Is Green the new Red: Progress

  Highways and cities

In the last article we took a quick tour of recent and amazing achievements and how far science and technology have come in the last century.

It seems as though there is only one direction we are headed on, and that is the path towards progress.  But lately it seems as if that may not be the case for all things.

The state of humanity and how we treat our fellow man is beyond the scope of this discussion, so let us just focus on scientific achievement in modern times.  We begin with a simple example of progress --- that of travel and taking care of human needs while traveling.

Specifically, let's focus in on the topic of rest stops (bear with me).  There are still primitive campspots with primitive toilets that just have holes in the ground and that is it, no running water or sewage, so how lucky we are to have rest stops along major freeways!

Usually the locations of the rest areas correspond to some scenic view, such as Texas Canyon on I-10 just east of Tucson.  After driving for hours, you can pull over and get out of the car, stretch your legs, use the restroom with running water, wash your hands and face, buy a cold soda pop, hot coffee (albeit vending machine quality), some snacks, and even read some information about where you are and what's ahead.

What could possibly go wrong?

It's amazing how much we take things for granted in the present day.  Consider the Burnt Well rest area along I-10, centered in the map to the left.  This is the first rest area you reach after leaving Phoenix headed west towards California.  Its location was chosen strategically since it is in the middle of a dry desert.  You will see a line in the desert intersecting with the interstate where the rest area is.  This is the CAP, a long canal that brings water over 300 miles from the Colorado River to Tucson.

So it is possible to pull over, use flushable toilets, wash up, and be on your way thanks to this marvel of modern technology.  But pumping all the water uphill takes a lot of energy and costs a lot of money.

In addition to this, every single rest area requires maintenance to keep them going.  Water and electricity have to be brought across miles of desert just to make going to the restroom easier for us.

So what's the big deal?  It all works fine right?

It did until this year.  Now the rest areas are closed due to budget cuts, and the exits to them are closed.  Now our road to progress has led us to a dead end, and the kids really have to go!

This is just a simple example dealing with rest areas along an interstate, but it can be used to illustrate a greater point.  What we call progress in the modern age is really more of a dependence. What we are dependent on is actually a very fragile system, a finite system, and one that is not permanent.

In the city of Tucson (other cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles could also be used here) the people are not living in balance with the surrounding area.  Tucson is a desert, a very hot desert, and fresh water is a precious commodity here.  The oceans are hundreds of miles away, the only river that ran through town is now dry, and our underground water table has dropped hundreds of feet in the last few decades.

Despite all this, living in Tucson is like living in any other city.  No matter how hot it is outside, we are still able to leave an air-conditioned house and get in an air-conditioned car, then go to work, school, or shopping in an air-conditioned building, completely oblivious to the extreme heat outside.

One may think there is nothing wrong with this except when we consider what it takes to live in such oblivion.  Mines on Native American reservations are exploited to get at the coal required to fuel our electric generators, underground aquifers drained to not just cool us down, but also to wash cars, water golf courses, construction, and for agriculture.  The ironic thing is that we don't even grow our own crops here, but rather use our water to grow water-hungry crops like cotton, only to ship them to China to make cheap clothing, and then to have them shipped back to us with a Nike swoosh on them.

Meanwhile, the food we buy at the grocery stores has to travel 1,500 miles, on average, to get to the shelves.  This is a highly unsustainable method of feeding our population.  But it works.

Until it doesn't.

The title of this series, Is Green the New Red, is meant for us to look not just to the future, but also to people who lived on this land before for insight into to how to live in this dry desert.

Tucson Water just recently had a conference and they found out that the CAP water that is used to replenish our aquifers will not be enough to sustain us in just a few decades.  But in the meantime we are allowed to continue to live in ignorance to our impending doom.  We live in ironic times.  For example, this year rain was minimal, just enough to dirty up the car.  How do we react to this minimal rain, a minimal replenishing of our water tables?

By using the limited water we have to wash huge chunks of metal so that they are shiny when they drive down the street. Or by watering our lawns even more to compensate for the meager rainfall.  It is like a vicious negative feedback loop hastening our demise.

We may think of our current lifestyles as having progressed from our Hohokam ancestors that inhabited the Santa Cruz valley in Tucson centuries ago, but this may not be true in a few decades.

   Where all our money has gone

Consider the example we began with.  At least with primitive toilets, simple holes in the ground, we would still have rest areas.  No need to haul water and energy out to the middle of the desert. A simple solution to a simple problem would still exist. No dependency on modern technology.

But now we have no toilets at all for our travels.  Not even the primitive type.

So are we really better off?

For more info: Just found out this was published on World Toilet Day!  Strange coincidence indeed.

Check back later this week for the next in this series, or subscribe now to this column via email using the Subscribe button above, or for your favorite news reader you can find the RSS feed here.

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