The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [107]
In this sense, extracting water from deep, ultra-slow-recharging aquifers is no different from mining: Once the ore (or water) has been removed, it’s as good as gone forever, at least on a human timeline. This is where our intuitive sense of water, which regularly falls from the sky, can lead us astray. Instead of thinking of it as an infinitely renewable resource, we need to be aware that an enormous proportion of the water we use is effectively a nonrenewable resource. Aquifers like the Ogallala are more like a non-interest-bearing bank account gifted to us by a distant relative. Because it won’t last forever, a prudent person would have a strict budget and a solid plan for what to do on the day that the account runs dry.
Ancient aquifers all over the globe are being pumped at unsustainable rates and will therefore someday fail to provide sufficient water to local populations. The list of problem areas are nearly endless, and very few of these locations have any sort of credible plans for what to do when the water runs out.
Exporting Water—The Food Story
Water is an indispensible factor in the story of ever-increasing crop yields over the past several decades. World food harvests have tripled since 1950, and irrigation is responsible for a large portion of those gains. Most people are surprised to learn that every pound of harvested wheat requires one thousand pounds of water to grow. In a sense, this 1000:1 ratio means that when the United States exports wheat, it’s really exporting water. A million tons of grain is the same as a billion tons of water, which explains why many water-starved countries prefer to buy their grains rather than try to grow them on their parched soils. It’s cheaper than digging wells or building desalination plants.
Without the use of aquifers, much of the dryer agricultural land in the world, such as the wheat fields in Saudi Arabia, would have to be abandoned altogether. And agriculture in the more temperate regions would have to revert to dry land farming practices—which means depending on rainfall alone, rather than irrigation—and this would lower yields. This is an inconvenient reality at a time when future food security is already an open concern of world leaders and population is slated to grow by approximately 40 percent over the next 40 years.
To quote Lester Brown again, “Knowing where grain deficits will be concentrated tomorrow requires looking at where water deficits are developing today.”3 The dryer and more populous nations are already struggling with severe water issues today. So as we ponder the predicament of falling water tables, we might also ask what the impact of these will be on our ability to support even a few more decades of exponential growth, let alone an endless amount of it. Given the enormous litany of water issues that are already upon us, I find it quite improbable that we will be able to support even one more economic doubling without running into serious issues.
The Food Bubble
Because water is so indispensible to agriculture, and the more populous and dryer regions are so heavily dependent on ancient aquifers to meet their irrigation needs, some stark conclusions are apparent. Again from Brown’s Plan B:
Many countries are in essence creating a “food bubble economy”—one in which food production is artificially inflated by the unsustainable mining of groundwater. At what point does water scarcity translate into food scarcity?4
David Seckler and his colleagues at the International Water Management Institute, the world’s premier water research group, summarized this issue well:
Many of the most populous countries of the world—China, India, Pakistan, Mexico, and nearly all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa—have literally been having a free ride over the past two or three decades by depleting their groundwater resources. The penalty for mismanagement of this valuable resource is now coming due and it’s no exaggeration to say that the results