I always knew that the next world war would be about fresh water, but I had not realised water would be the reason for the next American Civil War.
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In some cases golf courses can serve as a safe deposit box for arable land. In my area the land the golf courses sit on would have otherwise been paved over for roads or housing developments years ago. When it becomes necessary to increase farming acreage here (which it surely will be, our current practice of shipping wheat and milk in from 2500 miles away is not sustainable) that land will be available and usable.
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You think a rich golf course owning collective of plutocrats would sell their playground when they could decide to take by eminent domain and knock down some low income housing for that purpose instead?
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You can’t farm on the rubble of a housing project. Whether reclaiming the land when it is necessary will be possible is a political question that will not have the same answer in all places. Golf course reclamation does happen, though not as far as I know for farming. For example
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That’s pretty cool. Didn’t know about the Bothell project.
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That reminds me, apparently municipalities have only relatively recently stopped planting female fruit trees in favor of exclusively male ones. The reasoning from the 1940s and 50s is “fruit trees are messy” as if animals don’t clean up leftover fruit in a few weeks.
I’m convinced it’s just to make sure there’s absolutely as few free food sources for the homeless and unemployed as possible.
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There’s also this (which I just found, hence my “as far as I know” in the earlier post):
(FWIW, environmental groups here routinely raise this point, it isn’t original with me!)
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They are plenty of options. Some are better than others.
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(May depend on local availability of fog)
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Star Wars tech is always very rule of cool. Vaporators run on fusion power to basically be big air refrigerators in the desert. The water in the air condenses on them and they gather it in a cistern buried underneath.
But if you can do fusion on demand, you can probably just grab hydrogen and burn it with oxygen to make as much water as you like anyway.
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Jeez. Even vintage sci-fi addressed the question of survival without water. The writers then could have glossed over that little fact… but no.
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HOAs are a huge factor in all this water wasting grass. Those houses in the video probably belong to HOAs that won’t let them remove the grass even if they wanted. Because maintaining housing value growth is paramount.
The government needs to pass laws that even the playing field by saying HOAs can’t block conversion of grass to desert landscape. They did this to allow satellite dish installs that otherwise violated HOA rules. Of course this won’t happen until after the golf courses are long gone.
Which is happening. My mother lives in a community that is working up the courage to stop subsidizing golf, and national trends are that golf is in decline.
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The 2 worst things about this:
- when it all goes horribly wrong, they’re going to want federal bailout money to help them recover from their stupid choices
- After they ruin every other place they’re going to want to move up here to the Pacific North West and ruin us too.
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I seem to recall that people used to move to Phoenix because they thought living in a desert would help with their hay fever.
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You tell me if any of those are native.
Also, the ozone is pretty nasty around phoenix.
But I’ve never lived there. It might still be better than Virginia and Ohio, the states I’ve most recently lived in.
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In the wisdom of Sam Kinison: “you live in a f__king DESERT!!! Move to where the WATER IS!!!”
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Well, to be fair, I I live in a city where food and power is brought from great distances for the convenience of me and my fellow city-dwellers, and there’s nary a word about stopping growth and forcing it to move closer to the farms and hydro sources.
Of course, the community referred to in the video doesn’t seem to be close to anything. I’m deeply curious what drives the economy there.
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Golfs.
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IIRC, the next line is “Don’t send ’em food, send ’em fucking U-Hauls!!! AAAAAGGGGGHHH!!!”
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St George is right down the road from Mesquite, NV which is a world renowned golf destination. It’s kind of a Mecca for golfers who want to challenge themselves on difficult courses like Wolf Creek - a course so hard I literally lost more than a dozen balls the time I played there.
Doesn’t surprise me that St George is trying to hone in on that golf tourism action. Of course Utah doesn’t have the casinos like Nevada does.
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