Filed under: American politics, California, climate change, Syria, Water | Tags: California water, climate change, Syria, Syrian civil war, water politics, water war
Confession time: I can’t stand to watch the videos of Syrian people suffering and dying from the latest Sarin attack. Since I have asthma, I may very well die gasping for breath, and this particular horror strikes too close to home for me to watch. Here’s Charity Navigator listing their best charities for the Syrian conflict. Or you can give to the UNHCR for Syria.
Anyway, I decided to look back at my 2013 post on the Syrian Water War, to see where we are 3 1/2 years later. Has anything changed? Is there anything we can learn, especially with the current regime in the White House? Continue reading
Filed under: California, climate change, economics, futurism, Legacy Systems, livable future, Preludes, Water | Tags: Speculation, sustainability, water politics
Well, I finally finished reading Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (Amazon link), and I highly recommend it, if you haven’t read it already, even though the original text was written in the 1980s. For those who haven’t read it, the thumbnail is that it’s a muckraking history of water works in the US, primarily in the western US in the 20th Century. The reason I strongly recommend it is not just for what Reisner got right (or apparently got right), but also what he got wrong, like his prediction of the huge water crisis of 2000.
I’m not going to do a book review here. Rather, I’m going to talk about some of the things I got out of it, including how hard it is to predict when water crises will hit.
Putting the life back in science fiction 