"...., and nary a drop to drink", wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A situation that seems eerily familiar today, as drought clutches Australia, divides China into southern haves and northern have-nots, sickens the horn of Africa, turns the Bundelkhand region in India into a wasteland, and brings Barcelona, Spain to its knees.
In the U.S., the National Drought Mitigation Center's drought map shows fruit- and vegetable-growing states like California, Texas, New Mexico, South Carolina and Georgia in critical states of drought, with parts of Nevada, North Dakota, North Carolina, Alabama, Oregon, Washington and Idaho experiencing below-average precipitation that is making it increasingly difficult to grow crops like soybeans and corn, let alone those famous Washington-state apples or Oregon's blackberries and black raspberries.
Consistent drought has led to increasing water shortages across the western U.S. and these are now beginning to hit home - not just in farmer's fields but in residential communities, at the kitchen faucet and showerhead level. Hydrologists cite the cause as global warming, and predict water wars in the near future.
In California, a ruling in favor of the Delta smelt, and two years of below-average precipitation, have led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger to declare a statewide emergency - information Southern California's avocado growers already knew when they cut their avocado trees to stumps this spring to preserve increasingly marginal citrus crops.
Elsewhere in the U.S., floods have swept parts of the Midwest clean of homes, corn and soybeans with equal abandon. Iowa, the heart of the Corn Belt, has been hit hardest, with 83 of the state's 99 counties declared disaster areas, but the almost $2 billion being sought in emergency aid is likely to be slow in arriving or short of the mark as the government struggles to fund the war in Iraq from a piggybank increasingly depleted by the economic crisis and the devaluation of the dollar.
As a result of these lost crops (estimated at five million acres), this winter should see another rise in U.S. food prices similar to the one that has already occurred. In fact, the coming hike may be even worse, leaving those pushed to the brink by energy costs unable to buy adequate food and still heat their homes and drive to work.
Since the U.S. currently exports 54 percent of the world's corn, 36 percent of its soybeans and 23 percent of its wheat, third-world countries will find slim pickings on the international food market this fall, leading to greater rates of malnutrition and starvation, especially since Australia's drought precludes production and China, the largest supplier of global wheat, is having its own drought problems and internal supply issues.
The recent Midwest flooding is a lot of water, but none of it is drinkable and no large-scale technology is in place to cache rainwater; we apparently prefer to spend our money on war. When this water hits the Gulf of Mexico, laden with fertilizers from the almost 300,000 acres of planted fields, experts expect the Dead Zone - which last year covered 7,900 square miles - to grow to more than 10,000 square miles. This zone is a region in the Gulf that experiences eutrophication, or oxygen starvation, as a result of the nitrates in fertilizer accumulating in the water - a situation that leads to the die-off of fish and other aquatic creatures in the area, further limiting food supplies.
To make matters worse, experts are - in spite of the recent flood - now predicting a major Midwestern drought like the one in 1988. According to Iowa State University extension climatologist Elwynn Taylor, the chances are one in three. These odds are exacerbated by the continued presence of La Nina in the Pacific Ocean, and Taylor adds that if La Nina doesn't end by July, the odds rise to a disturbing 70 percent. If he is correct, what few crops survived the flood will likely succumb to drought.
Even where water is abundant in the U.S., most of it is no longer fit to drink. A report released in mid-March by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Lake Michigan high in pollutants linked to infant mortality, low birth weight, premature birth, heart disease and several forms of cancer. Lake Huron suffers from farm pollution, like the Gulf of Mexico, and increasing eutrophication. Lake Erie is so polluted that a "dead zone" well offshore contains nothing but zebra and quagga mussels and toxic bacteria. Lake Superior, the cleanest, is nonetheless haunted by ghosts of mercury, dioxin, and PCBs from industrial users around its shores.
In Virginia, more than 10,000 miles of rivers are polluted. Across the nation, 50 rivers or bodies of water are listed by the Environmental Working Group as severely polluted. According to experts, water-borne diseases kill 5 million people each year--more than AIDS and war combined. Pathogens in fish and shellfish that cause illness and even death in humans are almost always linked to improperly treated sewage released into rivers and bays.
As global warming advances, leading to ocean warming and thermal expansion rates that are 50 percent greater than previous estimates, water shortages - and fears of worse to come - are leading some corporations like Royal Dutch Shell to buy groundwater rights in Colorado before drilling for oil shale. Elsewhere, rural residents are protesting what seems a sweet deal for Nestlé - a water bottling facility in McCloud, California, where the multinational will pay .000087 cents per gallon on a 100-year contract that allows it to pump 1,600 acre-feet of spring water a year and a seemingly unlimited amount of groundwater.
In Texas, billionare T. Boone Pickens sits on top of a reservoir of 65 billion gallons per year, hoping to sell it to the city of Dallas (or the highest bidder) when things get tough. He didn't get rich by being nice. In Spain, the 2008 Zaragoza World Expo is unveiling a Digital Water Pavilion, a building whose walls are entirely water, digitally managed by an array of sensors. The water is reportedly recycled but still subject to evaporative losses, which has to be high in the hot, arid climate of Spain. Meanwhile, about 120 miles to the east, the residents of Barcelona are experiencing a 100-year drought, with precious drinking water being brought in by ship from France and even farther abroad. Perhaps, when all else fails, these thirsty residents can go to Zaragoza and lick the walls.
When Coleridge wrote those famous lines, he was speaking of sailors, who would - when fresh water supplies ran out - boil seawater and collect the steam to drink. Modern desalination still employs that technique, though on a vastly larger scale, and some suggest it as a solution to increasing drought. This is like saying bicycles are the solution to automobiles. Though desalination now occurs at a rate of 37 million cubic meters per day, at roughly 15,000 plants worldwide (most of them in the Middle East), the distillation process is tremendously energy intensive, and membrane technology is still well below the curve.
We may, by the 22nd century, be able to provide drinking water to the planet via membrane filtration, but we will never be able to water the approximately 1.75 million square miles of earth's arable land to provide crops, and what is the point of water without food? The human race faces death in either direction.
