Arizona Department of Water Resources
500 North Third Street
Phoenix, Arizona, 85004
[This accusation has been published on the Internet in newsgroups sci.environment, sci.energy, talk.environment, as well as e-mailed to the vice-president and president of the US.]
You designate portions of the state as critical areas of active water management and stand charged with the responsibility of wisely managing those resources.
You claim to be generously considering a length of time of 100 years as that span over which the continuation of human activity as now designed need be sustainable. [Arizona passed legislation prior to 1980 that made the supposed guaranteed supply of water for 100 years a requirement for development. Thus is the planned end of human life in this state.] That is a genuinely cute number, surely more years than most of the alive shall see, and probably their immediate offspring. However, in comparison to the longevity of Chinese culture, which has yet to proclaim the duration of its sustainability to extend only to a hundred years more, or to the great breadth and span of evolution as depicted in the first part of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which never considered the end of itself as a possibility, it is but niggardliness of human spirit.
You do not consider enough of reality even within the next decade or so to approach wisdom, let alone a hundred years. You focus on the water, and perhaps the money, but nothing else. Undoubtedly you need the reminder that the petroleum age will change from wax to wane, all too soon considering the century spent building the dependent infrastructure and present unheeding momenta. Until the subsequent age becomes defined and demonstrated, the foremost surety is that those systems and processes which now depend upon augmenting supply of petroleum and natural gas, will precipitously and increasingly be unable to do so.
Our agriculture is now quite dependent upon oil and gas, and will in necessity to use less to feed even more, function more poorly then even without considering the further diminishment of capacity through continuing loss of land and water. Nor will it be as feasible to transport foods from far lands by truck and plane. Those few and favored regions which are able to combine local production of many varied perishable crops with population are foolish to surrender that potential for some short-term profit making scheme.
But that is what you foster in your pretensions to wisely manage the use of water: golf courses watered with drinking water in the middle of the desert, almost always built upon the sacrifice of agricultural potential. It doesn't take an engineer to understand that such is the epitome of unsustainable practice, for many a grade schooler can make the required deductions. As if there were no longer an increasing world and US population, as if agricultural land was being augmented rather than everywhere paved over and eroded, as if swollen financial institutions were a means of growing food, rather than soil, sun, and water, as if global climate change and overshoot of carrying capacity did not challenge every existing assumption as to what constitutes intelligent development. You want to wait until the price of food rises enough to reverse the ubiquitous disrespect for prime farmland, wait until the oil supply begins to decline before considering how to continue feeding the population and moving food thousands of miles, wait until that quarter's profits are affected and the full chaos is upon us. You want us to wait a hundred years before questioning the wisdom of what you allow.
The developer creates his transplant of English green grass countryside into a most improbable environment, and cashes out as those who have time and money in surplus diminish the sustainability of the present in their chasing of little white balls. You don't even force the developer to provide for use of the treated waste waters when they come into existence, for he's quite cashed out by then, and there would be additional expense. No, just the sweetest of drinking waters for so many golf curses in Arizona. Growth at any cost.
You might cry out that it is the reality of the present economic system which compels you to authorize the obviously stupid, and probably it is so. Thus, the inability of this economic system to consider other than the churning of dollars in confrontation with impending great change makes viability of the system itself, doubtful.
I accuse you, and the system that begot you, of squandering mismanagement, of pimping to the shortest-term economic interests, of blatant unsustainable practice.
Steve Morningthunder
[Delivered by certified mail.]