This week, NOAA said 40 percent of the United States is in drought. The agency has been saying pretty much the same thing for quite some time now.
We should get used to it.
“Drought is always out there,” says drought policy specialist Donald Wilhite of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. “It’s always affecting some part of the country.”
In fact, drought has little to do with rainfall or the lack of it. It has become a political word used to describe inadequate municipal water supplies. Recently, researcher David Meko at the University of Arizona told me that “drought” may now be defined in ways that have little to do with nature. Basically, drought = thirst. “It’s not purely a function of the natural system,” Meko said. “It’s partly a function of need. What might not have been defined as a drought 50 years ago would be now.”
What worries me is that our country currently has an abundance of water and as need grows in the U.S. for water to drink and farm, how much pressure will they put on us to sell our water to them? At what cost to our environment? If America starts pumping water by the trillions of litres from the Great Lakes, can we stop them?
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