www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20210311-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
“We should then recognize that the development of basic economic infrastructure had always been a needed creation of what is required as an ‘habitable’ development of a ‘synthetic,’ rather than a presumably ‘natural’ environment for the enhancement, or even the possibility of human life and practice at some time in the existence of our human species.… Man as a creator in the likeness of the great Creator, is expressed by humanity’s creation of the ‘artificial environments’ we sometimes call ‘infrastructure,’ on which both the progress, and even the merely continued existence of civilized society depends.”
A Note To Readers
Two themes are developed this week. The first is the increasing alarm expressed by water managers, climatologists, and some journalists that the southwestern states are not only in extreme drought conditions now, but that the entire region has entered what is called a megadrought.
Megadroughts are defined as intense droughts that last for decades or longer. Over the past 20,000 years megadroughts have regularly occurred in the west, with some lasting as long as a century. I reviewed the book, “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow,” by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam, in 2014, which provides a good overview of the phenomenon.
The authors begin the book with this, “The climate history of the past 20,000 years reveals that the American West has been plagued by deep and prolonged droughts, as well as by enormous floods, on a fairly regular basis.”
And this, “The history of climatic change over the past 20,000 years presented here highlights pioneering studies that reconstruct past precipitation, temperature, stream flows, flood events and wildfires. Clues for these events are found in tree rings, in landforms, and in the sediments and fossils buried beneath lakes, estuaries, marshes, and the coastal ocean.”
My review, “Are We Controlled by the Whims of Nature, or Will We Create Our Future?” can be found here: https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
The second theme of this report is the first of a series of reports on what must be done to ensure the West, and more broadly, the entire continent of North America, a water supply that will suffice for the coming century, a century that must be one of a reindustrialization of the nation, the massive building of infrastructure and a growing population. That section will begin with a short history of water management, beginning many thousands of years ago. Also included will be an introduction to the “North American Water and Power Alliance” project put forth more than 50 years ago, but abandoned as the nation turned its back on the idea of progress and development.
As my colleague Ben Davidson writes in a new article to be published shortly, “The value of infrastructure–such as large-scale water management, for example–is measured by its transformative effect on the productive process, and on the power of labor, as a function of the new infrastructure platform.” And more broadly, “The most developed scientific framework for understanding the source of economic growth (or decline) is that developed by Lyndon LaRouche.”
