It’s hard to imagine that Seattle could ever face a water shortage. In my fourth December here, my husband and I bailed buckets of stormwater out of the basement of our 1940s rental house after rain overwhelmed our drains and gutters.
But about three-fourths of the water that flows through Washington state rivers in the spring and summer starts as snow, not rain, and gets stored in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. The snow melts over a period of months, feeding creeks and rivers, and providing reliable supplies of drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower.
Mountain snow becomes less predictable as the climate warms, melting earlier in the year and leaving less to sustain our waterways in the dry season. In 2005, an unusually warm winter left March snowpacks at one-fourth their normal size. Rivers hit record lows, and our governor declared a drought emergency, which continued through a dry summer. You can’t attribute any one event to climate change, but warming temperatures will make droughts like this more common in the Pacific Northwest and across the country.
Meanwhile, we’re reaching the limits of many of our water supplies, and both wet and dry regions—from the desert Southwest to New England—are worried about water shortage. For decades, the United States has used big infrastructure—such as dams, drilling, and massive water transfers—to avoid the hard truth that water is finite. Experts like MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick believe that the United States is heading toward “an era of water scarcity.”
We’ve also made our communities more vulnerable to global warming’s impacts by overusing and degrading our water resources, through destruction of wetlands that buffer us against floods and consumption of water from aquifers faster than it can be renewed.
It’s still possible to meet our water needs, even in the face of these converging crises. But it means we need to change our relationship with water.
We can start, as Sandra Postel writes, by “pay[ing] attention to how we value and use water” in our homes and communities. All over the country, communities and citizens are getting involved in water conservation—from repairing leaks to changing showerheads and using rain barrels.
We can take care of the ecosystems that supply our water needs. We can fight to keep pollution out of places like the Catskill-Delaware Watershed, which provides New York City’s drinking water, or join groups like the Waterkeepers, which are stopping dam construction on Colorado rivers. A healthy watershed means more—and cleaner—water for people and wildlife, as a coalition of loggers and ranchers discovered when they began restoring wetlands in the Feather River Watershed in California.
We can keep water supplies in our collective, public care and out of corporate hands. Citizens in places like Felton, Calif., and Milwaukee are fighting attempts to privatize community water systems, and around the world, activists are stopping efforts to bottle, sell, and exploit drinking water for profit.
Throughout history, many cultures have developed traditions that protect water. In coming decades, our security and survival will depend on how well we learn to respect water’s essential and irreplaceable role in all of life.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
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