Tag: natural resources

Drought on the Mississippi

Last summer’s drought, and more weather extremes probably due to large-scale global climate change, is having dire effects on shipping on the Mississippi River. Suzanne Goldenberg has an excellent article in the Guardian.

Students look upstream at the Missouri River from the Melvin Price lock and dam, just north of St. Louis, and close to its confluence with the Mississippi River. The dam is tasked with maintaining about 9ft of water in the river for shipping.

Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shutdown on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7bn (£4.3bn) in vital commodities – typically grain, coal, heating oil, and cement – moves on the river at this time of year. Cutting off the transport route would have an impact across the mid-west and beyond.

…

Farmers in the area lost up to three-quarters of their corn and soya bean crops to this year’s drought. … Now, however, [they] are facing the prospect of not being able to sell their grain at all because they can’t get it to market. The farmers may also struggle to find other bulk items, such as fertiliser, that are typically shipped by barge.

— Goldenberg (2012): Mississippi river faces shipping freeze as water levels drop in The Guardian.

The proposed solution is to release more water from the Missouri, however there would be a steep price to pay.

The shipping industry in St Louis wants the White House to order the release of more water from the Missouri river, which flows into the Mississippi, to keep waters high enough for the long barges to float down the river to New Orleans.

…

Sending out more water from the Missouri would doom states upstream, such as Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, which depend on water from the Missouri and are also caught in the drought.

“There are farmers and ranchers up there with livestock that don’t have water to stay alive. They don’t have enough fodder. They don’t have enough irrigation water,” said Robert Criss, a hydrologist at Washington University in St Louis, who has spent his career studying the Mississippi. “What a dumb way to use water during a drought.”

Water Scarcity in Yemen

Groundwater tends to be a common property resource. In places like Yemen, where ownership rights are not clearly defined it tends to be overexploited. So much so, that they’re looking at running out within the next 10 years. Peter Salisbury has an article in Foreign Policy.

Most potable water in Yemen is produced from a series of deep underground aquifers using electric and diesel-powered pumps. Some of these pumps are run by the government, but many more are run by private companies, most of them unlicensed and unregulated. Because of this, it is nigh on impossible to control the volume of water produced. By some (conservative) estimates, about 250 million cubic meters of water are produced from the Sanaa basin every year, 80 percent of which is non-renewable. In recent years, the businessmen who produce the water have had to drill ever-deeper wells and use increasingly powerful pumps to get the region’s dwindling water reserves out of the ground.

–Salisbury (2012): Yemen’s water woes in Foreign Policy.

A Darwinian Debt

Evidence is mounting that fish populations won’t necessarily recover even if overfishing stops. Fishing may be such a powerful evolutionary force that we are running up a Darwinian debt for future generations.

— Loder (2006), Point of No Return in Conservation in Practice.

Darwinian Debt. That’s the elegant phrase Natasha Loder (2006) uses to describe the observation that human pressure on the environment — fishing in this particular example — has forced evolutionary changes that are not soon reversed.

Fishermen prefer to catch larger fish, depleting the population of older fish, and allowing smaller fish to successfully reproduce. Over a period of years this artificial selection — as opposed to natural selection — gives rise to new generations of fish that are permanently smaller than they used to be. And the fisheries find it hard to recover even after decades (Swain, 2007):

Populations where large fish were selectively harvested (as in most fisheries) displayed substantial declines in fecundity, egg volume, larval size at hatch, larval viability, larval growth rates, food consumption rate and conversion efficiency, vertebral number, and willingness to forage. These genetically based changes in numerous traits generally reduce the capacity for population recovery.

— Walsh et al., 2005, Maladaptive changes in multiple traits caused by fishing: impediments to population recovery in Ecology Letters.

The Future of Stuff

The Story of Stuff is a pretty commonly used video that starts the conversation on resource use and consumerism. The video below, “Full Printed,” takes a look at the future and how technology, particularly 3-D printers, might reduce the environmental costs of the things we use.

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

Update

There are already some places for 3d printing.

Resource Depletion: Overfishing

In 1900 fish stocks in the North Atlantic looked like this:

Biomass of Popularly Eaten Fish in 1900. Design: David McCandless // Map render Gregor Aisch. Source: Hundred year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, V.Christensen et al., 2003. From Information is Beautiful , via the Guardian.

IN the year 2000, fish stocks looked like this:

Biomass of Popularly Eaten Fish in 2000. Design: David McCandless // Map render Gregor Aisch. Source: Hundred year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, V.Christensen et al., 2003. From Information is Beautiful , via the Guardian.

There are more data and visualizations on the European Ocean2012.eu site.

Finite resources

When will we run out of natural resources, either from depletion of non-renewables or overuse of renewables? Scientific American has a great interactive graph charting How Much Is Left that would tie in really well to our cycle on natural resources.

How Much Is Left? interactive graph. from Scientific American

The caveat is that it is notoriously difficult to really figure out how much of a resource is left. For one thing, there might be undiscovered deposits, or we could find ways of using it more efficiently to extend its lifetime. As resources get more scarce their price goes up which gets people more interested in discovering more or coming up with better, more efficient, methods of extracting things like minerals from alternative sources. If we start to run out of Lithium for batteries maybe someone will develop a process to extract it from seawater. Or, as oil gets harder to extract and its price goes up, perhaps there will be more investment in alternative energy technologies like wind farms, tidal generators and solar convection towers.

Cattle drives

pre-European vegetation of the U.S. (from Oak Ridge National Laboratory).

The story of cattle drives and the railroads also has a lot to do with the geography of natural resources in the United States. A few good references: