Wondered what you thought about this issue. There have been some water articles in the blogs lately.

California's Water Crisis Is Just the Beginning for Water Woes in the U.S.

Fresh water, once considered Earth's infinite, simply is not inexhaustible. Demand has soared, and supplies dwindled. Factor in climate change and drought, and the result is shortage and conflict over what's left.

...

We overuse water, too. The United States consumes a mind-boggling 410 billion gallons every single day. Individually, Americans use 80 to 100 gallons per person daily for in-home personal use, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey.

http://www.alternet.org/water/143902/california%27s_water_crisis_is_just_the_beginning_for_water_woes_in_the_u.s./?page=entire

Who Is Stealing California's Water?

We must stop pretending that water is free and unlimited, available to anyone who can put a siphon in a river or drill another groundwater well.

http://www.alternet.org/water/143721/who_is_stealing_california%27s_water/

by a kid about this at a film festival; one town in CA apparently has no rights to its water, they sold it to some water bottling company, and ran out of enough for themselves...Judge ruled against them, they sold it he said...Idiots...

Water, Food, needs, shouldn't be owned by anybody...except everybody...

BP is out with his turtles I guess.

Here is what I noticed in those articles:

First, there is an assumption that water should be viewed as a commodity, subject to supply and demand and bought and sold.

Secondly, there is an idea there that water is used up, consumed, as though it disappears. Water is not a manufactured commodity, it does not go away, the warehouse does not run out. It recycles when it is "used." The more it cycles, the better.

The water problem is two fold - privatization and pollution. This has nothing to do with "shortages" nor with "supply and demand." However, this is a great lesson in how Capitalism works, since the same pattern holds true with everything, it is just more obvious with water, and also it shows why Capitalism is such a threat to our survival.

Damn, the old man turned me into an environmentalist.

Water fracking in shale to release natural gas really has a lot of folks up in arms and actually active around here, the water is permanently polluted, I guess. Profit before life itself, it seems...

ecological marxists.:grin:

Warning: Thread highjacking!

Capitalism makes commodities of everything including people. There was always a trade in reptiles, small change. Then in the go-go eighties things went big time, Reptiles magazine was born, a dumbed down version of several attempts at more technical venues like Vivarium, which got blown out of the market. It was a production of a crappy publishing house which specialized in pets and which expanded enormously at that time. While the information was sometimes interesting or useful it is primarily a sales vehicle, promoting exploitation on a never before seen scale. back then I wrote letters protesting this massive encouragement of 'taking', to no avail.

It is not funny at all how this often works: commodification follows turmoil the way carrion crows follow battle. Thus there's a coup in Guiana and suddenly massive amounts of herps are on the market from that country. When things went to hell in Timor there's a glut of Varanus timorensis on the market. When the destabilization of Liberia began that country became the main source of African herps... Thailand, during the Vietnam War, was the main source of Asian herps, and these were the most common 'exotics' at the time, this went on until the field was stripped of snakes and the rice fields were overrun with rats. Only then was export curtailed.

Whodda thunk, getting rich on reptiles? Could air or water be far behind?

Capitalism, how do I hate you, let me count the ways...

Edit: Speaking of water, I was indeed busy with the critters, I had cleaned most tanks on Thursday but when I went to fill I found the water tea colored, the result of 4" of rain a few days earlier, and this even with filters and ph treatment, so I had to drain and refill yesterday when the well settled enough.

Hordes of Haliburton sharks descended a couple of years ago, pressuring farmers to sign deals, tearing up the land, punching through the shale. It was all very disturbing.

When I was young you could find all sorts of great old instruments for a few bucks. Then in the 80's, speculators saw them as an investment opportunity and started snapping them up. That drove the prices up, of course, and put them out of the reach of musicians.

Instruments started showing up in fancy antique shows with ridiculous prices on them. At the time I thought "no one is going to pay $5,000 for that instrument." What I meant was that no one who plays, or even who collects for the love of the old things, would pay that. So who would, and why? When I asked the people who were buying them, they didn't have any intelligent answer such as "I really love it" or "I want to play it" they just said "that is what they are going for." They didn't even know anything about instruments, other than "what they were going for" and how to spot a sharp deal. What the hell does any of that mean? The only value the thing had in their mind was as a clever investment.

People who previously had absolutely no interest in old instruments before, who were contemptuous and dismissive of them and anyone who took an interest in them, now suddenly were deadly serious about the subject - "it is very valuable" they would intone in sort of a self-righteous tone, as though anyone who questioned that were a moral leper. All because the item now had some absurdly inflated price tag on it.

We have here two examples of the market 'discovering' a new opportunity and wrecking the previous amiable arrangement, leaving those who had or used the 'new' commodity hung out to dry. Multiply our discomfort by 1000 and ya got imperialism, 'cept they take everything, land, livelihood, the ability to feed children.

Capitalism fucks up everything it touches.

Everything, everywhere, all the time. That is why it is so frustrating to argue with liberals who deny that it is happening at all. Do they like it, and want to claim it doesn't exist so that the evil commies don't take it away from them, or do they really not see it?

very hard. They squeeze their eyes shut and stick their fingers in their ears and try to wish you away. It is too hard. But a number of these liberal/progressives "claim it doesn't exist so that the evil commies don't take it away from them". They are capitalist foot soldiers, enforcers; and they want to keep what they have and fuck everyone else. They know that they don't have anything at all compared to the Owners, but the little scraps they have they will cling to even if millions must die. You hear it in the plaintive, "will I be able to own my home in a communist society? What about my food? Will I own that?" What gutless cretins. Fuck them all.
I am working toward a society where the concept "owning your own home" will be completely nonsensical to any rational person...

I think they secretly like things the way they are, and imagine themselves to be winners or soon to be winners, and want to think they are among and like the winners.

and I think they are very scared, this society has been so conditioned to "need" so much, they are terrified of losing their stuff...thus heads are embedded in the sand...
fait l'autruche"

"They are capitalist foot soldiers, enforcers; and they want to keep what they have and fuck everyone else. They know that they don't have anything at all compared to the Owners, but the little scraps they have they will cling to even if millions must die."

No doubts...