Demographers and scientists alike broadly predict that once the history of the 21st century is written, water will have emerged as the primary commodity driving the socioeconomic forces shaping world politics and the well-being of the global population estimated even by mid-century to exceed nine billion. (Almost a 30% increase from now for those keeping track...)
Whatever energy alternatives the vicissitudes of oil pricing and availability drive along the way, concerns with accessible power sources will pale alongside the specter of thirst and hunger arising from a shortage of the world's most basic source of survival, H2O.
That's why Detroit's alarming population decline first reported this week in the Times signals what can only be a temporary passage in the patterns of global settlement beginning right here in America. The built world is going to need places like a city, named after the French word for strait, along a river dividing two of the greatest freshwater lakes on the face of the globe (by size, the fourth: Michigan, and the tenth: Erie).
With population exploding in inauspiciously stressed water zones across all continents including the deserts of the American southwest and Rocky Mountains' dry eastern slopes and their nearby badlands, the limits to growth from lack of it will soon come into sharp focus. If not due merely to literal shortages initially made apparent by periods of drought, raising costs will accelerate the awareness, especially as a handful of large international corporate conglomerates are quietly privatizing the world's aquifers and controlling their terrestrial consumption. Without natural supplies and rainfall, such corporate control will monetize ever more effectively the cost of quenching thirst and growing crops, not to mention meeting the needs of sanitation and industry.
Just 2.5 percent of the world's water is fresh, and according to environment correspondent Alec Kirby of the BBC, "two-thirds of that is trapped in icecaps and glaciers." (No reprieve therefore from global warming, as, whether one believes it's caused by man or not, the lion's share of the resulting melt-off turns salty from the first liquefied droplet.) He goes on, "The amount of fresh water available for human use is less than one percent of all the water on the planet."
Which brings us back to Detroit and the colossal supplies surrounding it. It's the Saudi Arabia of fresh water! (Add in the ease of navigation from its surrounding waterways, stretching as they do from the Atlantic to the Mississippi by lake and canal.)
Sooner or later people will return and marvel that Nevada, Arizona, west Texas, and Dubai of all places once beckoned settlers ignorantly imagining a perpetual supply of affordable water. If those who can pay for it decide to stay in their artificially maintained oases, the tens of millions who cannot will gladly seek to to pursue their livelihoods in a place where the essence of life on earth abounds. At a time when public budgets and political will show no appetite for the kinds of massive (read: costly) governmental infrastructure needed to transfer water supplies to places where they don't exist, such localized, low-cost concentration offers even more evidence for the Motor City's eventual and promising rebirth.
The Romans started to figure out, beginning in 312 BC with the Appia Aqueduct, how to supply fresh water from long distance to spawn growth where the economics and political structures called for it. It worked well enough to sustain an empire but some claim the toxic lead piping feeding it ultimately abetted its downfall. There's no disputing, meanwhile, the genius of the technology and the example it set.
Such ingenuity has evolved in myriad, unimaginable ways through systems of waterways, pipelines, irrigation, and desalination, and it will continue to do so. Over time, however, the costs of such endeavor measured against dwindling reserves will -- like the production of oil -- forge renewed reliance on nature's most effective alternatives: proximity, bounty and thrift.
The future of Detroit is a wet one, and for that reason alone it shall rise anew and flourish through the most basic of human needs.
How many of the oil and gas rigs are actually situated in the Great Lakes or within 1 to 2 miles of the lakes? Because if there are rigs there someone needs to measure the methane, formaldehyde, water vapor and CO2 levels. You may have contaminated water. Especially, methane contamination.
Has anyone considered putting in wind energy or using the waters energy to generate power? I guess the fossil fuel freaks have intimidated all the politicians with the threat to withhold money if they go off the reservation and support alternative energy.
Has anyone considered doing what banks do to create loans? Michigan and other states could charter publicly owned banks like that of N. Dakota to fund priorites without costing taxpayers a dime. See www.webofdebt.com/articles and find three or four great articles on how to create cost free loans for the people. They do it in N. Dakota and you folks in Michigan can do it too. Just don't take no for an answer and tell the bankers to go to hell. Public banks serve people not profiteers.
Of the Great Lakes, the Detroit River is actually connecting Lakes Huron and Erie. And if we really wanted to be technical, the Detroit River connects Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair before connecting to Lake Huron. Lake Michigan, however, is on the West side of the state.
The article could have taken it the other way, and mentioned that all the water leaving Superior, Michigan, and Huron flows past Detroit. A pretty significant chunk of all the fresh water on the planet.
www.offthegridmpls.blogspot.com
The plastic bottled water that have taken over shelves in stores around the world has been the result of the best public relations campaign for marketing a product in modern time. Move to Detroit with the intention of renewal for that great city that is a monument to greed as manufacturing was outsourced and the city was left unable to sustain itself.
Do not move to Detroit for the precious resource of water; because greed is depleting that resource one plastic bottle at a time. Often in giant plastic bladders that are paid for by the Chinese. Those clever people have been draining our springs and creeks that are the source of the water for the great lakes and taking it across the ocean to store in aqua filters. They are aware of the importance of water and understood decades ago that the powerful would sell without thought for our future or conscience; Gov. John Engler (R), of Michigan made the first deals.
Add climate change to the mix and then the invasive species, including the possible take over by the Asian Carp and it does not take much intelligence to realize that the belief that the great lakes will endure and replenish is a myth.
And where it is drying up -- where I now live -- life will not be able to remain.
It is only a question of when the great H20 migration begins. I say...2020, when we start seeing 'clearly' the reality we are all in.
Mr. Gunther needs a lesson in the environmental disaster of the great lakes due to human greed and I hope that you will read my comment. I am a life long resident of the state of Michigan, soon to be a senior citizen and a volunteer for a conservation non-profit that is concerned with the ongoing draining of our springs, creeks, small rivers which renew the large lakes.
Please go to Gov. Jesse Ventura's website for the TV program, Conspiracy Theory to view the episode about the Great Lakes. In one scene, Jesse visited Mission Pointe which is twenty minutes from my house. Take a look and ask yourself if maybe this precious resource has not been protected for our future use. The powers that be do not intend for Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, minority populations to prosper.
Ann