Water depletion and economic collapse

by EPDaily | January 16, 2011 at 04:06 am

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Economic factors and environmental factors both play a part in determining our overall quality of life. Economic factors such as the cost of energy, the cost of food, and the cost of services do play a significant role in determining our happiness, but environmental factors such as clean air, available freshwater, and enough arable soil to feed the population act as the bedrock upon which all economic activity rests. Therefore it is paramount that we seek to learn how to protect our environmental resources so as to secure our economic stability.

Freshwater makes up a statistically small portion of all of the water on Earth, somewhere around 1% is considered freshwater. Freshwater supplies are both above ground in rivers, lakes, and streams, and they are also located below ground in aquifers that contain fossilized water reserves.

Limited resources, such as petroleum and water, are the foundation of the modern agricultural era. If we don't develop a sustainable strategy regarding our use of petroleum in fertilizers and water for irrigation, we may find ourselves slipping down the same slope that other nations have found themselves on as their domestic food production levels falls while the price of food on the global market rises.

As petroleum becomes more expensive on global markets, the price of the fertilizers used to increase agricultural production goes up. Transportation costs also increase. Food becomes more expensive.

The problem that has developed regarding our fossilized water reserves is that our current water-use practices are unsustainable even if the projected increase in population didn't happen. We are depleting our freshwater reserves and this will have an inflationary effect on food prices also.

Many regions of the world that depend upon freshwater supplies for everything from agriculture to energy are finding that planning for the future is difficult given the current consumption levels in conjunction with a decreasing supply. Some areas of the world are already beginning to feel the constraints of pushing local aquatic systems past the brink of what is sustainable.

There are tipping points past which effects seem to build in momentum as they snowball, concentrating their impact. In the globalized society that we have created, as individual countries are squeezed dry environmentally, then agriculturally and economically in an increasingly dramatic feedback loop, our unsustainable practices that are spread across the globe add up.

We should all feel the collective impacts of unsustainability equally, but the process of environmental and economic collapse is just beginning and those impacts are currently spread unevenly around the globe. While some nations have already begun building up some momentum toward collapse, other nations remain isolated from any major impacts leaving their citizens to question the validity of the idea of environmental limits to economic prosperity.

The recent events this past summer in Pakistan and Russia gave us an example of just how these tipping points in the environment ripple through economic markets. The question being posed to us is, how many environmental shifts can our global economic system take before it comes collapsing down like the house of paper money that it is. Can American capitalism absorb more floods, droughts, and more failed harvests in more regions of the world? Capitalism's crusaders are taught to defend their unlimited growth ideology, but defending capitalism can not stop the bedrock of economics from being overfished, overfarmed, overpolluted, overused, and overconsumed. We need to collectively begin to assess whether unlimited growth is sustainable on a planet with finite resources. If our environment continues to collapse, so will our economic system; protecting our air, water, and soil resources is a matter of self-preservation.

In America, we are able to create cooperatives regarding resources across state lines and through diverse ecosystems, but in other regions of the world, they do not. A river may begin in one country and then travel through several others before emptying its flow into the sea through its delta. What happens when the river's source-country builds several dams to conserve water for its own people at the expense of the people in other countries who live downstream? What happens to food production in those countries? What happens when a few of them located next to each other begin to experience agricultural failure simultaneously?

In many regions of the world, agriculture is dependent largely upon seasonal rainfall patterns. Small fluctuations in the weather from year-to-year can have profound effects of crop production, and hence available food. Still, other countries have reached the limit of their agricultural production due to depletion of their fossilized water reserves and will soon be importing more grain from the world markets at a time when climate shifts in other regions are decreasing food production. Small fluctuations in world food prices can push some countries past the brink and into bankruptcy, hunger, and illness.

Floods and droughts leading to failed harvests in Africa, in conjunction with more failed harvests in Russia and Pakistan this year, have already begun to create a situation whereby relatively weak nations are building up momentum heading toward more future problems. Multiple, successive environmental shifts can result in the governments of those nations negatively impacted being no longer able to provide basic services to their citizenry. Famine, migrations then follow.

America produces more than enough grain to feed its population, but similar to other regions of the world, is unable to sustain its current levels of production without raising prices due to constrained supplies of oil and water. Couple that with an expanding domestic population over the next couple of decades, and it becomes quite clear that cooperation among states that share a river corridor is necessary for each state to maintain its economic vitality. Regions that work together to make plans for the inevitability of constrained water supplies in the future will be able to shield their economies from climate and environmental shifts, more so than their counterparts that try acting unilaterally.

More efficient use of freshwater for energy and agricultural is necessary to keep it from being consumed at a faster rate than they can be replenished. The fertilizer question is stickier.

Agriculture, dependent largely upon freshwater and petroleum, is very susceptible to the same volatility in the current energy markets. Continued environmental shifts may just provide enough instability to push local agricultural markets into successive failures that add up to regional catastrophes and ultimately global collapse.