Let's Mix Oil and Water

The Conventions are over and most of us are back to real life. One bit of trivia: the tail of Hurricane Gustav just broke a three week drought over Michigan. See? Small blessings from great winds can grow.
However my estimation is that Lake Michigan is still about 20 feet below its high in 1984/5. That’s a lot of water down some drain. That’s drinking water for Green Bay, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids and whole lot of other small cities and towns in four states.
We keep hearing about droughts in the west, the southeast, wherever. Not just in this nation – it’s just been reported that Africa’s Lake Victoria will be used up and dry in thirty years. Much of Russia’s huge Aral Sea has become a desert littered with abandoned boats – in little over forty years. Farm irrigation is doing this.
And there’s talk about piping Lake Michigan water to the thirsty lawns and golf courses of our southwest. And our farms.
In short, we’re going through water as if it were oil. There’s six billion of us drinking, farming with, washing in and wasting our fresh water. All this is happening on a planet that is dotted with cities abandoned for one simple reason – loss of water supply. (Look at the large ruins in Afghanistan, Yemen, or our own Pueblos.)
War, famine and disease aren’t the only reasons civilizations fall – lack of water can do the trick just as well.
T. Boone Pickens warns us that we are participating in the greatest transfer of wealth in human history as we buy foreign oil. That’s bad enough – a similar but smaller transfer bankrupted the Roman Empire. But when we run out of water, that will make the oil crisis look like a small disruption in a nursery school.
I don’t hear any of our national campaigns talking about that. They should be. You can come up with options for oil. There is no alternative for water.