Climate crisis grows water woes

Yesterday, for the first, but we hope not the only, time this year, we saw a male scarlet tanager at the feeders. His fiery red plumage made us glad we were in Minnesota and not the normally cool and wet northwestern states currently suffering temperatures well in excess of 100℉. Up until we saw him, we feared his kind might have suffered a climate crisis triggered fate similar to the bluebirds that are still missing from our nesting boxes this year.

male scarlet tanager

Photo by J. Harrington

Today's Star Tribune flags another climate crisis issue that may spill over into Minnesota, The new water wars. The linked story references  California and Oregon battling over the water remaining in the Klamath River. Then it notes

President Joe Biden and congressional leaders should be sounding a national alarm. Biden is supporting a $973 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework that allocates $55 billion for clean drinking water infrastructure to eliminate lead in the nation's service lines and pipes — an essential investment. Yet the framework allocates only $5 billion for Western water storage — an inadequate sum for upgrading aging dams, canals and pipelines to improve flows and reduce losses.

Nowhere does there appear to be a mention of the need to stop polluting what has become an increasingly critical and limited resource: our water supply, both surface and ground. As lead pipes are to urban water systems, nitrates from fertilizer and manure from CAFOs are to water sources and supplies on which those urban systems depend. If we consider the environmentalists' phrase "reduce, reuse, and recycle" and apply it to water, we need to substantially reduce the wastes that prevent almost half of our surface waters from meeting water quality standards. That's a less dangerous tactic than reusing and recycling contaminated water, even after it's been treated.

Ask yourself these questions if you think Minnesota and the rest of the country have approached adapting to our climate crisis in a sensible way. Will the Great Lakes Compact be able to withstand the political power of "Big Ag" when the Ogallala aquifer is gone and California's Central Valley isn't growing avocados and almonds due to permanent drought? As an foreshadow, when the climate crisis is producing unprecedented heat waves on the west coast, and much of Minnesota is experiencing drought, has Minnesota's state government allowed a foreign company to draw excessive water from our state's wild rice lakes, lakes supposedly protected under treaty rights, so that a demonstrably unnecessary tar sands pipe line can be constructed? Are the state and federal governments doing little to nothing to stop that pipe line? Is this the kind of governance than can get many of US killed prematurely as the climate crisis worsens? Don't we need to do better with whom we elect?

[UPDATE: New rules for Minnesota’s large animal feedlots to be relaxed under compromise legislation]

The Drought

By Gary Soto

The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains

East of Ocampo, and then descended,

Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate.

They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went

Trackless, the houses blown open, their cellars creaking

And lined with the bottles that held their breath for years.

They passed the fields where the trees dried thin as hat racks

And the plow’s tooth bit the earth for what endured.

But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless

And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket,

Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger—

Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

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