A drought for the ages

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Veganism Can End The Drought If we can get enough people to become vegans A drought for the ages By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY DENVER — Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it's spreading.half the nation is either abnormally dry or in outright drought from prolonged lack of rain that could lead to water shortages, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly index of conditions. Welcome rainfall last weekend from Tropical Storm Barry brought short-term relief to parts of the fire-scorched Southeast. But up to 50 inches of rain

is needed to end the drought there, and this is the driest spring in the Southeast since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Coast to coast, the drought's effects are as varied as the landscapes: •In central California, ranchers are selling cattle or trucking them out of state as grazing grass dries up. In Southern California's Antelope Valley, rainfall at just 15% of normal erased the spring bloom of California poppies. •In South Florida, Lake Okeechobee, America's second-largest body of fresh water, fell last week to a record low — an average 8.89feet above sea level. So much lake bed is dry that 12,000 acres of it caught fire last month. Saltwater intrusion threatens to contaminate municipal wells for Atlantic coastal towns as fresh groundwater levels drop. •In Alabama, shallow ponds on commercial catfish farms are dwindling, and more than half the corn and wheat crops are in poor condition. Dry

episodes have become so persistent in the West that some scientists and water managers say drought is the "new normal" there. Reinforcing that notion are global-warming projections warning of more and deeper dry spells in the Southwest, although a report in last week's Science magazine challenges the climate models and suggests there will be more rainfall worldwide later this century. "It seems extremely likely that drought will become more the norm" for the West, says Kathy Jacobs of the Arizona Water Institute, a research partnership of the state's three universities. "Droughts will continue to come and go, but … higher temperatures are going to produce more water stress." That's because warmer temperatures in the Southwest boosts demands for water and cause more to evaporate from lakes and reservoirs. "The only good news about drought is it forces us to pay attention to water management," says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a think tank in Oakland

that stresses efficient water use. This drought has been particularly harsh in three regions: the Southwest, the Southeast and northern Minnesota. Severe dryness across California and Arizona has spread into 11 other Western states. On the Colorado River, the water supply for 30 million people in seven states and Mexico, the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are only half full and unlikely to recover for years. In Los Angeles County, on track for a record dry year with 21% of normal rain downtown since last summer, fire officials are threatening to cancel Fourth of July fireworks if conditions worsen. On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa urged residents to voluntarily cut water use 10%, the city's first such call since the 1990s. In Minnesota, which is in its worst drought since 1976, the situation is improving slowly, although a wildfire last month burned dozens of houses and 115 square miles in the northeastern part of the

state. The Southeast, unaccustomed to prolonged dry spells, may be suffering the most. In eight states from Mississippi to the Carolinas and down through Florida, lakes are shrinking, crops are withering, well levels are falling and there are new limits on water use. "We need 40-50 inches of rainfall to get out of the drought," says Carol Ann Wehle of the South Florida Water Management District. Despite a recent storm, water hasn't flowed in Florida's Kissimmee River, which feeds Lake Okeechobee, in 212 days. The district has imposed its strictest water-use limits ever in 13 counties, cutting home watering to once a week and commercial use by 45%. in California, winter snowpack in the Sierra Nevada range was only 27% of normal this year, another dry winter would tax supplies. Gleick says water managers are not reacting forcefully enough to the drought: "The time to tell people that we're in the middle of a drought and to institute strong conservation

programs is today, not a year from now." The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is doing that. Last month, it began a "Let's Save" radio campaign. After nearly a decade of drought in parts of the West, the nation's fastest-growing region wrestles with rising water demands and declining supply. Donald Wilhite of the National Drought Mitigation Center says the Southwest and Southeast are "becoming gradually more vulnerable to drought" because the rising population will need more water. "We think of water as an unlimited resource," he says. "But what happens when you turn on the tap and it's not there?" Contributing: Doyle Rice How Much Water to Make One Pound of Beef? March 1, 2001 -- To date, probably the most reliable and widely- accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: "the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer." Not

