In Memory

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My newspaper column today, an expansion of something I wrote several years ago, on what happens when you don’t have health insurance (sub. or ad or something req.):

Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.”

That was five years ago. The quiet tragedy associated with a lack of health insurance has continued, the numbers growing in the half-decade since a team from the Institute of Medicine, our leading national health care think tank, published that statistic.

Perhaps 18,000 is too abstract to get your head around. To make this more concrete, let me introduce you to Virginia Heineman.

Severely asthmatic, chronically ill, and as a result chronically underemployed, Virginia — “Ginnie” to those of us who loved her — lived on society’s margins.

She was my wife Lissa’s beloved younger sister. She was one of 2002’s 18,000 unnecessary deaths.

In the Long Emergency, Will I Be Able to Buy Bike Tires?

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The Ghost Mall

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Wandering on my bike Thursday morning, I ended up at “the ghost mall,” the old Winrock Center a few miles from my house. It’s one of those enclosed shopping malls circa the ’60s, when air conditioning and indoor shopping was all the rage.

It’s now largely empty, discarded in favor of new shopping trends despite the fact that it was perfectly useful if you needed to buy a t-shirt or tennies or play those new-fangled electronic games at the video arcade.

It’s a testament to our affluence that we can throw away something with such heft and permanence and continued usefulness. But it occurs to me that it’s a good little conceptual practice ground for thinking about life in the long emergency – peak oil and the like.

When it was still a working mall, I went for a bike ride around it one Christmas day, reasoning that was the only time I’d ever get to race around its ring road without having to deal with traffic. These days, most any day will do. I was feeling all smug and satisfied Thursday morning as I rode around the mall, thinking that, in the long emergency, when all around us is collapsing, I’ll still be able to ride my bike to get around.

But where will I get tires?

Time Trials

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Time Trials

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

This is where I’ve been spending weekend mornings for the month of August (mostly Saturdays, one Sunday) – out along the Interstate 25 frontage road north of Bernalillo, New Mexico, where my bike racing team puts on its annual time trial series. I’ve been working the start line. The last two weeks I got to be the guy who says “five four three two one go” every 30 seconds. Lissa comes too, helping run the registration table. (Sorry for crappy photo – cell phone.)

What Kind of Drought is South Texas Having?

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There are supply droughts, where the amount of rain falling from the sky drops precipitously, and the amount of water evaporating from plants and transpiring from their leaves, rises. And there are demand droughts, where the main problem is not in the supply of water nature offers, but in the way we use it.

The current drought in Texas, as this story shows, is both:

Even as the steady, very visible drop of Lakes Travis and Buchanan has gained notoriety, the well water that many people in the Hill Country rely on from underground aquifers has also been sucked dry.

The issue is exacerbated, water specialists say, by the rapidly increasing number of pumps, like straws into a tall glass of Coke, that reach into the aquifers beneath the booming areas of northern Hays and western Travis counties.

Caring About Water

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licensed under creative commons, courtesy suburbanbloke

licensed under creative commons, courtesy suburbanbloke

When an organization dedicated to the world’s water problems conducts a survey that concludes people care a lot about the world’s water problems, it’s good to accept the results with some caution. That caveat notwithstanding, the results of this survey are nevertheless not surprising:

The survey, commissioned by Circle of Blue and conducted by Toronto and London-based GlobeScan was made public in Stockholm, Sweden, on August 18 during World Water Week. It found that people around the world view the fresh water crisis as the planet’s top environmental problem.

The fierce impediments to clean water and sanitation, and the millions of premature deaths from water-related disease are seen as having a greater influence on quality of life and the planet than air pollution, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, loss of habitat and climate change.

Water Wars, or Not?

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When we talk about “water wars” in the United States, things like what is now happening in Atlanta, we’re not really talking about shooting wars. But there’s are widespread fears that globally, water wars will be one of the defining structures of 21st century conflict.

Not so, suggests a new paper in the Journal of Peace Research. Jaroslav Tir of the University of Georgia and John Ackerman of the U.S. Air Command and Staff College argue that water actually provides an opportunity for cooperation rather than a source of conflict:

[T]he findings suggest that the roles of allegedly important and problematic factors such as the upstream/downstream relationship and recent militarized conflict have been exaggerated in earlier research. Cumulatively, the findings sound a cautiously optimistic note for the prospects of the spread of formal river cooperation in the less developed parts of the world.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Albuquerque’s Sewage Reclamation

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Albuquerque’s on the brink of New Mexico’s largest sewage reclamation project, taking 2,500 acre feet per year of water from the city’s wastewater treatment plant outflow and using it to water parks and golf courses.

All well and good. Sounds like a great idea to put wasted water to use. But, as I tried to get across in a story for the newspaper (ad/pay gated) this isn’t “free water”:

[T]he sewage reuse will reduce pumping from Albuquerque’s aquifer, Stomp said.

But because the sewage treatment plant discharge provides water for the Rio Grande ecosystem and downstream users, the project is essentially a zero sum game in New Mexico’s overall water budget, experts say.

“Municipal water reuse isn’t necessarily conservation,” University of New Mexico water resources professor Bruce Thomson and local water consultant John Shomaker wrote in a recent analysis of the issue.

Stomp agrees the project won’t change Albuquerque’s “consumptive use” of water — the amount we pump from the aquifer or remove from the river minus the amount returned to the river from the sewage treatment plant.

California Drought

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Via NASA’s Earth Observatory, MODIS view of California’s central valley. The brown, blocky bits are areas where agricultural land, which would usually be growing this time of year, lies fallow. Click through to see it big:

Drought in California as seen from space

Drought in California as seen from space