Drought and Fire, Floods and Drowning — Same Day. Again this week, the news is filled with reports of huge differences in water conditions in various parts of the Nation. Parts of Texas and Oklahoma got 18 inches of rain last nite alone, and the streets of a state capital, Oklahoma City, are flooded after 15 days of rain. More rain is on the way. Elsewhere, a 13-year-old boy was swept to his death in a swollen river. But while all that was happening, a forest fire was running wild in the Lake Tahoe area of California, pouring out smoke in such quantities that the health of people in a second state capital, Carson City, Nevada, was endangered. In like fashion, a few weeks ago central Florida was ablaze with long-running wildfires, while parts of the Mid-Atlantic States were flooded. Georgia farmers are being ruined by drought, and parts of the Southwest are experiencing what I recently heard termed a five-year drought. An MSNBC report Monday says that drought is presently affecting parts of 30 states, with "significant wildfire danger" in 19 states. A video that amplifies that report says:

"Basically, you're talking 50% of the United States is in some kind of a drought mode." ... In Georgia and northern Florida, the biggest fire in more than 100 years is still smoldering.

Heavy rains in Texas are not, the reporter says, an unalloyed blessing. Those rains produce growth of masses of grasses and other biomass, with the effect that:

When the hot, dry weather returns, there will be much more fuel to burn.

Every year we see the same absurdity: floods, often deadly, in one part of the country; drought, often with accompanying deadly fires, in another. Government does nothing to move water from where there is too much to where there is too little. Why is that?
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Isn't it obvious that we should have canals and high-capacity pipelines running every which way across the Nation to even the flow so that every part of the country has enuf water, but little more? Indeed, we should have irrigation works in place in every part of the Nation subject to drought. My area is called the Garden State. We could be a Garden Nation, with the large-scale equivalent of drip-hoses in the places that regularly become tinder-dry, as would prevent the most devastating wildfires. We need to remember that homes, trees, and the occasional firefiter, are not the only things destroyed by such fires. Uncounted animals are also killed. And, for the "global warming" crowd, wildfires send millions of tons of "greenhouse gases" into the air.
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Tho fire has always played a part in renewing forests, there is in this, as in everything else, a Golden Mean, between no fires and catastrophic fires.
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Droughts can be so severe, over such a wide area, that they constitute a danger to the entire Nation's prosperity (at the least). A webpage on a Federal Government website says that this country suffered a nearly nationwide, three-year drought in the 1950s, when our population was half what it is today. No one has done anything to insulate us from the consequences of sustained, widespread drought in the future.
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In 1997 I sent letters to three major newspapers in different parts of the Nation to advocate the creation of "an interstate highway system for water". None of them printed it. I later put that text (only about 630 words) onto the Expansionist Party website, but almost no one has troubled to read it. Far less than 1% of visitors to the XP home page have gone on to read that page.
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Creating such a massive and complicated system would almost surely lead to learning on a grand scale, and perhaps even to new technologies. For instance, we might learn how to use passive systems, such as capillarity, to raise water without human-supplied energy in places remote from power lines.
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Had we started on such a system ten years ago, beginning with watercourses from the wettest parts of the Nation, such as the inland areas regularly inundated by waters lifted from the Gulf of Mexico, out to the High Plains, Southeast, and Southwest, there might today be places other than streets for deluges like that underway in east-central Texas and Oklahoma, to go. And Georgia farmers might not be facing ruin.
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If we start an interstate highway system for water today, ten years from now we might find that not only are the rainiest parts of the Nation not submerged, but agriculture and forests in much of the rest of the Nation are in hugely better condition than they are today. For the "global warming" crowd, again: resurgent forests absorb enormous quantities of "greenhouse gases" and lock them up in biomass for decades or even centuries. For people concerned about deforestation in the Third World, the more wood that American forests can produce, the less predation the First World will make upon Third World forests.
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What else would be affected is impossible to predict. Consider the costs and effects of the actual (roadway) Interstate Highway System. Modern American life without that system is impossible to visualize.

The system is prominent in American daily life. The distribution of virtually all goods and services involves Interstate Highways at some point. Residents of American cities commonly use urban Interstates to travel to their places of work. The vast majority of long-distance travel, whether for vacation or business, uses the national road network; of these trips, about one-third (by the total number of miles driven in the country in 2003) utilize the Interstate system. * * *

Although construction on the Interstate Highway system continues, the removal of the last traffic signal on Interstate 90 in Wallace, Idaho, on September 15, 1991 is often cited as the completion of the Interstate System. The initial cost estimate for the system was $25 billion over twelve years; it ended up costing $114 billion and taking 35 years to complete.

Before the Interstate Highway System was built, few people thought we needed it. If we had been told it would cost $114 billion (tho not in 1956 dollars) and take 35 years to complete, we might not even have started it. But aren't we glad we built it, no matter what it cost and how long it took?
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We don't have to be passive 'grasshoppers', leaving ourselves exposed to risks from droughts and floods. We can be industrious 'ants', building a safety net against capricious — and destructive — Nature.
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P.S. Ann Coulter "needs killin'". She has moved far beyond the limits of acceptable political discourse. I have advocated that Bush and his ilk be tried and executed by tribunals over war crimes and crimes against humanity. Coulter, however, has said John Edwards should be murdered by terrorists. But she is much more sensibly to be regarded as a proper target of Moslem terrorists, since she has been a forthrite advocate of discrimination against Arabs at home and mass murder of Arabs abroad. Her continued existence is yet another proof that there is no God.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,568 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:45 PM