surprisingly, the beef industry promotes a study that determined, using highly suspect calculations, that only 441 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of beef. (The cattlemen's study applied liberal deductions from water actually used, reasoning that water was evaporated at points during the process, or was "returned" to the water table after being used to grow plant feed, or was returned to the water table via urea and excrement from cows. Thus, study authors reasoned these waters were not "lost" but "recycled" and therefore could be subtracted from gross amount of water actually used in beef production. Of course, evaporation and cow dung don't go very far in replenishing water pumped from acquifers which took thousands of years to fill. It's interesting to consider that if the same fuzzy math were applied to calculating how much water it takes to grow vegetables, potatoes would probably only require about 2 gallons of water per pound.) Bestselling

author and vegetarian trailblazer John Robbins has examined in detail a variety of estimates and who worked on them, and some of his observations are in his new book Food Revolution (see here). So what's the beef with beef, when it comes to water? Simply put: it's wasteful and irresponsible to squander our precious resources on a luxury item like meat. The only question we're left with is: just how wasteful and irresponsible is it? Once again, our intrepid investigator, John Robbins, recently uncovered some startling new evidence. That evidence comes in the form of a scholarly new book which sheds new light on the subject. Edited by David Pimentel and others and published in January, the book is titled Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation and Health (Island Press, Washington DC, 2001). Pimentel is a celebrated professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University, who has published over 500 scientific

articles, 20 books and overseen scores of important studies. The other editors of the book are Laura Westra, professor of environmental studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and Reed Noss, president and chief scientist for Conservation Science, Inc., and president of the Society for Conservation Biology. Drought, warmth bring record low water levels in Lake Superior By John Flesher, AP Environmental Writer TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Drought and mild temperatures have pushed Lake Superior's water level to its lowest point on record for this time of year, continuing a downward spiral across the Great Lakes. Preliminary data show Superior's average water level in September dipped 1.6 inches beneath the previous low for that month reached in 1926, Cynthia Sellinger, deputy director of NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, said Sunday. PHOTO GALLERY: Lake Superior drops to record low levels The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which uses a different

measuring technique, calculated the September level at four inches below the record, said Scott Thieme, chief of hydraulics and hydrology for the Detroit district office. It's the first time in 81 years that the biggest and deepest of the lakes, with a surface area matching South Carolina's, has reached a new monthly low, Sellinger said. The Army Corps recorded Superior as also setting a record by a half-inch in August. But the NOAA lab had the lake at slightly above its record level then. FIND MORE STORIES IN: Detroit | Mich | Great Lakes | NOAA | Drought | Lake Superior | Cynthia Sellinger Either way, the lake has plummeted over the past year and has lagged beneath its long-term average level for a decade — the longest such period in its known history. "I've been here since 1959 and this is the lowest I've seen it," said Joel Johnson, owner of Lakehead Boat Basin in Duluth, Minn. Some areas had so little water last spring and

summer that recreational boats couldn't reach docking slips, although other marina operators managed operate normally. Commercial shippers, who haul iron ore and coal across the lakes to manufacturing centers such as Detroit, have been unable to fill cargo holds to capacity for fear of scraping bottom in shallow channels. The biggest vessels, which hold 67,600 tons, have left 6,000 to 8,000 tons behind on many trips, said Glen Nekvasil, spokesman for the Lake Carriers Association. "Light loading has been just creaming the industry this year," he said. All the Great Lakes, which together make up about 20% of the world's fresh surface water, have been in decline since the late 1990s. Lakes Huron and Michigan are about two feet below their long-term average levels, while Lake Superior is about 20 inches off. Lake Ontario is about seven inches below its long-term average and Lake Erie a couple of

inches down. The NOAA lab bases its statistics on measurements taken by a gauge near Marquette. The Army Corps averages the numbers from several gauges around the lake. Levels typically fluctuate through the year. Superior, a feeder for the other lakes, rises in spring and summer as melted snow flows into its headwaters, then recedes in fall and winter. But precipitation is well below normal in the Lake Superior watershed, and unusually mild winters have reduced the winter ice cap, boosting evaporation. with Superior at its all-time low point for the beginning of fall — when the lake usually begins its annual drop-off — prospects for quick improvement wouldn't seem good. Scientists point to a number of possible causes for the low water, including historical cycles, weather patterns and global warming. "Is this going to continue? That's the big question and we don't know," Sellinger said. How

