What Happens to the U.S. Midwest When the Water's Gone?

[riversedge]

Nope--self regulation not working!




RiotWomenn ?@RiotWomennn 1h1 hour ago

Water ... Farmers banded together to fight the Keystone Pipeline but what about irrigation? Self-regulation maybe?





What Happens to the U.S. Midwest When the Water's Gone?

The Ogallala aquifer turned the region into America's breadbasket. Now it, and a way of life, are being drained away .


Picture of broken bed springs on the High Plains that once served as a corral
Picture of a young girl bathing in a bucket filled with water
Left: Bedsprings once served as a corral near Elida, New Mexico, where turbines tap into the High Plains’ unrelenting wind, generating new income for farmers who have lost earnings as their wells dry up.Right: Two-year-old Annalea Garcia is bathed nightly by her mother, Crystal, in a bucket filled with water hauled from town. Their well and the wells of some 30 other families on the outskirts of Clovis, New Mexico, have run dry.
By Laura Parker
Photographs by Randy Olson

PUBLISHED July 2016

This story appears in the August 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.

"Whoa," yells Brownie Wilson, as the steel measuring tape I am feeding down the throat of an irrigation well on the Kansas prairie gets away from me and unspools rapidly into the depths below.

The well, wide enough to fall into, taps into the Ogallala aquifer, the immense underground freshwater basin that makes modern life possible in the dry states of Middle America. We have come to assess the aquifer’s health. The weighted tip hits the water at 195 feet, a foot lower than a year ago. Dropping at this pace, it is nearing the end of its life. “Already this well does not have enough water left to irrigate for an entire summer,” Wilson says....................................

[Nitram]

1. It will dry up and blow away.

The Second Dust Bowl.

[rurallib]

2. Link please?

maybe I missed it

[Binkie The Clown]

3. Something that can't go on, won't go on. It's that simple.

Our way of life is going away whether we like it or not.
Water, climate, energy, economy, none of these can continue operating in the red. We can't continue to consume more than the planet produces. It can't go on, so it won't go on.

[world wide wally]

4. One thing we should most certainly be doing is switching to drip irrigation

Through drip irrigation, Israel made the desert bloom.

[Earth_First]

5. It's only a matter of time before the Great Lakes become drained, outsourced...

It's the largest collection of freshwater on the planet. Consisting of 21% of the planet's landmass.

It's going to become a very key resource and likely to spark an campaign among it's residents and nations.

I, for one, am one of the 33 million individuals who live in a Great Lakes watershed. I am ardently opposed to removing water the Great Lakes to ship elsewhere in the country in great quantities so that individuals and industry may carry out unsustainable practices in regions not equipped with adequate resources to sustain itself.

It will be ugly...