India water: Hundreds jostle to reach well

[hunter]

The video in this story from India this is madness...

People in Khadimal village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra have been forced to risk their lives every day for one bucket of water.

The village is in Amravati district in Maharashtra's drought-prone Vidarbha region, which also faces frequent heat waves.

The residents say the local village council sends tankers twice or thrice a day. The tanker drivers pour water into a well, triggering a desperate rush to fill buckets before the stock runs dry.

--more--

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-india-61755730

Equally mad is how we deal with this problem in California:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/thousands-of-wells-could-go-dry-in-california-as-most-of-the-state-experiences-extreme-drought

We burn a lot more fossil fuels and generate a lot more plastic waste accomplishing the same thing -- fossil fuels that make the problem worse for everyone.

[Magoo48]

1. Here in California where we still see massive lawns everywhere, where agriculture wastes water,

where water bottlers often don’t pay for their water, where water guzzling landscaping is still encouraged while food gardens are widely outlawed, where desalination is still discouraged even though near sight, green sources of needed energy can be built. That California?

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. The California where

they haven't outlawed golf courses?

[Magoo48]

3. Oh, that California.

[hunter]

4. Golf courses are not first on my personal list. Factory farm meat and dairy are.

I do think golf would be a much more interesting game if golf courses took the local natural environment into account. Front yards don't have to have manicured lawns, and golf courses don't have to be all lawns, lakes, and trees.

In California and in India the farmers who make the most money, or those who are wealthy to begin with, have the most political power. They often use water in ways that harm the powerless and disproportionately damage the natural environment.

There's quite a lot of farmland in California that simply shouldn't be farmed. That's a tough sell.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. Sorry, but

feeding people is higher on my list than playing a stupid game or having grass in front of your house.

[hunter]

6. We got rid of our front lawn in 1998...

... long before it was fashionable, or even acceptable to many of our neighbors.

Now there's only a few holdouts maintaining their lawns, even refusing grants to rip them out.

I live in a place where all the water that goes down my drain gets recycled into near-potable water for agriculture, and potable water, true toilet-to-tap fashion.

I'm not a vegan. I just think that land currently used to grow food for factory farm animals or feedstocks for biofuels might be better used to grow food for humans. If we greatly reduced factory farm meat and dairy production, and eliminated biofuel production, we could restore some land to its natural state. Nobody would go hungry.

[Jilly_in_VA]

7. Bully for you

but your vision is going to take a great while, and will not happen overnight. The water crisis is immediate. Getting rid of Big Ag is going to take much, much longer. That affects people's livelihoods too. I live smack in the middle of a big poultry raising region, and trust me, "getting rid of factory farm meat and dairy production" affects more than just a few people's livelihoods. I don't like factory farms any more than you do, but it cannot and will not happen overnight.

[hunter]

8. I don't want to get rid of "big ag."

We need it to feed the world.

I just want to get rid of the more damaging aspects of it, damaging to the environment, and damaging to the human spirit. I'm a radical environmentalist and social justice warrior. I don't apologize for that.

I've seen a lot of progress in my life. A lot of it is progress I've been fighting for my entire adult life.

The first President I campaigned for was Jimmy Carter, if that dates me.

I wasn't sure gay marriage would ever be normalized when I first started posting on Democratic Underground, or that cannabis would be legalized, not even partially as it has been in some states.

Hell, my own grandfather had a fit when my wife and I announced our engagement. Men in his family, white men of the wild west, didn't marry, in his own words, "Mexican Girls." To his credit he got over that.

I am some sort of hypocrite when I complain about poultry. I've eaten plenty of eggs, I had chicken street tacos for lunch, and our family dogs (all of them shelter dogs) have eaten plenty of "retired" laying hens.

But I look forward to a time when the most popular and lowest cost hamburger at your favorite fast food place isn't made of meat, and people don't generally pour cow's milk on their breakfast cereal.

As for water, I think we can find ways to bring clean water to everyone on earth. Technologies that were considered "out there" when I was young are becoming practical.

In the 'eighties cutting edge sewage treatment plants could produce non-potable water that was only considered suitable for golf courses and other landscaping uses. Seawater desalinization plants required untenable amounts of energy and many of the basic engineering problems hadn't been solved yet.

People's "livelihoods" wouldn't matter at all if it was easy to find new livelihoods.

Personally, my radical self, I think we should be paying people to experiment with lifestyles having extremely small environmental footprints. We'd judge the success of these experiments in terms of happiness. With any luck these happy lifestyles with small environmental footprints would spread.

Everyone wants to be happy, right?

I'm fairly certain I'd never be happy working in a poultry plant.

[Jilly_in_VA]

9. Okay, we're in agreement

And I'm a whole lot older than you, since the first president I campaigned for (before I was even old enough to vote!) was Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary, and then JFK.

I would LOVE to get rid of the massive hog farms and their pollution, let alone what they are doing to the ordinary people of eastern VA and most of NC. I would love to get rid of the way chickens and turkeys are raised in massive operations hereabouts. I don't like huge dairy operations and I don't like ethanol. That doesn't mean I don't eat pork and chicken and turkey, because I do. However, I try to be careful about where I buy them and where they're sourced, and I tend to eat less of them and more grains and veggies whenever possible. Thing is, buying fresh and local is more expensive and many people simply can't afford that. That shouldn't be the case; it wasn't when I was a kid. Then Big Ag took over and bought out the small farmers.

I have a real thing about golf courses, as if you hadn't guessed. My late ex used to refer to the game as "pasture pool" (he was a really good pool player) and I always thought he was spot on. If I want to play pool, I will play indoors, on a table, under lights, thank you very much. There is no need for so many golf courses taking up so much land and water. Besides which, there is no need for energy consuming golf carts except for the disabled. Ordinary golfers can and should damn well WALK.

/Rant mode off.