Running on Empty

It's not gasoline either.  We're not that lucky.  We're fast running out of something that eclipses fossil fuel in significance - groundwater.  Underground water has been propping up the Green Revolution for decades.  In our quest for ever more food we've been tapping into our aquifers, pumping for all we're worth.  Now they're running dry.

The latest "bombshell" report comes courtesy of NASA but, as I read the news summary, I couldn't help but think of Maude Barlow who, for years, has been writing about this and telling anyone who would listen.  Maybe NASA will get the world's attention.

A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warns that “most of the major aquifers in the world’s arid and semi-arid zones, that is, in the dry parts of the world that rely most heavily on groundwater, are experiencing rapid rates of groundwater depletion.”

The groundwater at some of the world’s largest aquifers — in the U.S. High Plains, California’s Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere — is being pumped out “at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished.”

The most worrisome fact: “nearly all of these underlie the word’s great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity.”

And this is doubly concerning in our age of unrestricted carbon pollution because it is precisely these semiarid regions that are projected to see drops in precipitation and/or soil moisture, which will sharply boost the chances of civilization-threatening megadroughts and Dust-Bowlification.

As these increasingly drought-prone global bread-baskets lose their easily accessible ground-water too, we end up with a death spiral: “Moreover, because the natural human response to drought is to pump more groundwater continued groundwater depletion will very likely accelerate mid-latitude drying, a problem that will be exacerbated by significant population growth in the same regions.”

This is only tangentially related to our other water crisis, our broken hydrological cycle.  That has to do with powerful changes in precipitation - rain and snow - and the waves of drought and flooding we're experiencing around the world.  The groundwater crisis is a powerful example of over-consumption of natural resources and, more important yet, our absolute dependence on over-consumption.  Our global civilization is dependent on consuming ever more natural resources than nature can provide.

  

NASA employs the GRACE satellite system to monitor surface subsidence, giving reliable tracking of groundwater loss worldwide.  

Groundwater has played a major role in the evolution of civilization.  Our aquifers allowed societies to survive droughts.  When there wasn't enough precipitation and surface water for agriculture we could fall back on our aquifers. These groundwater reservoirs would then "recharge" (refill) gradually during normal conditions.

Over the last century we thought differently about groundwater.  Instead of seeing it as a strategic reserve, our agricultural safety net, we chose to treat it as a primary source of agricultural irrigation which led to the mess we're in today around the world.

We need a new and clear vision of our planet's natural resources.  We must understand the critical role these resources have played in the growth, health and prosperity of our civilization over the centuries.  Most of all, we have to grasp how the resources we're so greedily squandering today will be needed by our children and grandchildren.

As Joe Romm of ThinkProgress puts it, we're stealing our kids' future.

As we reported last year, we’re taking $7.3 trillion a year in natural capital — arable land, potable water, livable climate, and so on — from our children without paying for it. In short, humanity has constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations.