Restoring the Flow: Confronting the World's Water Woes
304
Restoring the Flow: Confronting the World's Water Woes
304eBook
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Overview
Try as we might, parts of North America may not escape the impacts of the global water crisis. The same kinds of water supply and quality issues that have appeared around our crowded planet are already beginning to present themselves here. Unfortunately, this is occurring at a time when, as a direct result of declining global food production, the world is beginning to rely more heavily than ever on agricultural communities in North America to help meet increasingly unattainable food-production goals.
Instead of waiting for a water crisis of our own, North Americans may well wish to put the lessons learned elsewhere in the world into active practice. Passionately conceived, clearly written and citing concrete examples from all over the world, Restoring the Flow is an approachable yet authoritative source, one of the many implements concerned citizens, government officials, businesspeople and policymakers can use and reuse in understanding and addressing this ever-growing global crisis.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781926855349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rocky Mountain Books |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 398 KB |
About the Author
Bob Sandford is the author or editor of some 20 books on the history and heritage of the Canadian West. He began his work with UN-linked initiatives as chair of the United Nations International Year of Mountains in 2002. He also chaired the United Nations International Year of Fresh Water and Wonder of Water Initiative in Canada in 2003/04. These celebrations focused on the growing importance of water to ecological and cultural heritage in Canada.
Bob is presently chair of the United Nations International Decade “Water for Life” Partnership in Canada, an initiative that aims to advance long-term water quality and availability issues in response to climate change in this country and abroad. He is also director of the Western Watersheds Climate Research Collaborative, a research and public-policy arm of the University of Lethbridge that promotes understanding of climate impacts on river systems originating in the Rocky Mountains. Bob was the first Canadian to be invited to sit on the advisory committee for the Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy, a biennial global public-policy forum that examines solutions to our planet’s water crisis.
Table of Contents
Invocation 11
Rivers within yearn for rivers without 11
A Meditation on Population 13
Acknowledgements 14
Introduction: Converging Global Water Trade-offs 17
North America 17
The world at large 19
"Peak water": Facing up to some terrifying trade-offs 20
Virtual water export 22
The small but crucial matter of sustainability 23
The emerging world of ecohydrology: Nature needs water, too 24
Getting our house in order 26
The Urgency of Water Policy Reform in Canada 33
Potential avenues of reform 35
Chapter 1 The Drying Out of the Interior of Our Continent 39
Confronting Drought in British Columbia 39
Drawing a mental map of the drying West 39
Contemplating the threat 42
Addressing the threat 43
Australia: A Case in Point 47
Face to face with aridity 47
Learning from Australia's Murray-Darling basin 51
A drought of uncommon intensity and duration 52
Why has the Australian drought been so severe? 55
What can we do? 60
Summary lessons for Canada and the mountain West 61
Getting Past the Talk To Take Some Action 64
Chapter 2 Diminishing Flows 67
A Gourmet Recipe for Upland Water 67
Ensuring Water Security in the Mountain West 69
The link between economics and ecohydrology 69
Who currently are western Canada's main water users? 71
Hydro-power generation 71
Agricultural water use 72
The water needs of the oil and gas industry 74
Municipal water use 75
Tourism and recreation: water as an attraction in its own right 76
Nature as a water user in and of itself 81
The political process as water information user 84
The high benefit-to-cost advantage of hydrometric monitoring 85
Chapter 3 The Dust Bowl Then and Now: Drought and Climate Lessons Learned and Not Learned on the Great Plains 87
Part 1 The Catastrophe 88
Defining drought in the context of the Dust Bowl 89
The first steps in recognizing and addressing the Dust Bowl problem 92
Great Plains restoration 94
The renewed post-war order 100
Part 2 What Has Changed, and What Hasn't 101
Denial 102
Even major disasters may not result in changes in societal attitudes or direction 104
Calculating economic costs 105
The fundamental change we seem unable to make 106
Exotic proposals for addressing the problem without solving it 108
Environmental refugees then and now 111
Appropriating and commodifying environmental values 112
Why are our major institutions unable to effect lasting change? 114
Part 3 Getting It Right This Time 117
Finding our way back to place 118
Restoring prairie watersheds 121
Bridging the gulf between promise and practice 124
Chapter 4 Corralling the Water Hole 126
Part 1 Water and Urban Power in an Era of Climate Change 127
What is the value of water? 127
The first-in-time, first-in-right prior appropriation water doctrine, or how to put a corral around your water 129
Troubling comparisons: Los Angeles and Calgary 133
Questioning tired assumptions and old laws: prior appropriation and agriculture's right to water 139
Part 2 Herding Some Sacred Cows 144
Shawki Barghouti: Corral irrigation, not water 144
Part 3 Water Teachings from Europe 152
Iberian suite: A very long road toward change 152
Introduction: No rain in Spain 153
Spanish water and Spanish farmers: Some history 157
From the top: The European Union Common Agricultural Policy 160
The European Union Water Framework Directive 162
Spain's National Irrigation Rehabilitation Project 165
The role of river basin authorities and irrigation associations in Spain 169
Water markets 170
Water scarcity, drought and climate change 173
Lessons for Canada 175
Future options: Linking agricultural development goals to water availability realities 182
Challenges we can expect as we work at the problem 183
Chapter 5 Water Teachings from Texas 185
Transcending the Tyranny of the Longest Straw 185
The Ogallala Aquifer: A rich bank account in overdraft 189
Groundwater management districts on the US High Plains 196
Will a cultural shift toward water thrift be sufficient? 200
The Trinity Aquifer 203
A New Texas Model 207
Using computers to understand desired future conditions 207
Bench-testing the beta 209
Atomizing risk by sleight of hand? 212
Testing the software for real 214
The numbers don't lie: There is no free lunch 217
Pitching the new techniques to the folks back home 221
Chapter 6 Our Cold Amazon 225
The Other West 225
Heading North of 60 226
Northern voices, northern waters 228
Great Slave Lake 229
The moral and ethical dimensions of climate change effects on the North 235
The ethics of climate change get real up North 241
The no-longer-frozen North: Pine Point and other digressions 246
Restoring the flow: Intergenerational equity and the future of the Northwest Territories 250
Chapter 7 Avoiding the Perfect Storm: Toronto, Great Lakes Water Woes and Climate Change 256
Understanding the Forms of Scarcity 257
Physical scarcity vs. economic scarcity 257
Economic scarcity and Great Lakes water 258
Scarcity amid abundance 260
Warming & Water: A Tempestuous Marriage 262
An extreme weather episode: Toronto, August 2005 262
The Perfect Storm in myth and fact 265
Overshadowed by Katrina: Toronto's Perfect Storm 268
Adaptive management 274
What the City of Toronto is doing about climate change 277
Afterword: Going Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel: The Urgent Need for Water Policy Reform in Canada 279
Facing our Global Situation 279
Looking into the blinding eye of policy truth 280
Sustainability as a Foundation of Democracy 282
What has "sustainability" come to mean? 283
Toward revitalized governance for sustainability 284
The Great Work of the Next Generation 287
The challenges for watershed basin governance models 287
Revitalized water governance: filling the gap between promise and practice 289
From promise to practice: a cautionary tale from Arizona 292
Notes 295
Bibliography 299
Index 303