Water is necessary for life.  It has been said that a human can go weeks without food, days without water and minutes without oxygen before there is death.  I have written here before about water and the need to look more closely at how we use it.  The two prior blog posts about water were triggered by the prolonged drought in the Southwestern United States and the fact that what was thought of as a temporary drought is now thought to be the new normal.

There is now severe drought across not only the Southwest, but also the Southeastern U.S. and across northern Minnesota.  Lake Okeechobee in Florida, the second largest body of fresh water in the country is in danger of ceasing to be a lake in the years ahead.  In fact, part of what used to be the lake was subject to a large brush fire in May. There are now states that are almost entirely enduring drought conditions.  Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Utah are all at 98-100% at drought level.  In Florida, officials said that it would take 50 inches of rain to begin to restore Lake Okeechobee.

Global warming is educating all of us to the reality that we are damaging the planet.  It is also deepening our understanding of the critical need to accelerate conservation and recycling efforts as they are the single greatest immediate effort we can bring to fight climate change.  We must now start to look at the way we use water, …

About a month ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘Water’.  In it I suggested that water would become an increasingly precious resource in the southwestern U.S. and that disputes would occur between states and other regulatory entities over rights to the water of the Colorado River.  It was therefore no surprise to see a huge front page story a few days ago on the topic.  The front page picture was of a fishing pier that was jutting out into the air since Lake Mead was 80 feet below ‘normal’.  Welcome to the new normal.
The two driving forces that are making water so much more scarce are unchecked population growth in the southwestern U.S., and the fact that, according to scientific evidence, what had been thought of as prolonged droughts were, in fact becoming the new normal. This means that everything about water will need to be revisited and rethought.  Usage, recycling, legal interpretations of water rights and ownership, escalating prices for water and a need for fundamental perceptual change on water and it’s usage.  Welcome to the twenty-first century when we have finally come to the crossing of inevitable trend lines.  These are the ever upward trend line of population growth and uncoordinated real estate development and the trend lines of both limited resources and climate change.
Water is a life source.  Water is a life source of all living things to varying degree.  Food, water and oxygen are three things that are essential for …

A few years ago I started the process of buying a second home in a warm part of the United States.  Living in Chicago, I wanted to find a place that, through the years would be where I would spend an increasing amount of time during the winter months.  The first step in this process was looking at the various real estate web sites that displayed listings in the Southwest and in Florida, where the weather usually stays above freezing. 

The first thing I experienced of course was sticker shock.  In the few years since I had last looked at second home prices in places like Arizona and Florida the prices seemed to have doubled.  This of course made me accelerate the process.  I came into this process with a bias toward Florida because of a life long history of visiting the state for a number of reasons, mainly vacations and family.  That being said, I have always liked the stark spiritual aspect of the desert, so I carefully looked at Arizona in particular, and also Nevada.

There was however, one thing that kept nagging at me about the Southwest: water.  During the 1990s and early part of this decade I started to see that there was a developing scarcity of water in Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.  Water rationing and contentious relationships between states regarding water from the Colorado River all grew dramatically during those years.  The first reason of course was that unchecked real estate development and sprawl was covering …