killing hidden waters
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

16::September::2005 18:58 → permalink

Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process, like the looting of ore deposits, soil, forests, and fuels, is the machinery behind the expressions “conquest of nature” and “the miracle of the deserts.” Rip away the veneer of western history and this consumption of resources links the centuries.

[and the final paragraph of the book:]

This writing has always been on the wall. It is not a revelation to learn that cheap energy makes societies boom, that groundwater in arid regions has negligible recharge, that humans tend to use as much of anything as they can lay hands on. We can ignore these facts and pump, mine, and combust with abandon, or we can recognize these facts and attempt to construct a sustainable society. There will be no painless answers, nor were there any in the past. — Charles Bowden

I was not expecting what he presented, and was fascinated when he repeatedly makes the connection between levels of technological implementation and several attendant processes — the consequent overall social structure, the impact on the environment, and the absolute energy cost of the different implementation levels. Starting with indigenous tribal groups and continuing through the contemporary inhabitants in the desert Southwest, he examines the usage of a range of resources — water, fossil fuels, soil, and forests — and makes a good case for the cataclysmic risk of unsustainable use. Indeed, pointing out the obvious, he makes it clear that unsustainable use (always) ends in some kind of socio-economic collapse — perhaps deferred temporarily by substituting one resource for another — but eventually depletion precipitates a collapse. Noting a sequence of energy-coalescing advances (the horse for the Comanche Indians, fossil groundwater for the High Texas Plains (the Llano Escatado), the metal shovel for the Pima indians, etc), Bowden examines the consequences of resource exploitation via those technological advances and compares the social system both before and after access to the resource (as afforded by the technology change). Basing the view on the intrinsic energy value of the resource, he forms a powerful critique against contemporary social systems that blindly insist on technologically maximizing usage of a non-renewable resource base. It is probably necessary to be reminded that these cycles occur across any (and all) civilizations, down to rather small population groups.

Compared to my own energy-based worldview, Bowden confirmed some examples that I often use in class — where the history of civilizations may be directly correlated to the existence of one or more non-renewable resources which causes the ‘rise and fall’ of the society. The rise is facilitated when the resource-base becomes exploitable through technological advance or through simple physical access to the geographic locus of the resource followed by the subsequent fall when the access is denied or the extent of the resource is exhausted. One example I use are the British hardwood forests that, through technical advance became the basis for the construction of the British fleet which eventually defeated the Spanish fleet. When those forests were depleted, the British had no substitute for the first-growth elm and oak trees which were used for the unitary keels of ships-of-the-line. Not long after the depletion of British forests towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, coal, a potent form of concentrated solar energy is discovered, and drove the industrial revolution. British Imperial hegemony follows the decline in this readily available coal. And, aside from a tenacious clinging to Gulf oil resources following World War I and continuing as a secondary partner to US hegemony, the British Empire is in very late decline. This example is over-simplified, but it is not difficult to make the case that a single fundamental resource or energy source or a combination of a few underlies any concentration of social power. And conversely, it is not difficult within any social system to identify those primary sources, given that much of the attention of the social system as a whole is dedicated to the secure utilization of those resources.

Bowden, Charles (2003) Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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