that 90 percent of SUV owners want government to require higher fuel efficiency.
Fortunately, we still live in a democracy where we can choose lawmakers who will pass environmental protections. Only such government action can halt or reverse the damage we’ve done.
Instead of demonizing the environmentalists, we should vote for them. But making that choice in the voting booth requires that we acknowledge our own internal debates. Instead of dividing the world into “opposite halves,” we would then begin to appreciate the unity of our self-interest and that of the general good.
Julene Bair, of Longmont, Colo., is the author of “One Degree West” and is nearing completion of “The Whole Song,” a book on the Ogallala Aquifer. She wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.
I don’t think we can wait for lawmakers ‘who will pass environmental protections’.
I think each of us, right now, has to stop doing things that undermine our values.
Julene, you shoulda refused to receive family income that was created by sucking down the Ogallala Aquifer. You should be courage every day in your personal life instead of waiting for a mirage of courageous lawmakers to appear and show courage.
If every single one of us refused to do things in our daily lives that degrade the human environmental future, well, then we’d have a movement.
I am outraged, Julene, that you wrote this column and absolved yourself.
Also, your father’s heirs do not own the Ogallala Aquifer and none of you have a right to income derived from the aquifer: the aquifer belongs to all of us and I want my share of your family’s share of income stolen from my aquifer.
Hooray, Julene, great article.
TreeFitz, you are way off base. Your kind of self-righteousness infuriates me. You are the one who is absolving yourself with your holier-than-thou crap. Tell me about your perfect ecological life. Tell me about how you have never eaten a mango shipped from Mexico, or a piece of corn grown with pesticides. Tell me that you have never worked at a job that degrades the environment, or have never driven an automobile. People like you are hypocrites of the worst kind.
You are a practitioner of the very kind of blindness Julene is talking about - only you come at it from the opposite side. You are still blaming others for your own role in this fucked up mess. You are just as much part of the problem as the rest of us.
And by the way, my ancestors owned the aquifers on this continent, and I don’t remember giving any of them to you.
I agree with Treefitz. dponcy, as I understood it, the native americans never beleived in owning land in the first place. But regardless, no human owns a natural resource; the earth is not ours, we share it with all things plant, animal, and microsopic. The aquifer is not a source to be exploited for the quick wealth of a few families.
QUOTE: “…and buy unsustainably grown food that travels 1,500 fuel-consuming miles to reach the supermarket.” UNQUOTE
Go to www.100milediet.org for excellent information concerning this.
So what are we supposed to do, Julene & Treefitz, stop irrigating on land that cost two or three thousand dollars per acre and immediately go broke and wreck the economies of every small town in several states? Then we can move to Longmont or Denver, go on welfare and start taking 15 minute showers and watering lawns and golf courses like crazy while claiming to be great environmentalists. I suppose the water we do not pump then should be piped to the cities for a better use than growing food for people and animals. Perhaps Julene does not know that most areas in the aquifer are using strict controls and all methods possible to reduce the use of precious water. Do you know where your water is coming from? Maybe it belongs to someone else too and so one million people should cut shower time to a maximum of one minute and help save the resource. It is always easy to point to everyone else as the guilty ones and offer unworkable solutions for others to live with.
No. What we should do, Kernel, is to recognize that farmers ALREADY receive direct, massive welfare payments, plus a whole host of indirect welfare payments (subsidized fuel, water, grazing rights and property tax breaks.) Then we proceed to dismantle the welfare state.
At which point farmers might actually start making money in a sustainable manner. For example:
http://www.texasep.org/html/nrg/nrg_3rnw.html
“cattle producers in West Texas might consider the $50 net revenue per acre for (leasing their property for wind power generation), as compared to a $5.00 profit per acre for West Texas cattle.”
Years ago I saw an OPRAH WINFREY program about US lawns. The waste for these anal-retentive neat allotments of green is astounding, so is the quotient of chemicals leeching back to the water table. Then we wonder, this added to the chemicals (”better living through chemistry” style) used by agriculture why amphibians have twin genitals or nature starts coming apart.
The U.S. economy is now a house of cards. Brilliant writers have recently expounded in this same podium on the ACTUAL status of the U.S. dollar. Our country’s banquet of the vanities and ridiculously wasteful use of precious substances like water faces the same fate as the Titanic. For obvious reasons, it’s a self-defeating paradigm; and as Al Gore and other notables have pointed out, the calculus has drastically altered and IS altering as I write these words. Whatever contracts and covenants human beings worked out with the natural world (the elementals) is now under strain about to break. Things routinely taken for granted, even cheap oil, has its expiration date all but published. EVEN if people are too selfish, stupid and habit-prone to alter their behaviors, nature has a menu of recipes for those exigencies. MANY prophetic sources agree that the time line for a huge transition to mankind’s “business as usual” is near… I believe this unnecessary Middle East war has exacerbated the worse side of the prophecies, unless enough critical mass (in the form of human practice, prayer and principle) acts as counter balance. Even then, like a car wreck, the momentum is already in progress. What we can work with is the degree of impact at the CRASH.
Learning to live simply, giving away what you don’t use, eating less, using less energy, wearing recycled clothing, etc… these are helpful. IF done by thousands, millions, they would exert an effect. Same with eating no meat (or less of it), and (although I think this is probably true of most in this forum) not buying what we do not need. WE are atoms in the body of this nation’s anatomy and each can exert some impact over the ultimate outcome. It’s important to do our part(s).