About six years ago I stopped by NOAA in Boulder and picked up a pamphlet that warned drought in the American Southwest could last a few hundred years.
Earlier this year National Geographic also reported the California drought could linger for 200 years, based on past climate patterns.
The U S Drought Monitor as of early June 2014 shows extreme drought conditions now in portions of Colorado and parts of New Mexico and southeastern Colorado, the latter place I moved from last year.
This could be a tragedy for California and the rest of the nation as a significant amount of food is grown in the Golden State.
Rob Schultheis warned about this possibility in his book The Hidden West: Journeys in the American Outback. This environmentalist and journalist used to walk for weeks in those dry dusty canyons of central Utah. Last year I went to Dead Horse State Park and Canyonlands National Park in Utah and was awed by the vast stretches of dry desolation that could be seen from various observation points. I found it hard to believe Schultheis would go down into those distant canyons and plateaus on foot for days and weeks and somehow survive.
His book repeated what others have observed about southern California and Los Angeles -- what Schultheis called "hydrological imperialism" that stuck its tentacles out for hundreds and hundreds of miles, even into surrounding states. It sucked wetlands, rivers, lakes and aquifers dry, bringing the water to L.A. for golf courses and parks and lawns in what is really a desert.
Inland lakes in Nevada that used to support small Indian tribes a century and more ago, Mono Lake, for example, were already dying when Schultheis wrote his book in the 1970s.
A profound lesson in humility I learned from Schultheis was how the Digger Indians, like the Piutes, could survive in that bleak landscape. Europeans types like me who passed through would look down on them...and yet Schultheis observes the Indians were masterful survivors in an environment most of us would quickly die in.
Likewise, once irrigated fields along the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado have dried up as Aurora, Colorado has reached out a tentacle to claim water for the lawns and parks of suburban Denver.
When Schultheis first arrived on the arid high plains they left him with a vivid impression of "exile, abandonment, extinction."
Could those same words describe southern California some day?
California was once mostly dust and drought. And then man came along and rigged up pipelines and moved water from wetlands and distant rivers and lakes to the California desert. Could it return to dust again?
Yes, we can blame Congress for some of this tragic mess in the Southwest. And the White House. And the controlled news media. They never stop to think and look at the big picture.
Another Colorado environmentalist and anti-immigration agitator Frosty Woolridge spent years warning that rampant immigration should be stopped on environmental concerns alone.
I grew up hearing our government and covert Rockefeller type facilitators tell two generations of American women to have only two children. The women were warned resources are limited and must be conserved. The women listened and the U S birth rate has dropped to about replacement levels for American Americans.
But then the borders were opened up and tens and tens of millions of foreigners have swarmed into the U S to consume land, water and air resources once considered so precious.
Much of the expanded demand for water and land can be traced to immigration impact.
Conspiracy researchers who are knowers and not theorists have said the goal is to destroy the white Euro-centric North America of old (north of the Rio Grande) and brown the population. Did you know India was once occupied by a white race in the north and a black race in its south?, according to Richard Kelly Hoskins. And as the races blended together each lost its earlier identity and now - despite so many American yearning for Hindu spiritualisty - we see an India with huge masses of poor peasant people who compete to survive on the resources of that land. India is praised for its high spirituality. But should India also be judged for how it has failed to provide a better quality living for much of its population? When the once separate white and black races blended, what happened to focus? Can responsibility and community redeem karma and fate? Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist of an earlier generation, observed the United States could never be defeated militarily. But he suggested it could be toppled through psychological warfare. Is not the numbing and dumbing of our population about such matters as free market immigration into the arid Southwest evidence of this?
It turns out California fields can go dry, just as some day, maybe in 70 years according to a PBS documentary I saw recently, our petroleum resources - the major cause of the population spike since the 1800s - will dry up too.
While these long range thinkers funded by big money succeed at restructuring the United States...they have also succeeded in destroying some of the resources we were once urged to conserve.
Woolridge and Schultheis are among those voices were crying in the wilderness...about the wilderness.
And we did not listen.
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/RegionalDroughtMonitor.aspx?west
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