Peak Water

When I visited my extended family in Idaho this summer for a reunion, we went wave-racing on the Snake river. I held on tight to my cousin’s life preserver as I got bounced and sprayed by the modest fresh water waves. On either side of me at any given time, I could see that the riverbed was exceptionally low. I’m not a geologist and I don’t know anything  about rivers, but I could clearly see that there were rocks piled several feet high that used to be under water. But there they were, baking in the August sun. My aunt mentioned that the water level was the lowest that had ever been recorded. I was on vacation though, and news stories about climate change and envrionmental collapse were the last thing I wanted to hear about, next to the war. For a week I was free of television and the internet, so I was released from fear-mongering news, or so I thought. Nature has a way of making us pay attention, whether we like it or not.

On the western side of the Snake river there are rolling hills or small mountains, whatever you’d like to call them. As my cousin bobbed and weaved on the water I found myself squinting at the darkened patches of ground that covered the mountainside. When the waveracing finally ended, I asked my aunt about the giant shadows covering the ground. She said that there was no shadow; two weeks prior there had been a wildfire that had burnt several square miles of land. I looked again at the black stain on the hills in awe, realizing that it was miles and miles of charred grass and trees.

When the week was over I returned home to Chicago to the big news story of the wildfires in Greece and Southern California. I started researching it and found that the problem was much wider and prevalant than I could possibly have imagined.

I have yet to see a real effort by the mainstream media to cover this terrifying story. Kudos to the Nation for bringing it out of the closet.

As the World Burns: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/e ngelhardt