Is willful ignorance worsening our environmental crisis?

In our digital interconnected world news travels fast—when we bother to listen. Which makes our shared indifference to a looming environmental catastrophe incomprehensible.

As of early July, 97 percent of California was in severe or extreme drought despite the fact that some parts of the state—particularly Southern California—are using more water than they did a year ago, ignoring repeated warnings. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs, are at critically low levels, and the flow of the Colorado River, the main artery for the Southwest, has declined about 20 percent since 2000.

While these trends are frightening back in April, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since 2010 and that we are nearing the tipping point for global catastrophe. The bleak highlights include floods, droughts, wildfires, and war caused by water scarcity.

The release of the UN document made headlines and was then quickly ignored. It would appear that too many people fail to see the environmental connection between events in Montana and Mozambique, Antarctica and the Amazon, Pittsburgh and Prague—or between Siberia and Southern California. Indeed, judging from the water usage in California, it’s hard to get some to acknowledge the environmental connection between the northern and southern parts of one state.

How is such cognitive dissonance possible? Willful ignorance?

Let’s take California, my home state, as an example. In July 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all Californians to voluntarily reduce water use by 15 percent. Unlike the previous administration, which imposed mandatory conservation measures and required local agencies to meet water-saving targets during the 2012-2016 drought, the more recent restrictions were merely strong suggestions. The result? Since July 2021, California residents have only cut water use 2 percent statewide—far short of Newsom’s goal of 15 percent savings amid the worsening drought.

California did recently ban the use of potable drinking water to irrigate “non-functional” grass such as street medians and lawns on commercial properties. And the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports water from the State Water Project and the Colorado River for six counties in Southern California, has declared a water emergency and limited outdoor watering to one day a week across parts of its service area.

These measures are good, but they don’t consider the agricultural sector, which, according to the California Department of Water Resources, accounts for 80 percent of water used in California. That’s a problem. If California and the other six states of the Colorado River Basin can’t figure out how to conserve between 2 million and 4 million acre feet of water in the next year to protect the entire Colorado River system, the federal government will according to Congressional testimony by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton. That’s a tall order, given that California alone is expected to use 4.6 million acre feet this year, followed by Arizona, which is projected to use 2.1 million acre feet. Almost all of this is for agricultural purposes, though a small portion is withdrawn for municipal use.

Despite this, many in the agriculture sector seem unable or unwilling to look past the next harvest. They point out—rightly—that the state’s $50 billion agriculture sector is too important to let fail. But unless substantive measures are taken—including a reduction in groundwater pumping, an increase in groundwater recharge, rethinking the mix of annual and perennial crops, and a significant increase in the use of recycled water—portions of the agricultural sector will fail and bring the state’s economy and its population with it.

This is not an indictment of the agriculture sector alone. Nor is it a story about California and Californians alone. The same willful ignorance can be seen in other parts of the nation.

So, what do we do now? Control and adapt. In terms of energy, it means reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and turning instead to sustainable sources. In terms of land usage, it means protecting forested watersheds, which is estimated to provide more than 75 percent of the world’s accessible fresh water; placing a moratorium on the draining of peatlands—which release 1.9 gigatons of carbon dioxide, or 5 percent of global anthropogenic gas emissions annually, and vastly decrease our consumption of water-intense crops and increasing the use of recycled wastewater for the crops we do grow.

These last items—water efficiency and water reuse—are crucial. The Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility operated by the West Basin Municipal Water District where I serve as a member of the Board of Directors produces about 40 million gallons of recycled water every day, conserving enough drinking water to meet the needs of 80,000 households for a year. It also utilizes a 60,000-square-foot solar power generating system that has cut CO2 emissions by more than 356 tons each year.

With modern technological advances, we have learned how to mimic nature’s process of cleaning water and to do it at a much faster rate. Water recycling employs the same principles as the hydrologic cycle but with vastly greater efficiency that results in a much purer end product. Microfiltration and reverse osmosis are the most advanced phases of water treatment producing water that exceeds state and federal drinking water standards and creating a final product that is as pure as the bottled water you buy at your local supermarket.

But water recycling in Southern California ultimately cannot stop climate change unless other cities follow suit with their own reclamation plans, unless aquifers are better protected against groundwater contaminants, unless agriculture and cattle farms stop overburdening water supplies, and until we get serious about shifting to renewable energy.

In other words, to stop climate change we must finally heed the many alarms that are warning us our world is about to change.