Our Food Choices Can Help Save the Environment From a speech delivered to EarthSave Baltimore by Professor Steve Boyan The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the two things that people can do which will most help the environment are (1) to drive a fuel efficient automobile (that means, not a SUV or a truck), along with a decision to live near to where you work. That recommendation is indeed important. Anything you can do either in what you drive or where you live is important. The 2nd thing the Union of Concerned Scientists proposed that people could do which also would have dramatically good consequences for the environment: to not eat beef. I'm going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I'm going to tell you why. In 1990, when I first read, that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed

a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason was: if 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I'd give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won't have that impact: it probably won't have any impact on anything at all, except me. I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2500 to 5000 gallons of water - you heard it, for every pound of beef, 2500 to 5000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It's a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the mid-west to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can't get any water from their wells. John Robbins points

out that in the 1980's and 1990's, to conserve water, most of us went to low flow showerheads. If we take a daily 7 minute shower, he says, and we have a 2 gallon per minute low flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old fashioned 3 gallon per minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you'd save maybe double that. By giving up one pound of beef, you'd save more water than you would than by not showering at all for six months! And that's just one of the environmental impacts you'd have. The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots.

These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can't graze at all. They are crowded, filthy, and stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn is dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will be over 1200 lbs. In her lifetime she will have consumed 284 gallons of oil. Today's factory raised cow is not a solar powered

ruminant but another fossil fuel machine. And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and disease-bearing organisms. It overpowers nature's ability to clean it up. It's poisoning rivers, killing fish, and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California's population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn't just cows that produce this waste. Factory raised hogs produce 4 times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Cases of pfiesteria have broken out in that state and even here in Maryland - from water polluted from pig farms and chicken farms. Even the oceans are polluted: 7000 sq. miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a complete dead zone. There are more environmental impacts. Cattle don't spend their entire

lives in feedlots. When they are young, they graze. Where do they graze? Well, more than 2/3rds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing. 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands, lands that President Clinton didn't even try to save. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn't absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies, and damaging streambeds. Your tax dollar subsidizes this activity. The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature which might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot, or gun down the wildlife. Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their

nests. ccording to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, black birds, cattle egrets, and starlings using these methods. These activities are on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! I'm not done yet. We in the United States do not get all of our beef from the west. We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from Central America alone. Every second of every day, 1 football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers. A ¼ lb hamburger destroys 67 square feet of rainforest. Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich plant and animal life, varieties of life we don't even understand, and forms of which may provide the medicines we need to cure disease. Rainforests supply us with oxygen. They moderate

our climates. When rainforests are destroyed, it's only a matter of time before the land becomes desertified. They absorb some of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere. We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25%, compared to any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that gain has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs, and new insect pests. Some of these things are starting to happen already. Coral reefs are dying. Insect pests are spreading out of their range and killing off new kinds of trees. Weather patterns are changing. Some places

have had extreme weather events, with billions of dollars of losses. Some island people have had to abandon their islands because rising seas have salinated their underground aquifers. Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. As I said earlier, a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27th the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don't talk about: cattle produce almost 1/5th of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big

time. Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos. There's another major environmental consequence of our factory system of animal raising: that's the matter of species extinctions. Now it is true that species die off all the time. Normally, the earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this earth, we have had 5 periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there's a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. We think of mammals that are endangered, and 25% of mammalian species are endangered. But what's much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the

plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria, and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out. The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests of the world. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern United States by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching. You know, you and I cannot change all this. We are not going to be able to get a bill through Congress outlawing factory farming. Yet Earthsave as an organization believes we can still have a dramatic effect: we believe that you can

protect your health and protect the environment one bite at a time. Let's review what I've said here: by not eating beef - and other farm animals as well - you : Save massive amounts of water - 3000 to 5000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid Avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do Avoid the destruction of topsoil Avoid the destruction of tropical forest: remember passing up ¼ lb of hamburger averts the destruction of 67 sq ft of rainforest Avoid the production of carbon dioxide. Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kilograms of CO2. Eating one lb of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for over 3 weeks. Reduces the amount of methane gas produced. I imagine the next bumper sticker: stop farts, don't eat beef. Reduces the destruction of wildlife

habitat Help to save endangered species. That's a pretty good day's work, for just what you don't put in your mouth. http://www.chooseveg.com/meet-your-meat.asp The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. -Albert Einstein