This is the latest response I had to write for my Community Development class. Our topic this week was about the environment and development issues, specifically those related to clean water.

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“One day—and it won’t be long—we are going to wake up and it is just going to be too late.” This quote from Mahesh Chaturvedi, in the 2006 New Yorker article “The Last Drop” by Michael Specter, we read perfectly sums up my feelings after the readings this week. I am afraid we have reached this point. We are past the point of no return when it comes to the environment and rather than discovering how we can fix it, we will just keep discovering how much we have ruined it. We have read in several places about the belief that regardless of the problems of today, the technology of tomorrow will save us. We are now living in the tomorrow of the 1970s. Yet as much as fantastic advances have been made in solar and wind power, hybrid cars, and even “fuel efficient” jets, technology is also increasingly telling us that the planet is changing for the worse and changing faster than we ever realized it could. Our vision, or at least my vision, of the future is shifting from utopia to dystopia.

One thing I had not ever really thought of though was the application of the Tragedy of the Commons to resources like air and water, even markets depending on how you look at things. When I learned about the Commons in undergrad, I think we usually talked about it more as a thought experiment proving people’s tendency to act greedy and selfish . The more I have read this week for class the more I’m realizing just how poorly we are managing perhaps the most precious resources we have—air and water. I liked Hardin’s example of how providing food aid has never led developing countries to plan better for the future. The more I read about the water situation in the American southwest the more it became clear that the problem is not that no one is regulating the Commons there; the problem is that whenever lack of water has come up against development, more water was brought in from outside and development continued. Rather than realizing these huge megalopolises were being built in the middle of a desert where they had no right to exist, more water could always be brought in to meet growing needs. As a result, the Colorado River doesn’t even drain into the ocean anymore and one of the “regulators” has proposed piping in water from east of the Rockies!

But the costs of this system are starting to become clear. Farmers in Northern California and the central valley will tell you how restrictions on the water they can use for irrigation is hurting their business. Our growth and development is outpacing the ability of the planet to sustain us. Even in the West where we have historically looked to technology to save us when the environment doesn’t we are starting to realize the costs of our decisions. We need to drastically change how we allocate and use our resources if are to avoid catastrophe. Will it really take faucets running dry in Los Angeles before we start?

Filed under: life by Jonathan