ABSTRACT
Every decade, several environmental subjects become publicly prominent, causing otherwise disinterested people to become curious and concerned. As I watch the media cultivate the public’s emotional reactions, I think of these events as “media tsunamis” climaxed by a large wave of interest that eventually attenuates, unless a similar event reoccurs. During my lifetime these media tsunamis have included atomic warfare, Earth Day, stratospheric ozone depletion, the TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima nuclear power plant failures, and more recently fracking and global climate change (GCC). The GCC message is that human fossil fuel use has caused upper atmospheric
changes leading to alterations in the frequency, duration, timing and type of precipitation; rising sea-level; acceleration of the world’s water cycle; more frequent and massive storms that kill and injure people and destroy their possessions, while in other places and times lead to longer and more severe droughts (International Panel 2001, 2007; Karl et al. 2009; Lins et al. 2010; Vorosmarty, Sahagian 2000; Vorosmarty et al. 2000, 2010). The media message is predominantly negative information, which is more salient to the public than positive news. Disputes about imperfect data and models and denials of GCC have tended to
elevate global climate change to a topic of public conversation. For example, a few years ago, the author attended a reunion. After falsely assuring each other that our appearances had not changed much during the last 50 years, several of my fellow graduates raised global climate change and its potential impact upon their children and grandchildren. We discussed the subject with an intensity that would have made our professors proud had we been so inclined to engage in such serious discussions a half century earlier. My classmates recognized that they were contributing to the problem through their consumption, yet other than making
personal adjustments in their purchasing, they felt powerless about making a contribution to reversing global climate change. My contributions to that conversation are reflected in this chapter, centering
around the larger issue of resource use, economic development and land use. I told my classmates that they might make a difference not only by focusing on their individual behaviors and purchases but they could play a role in local landuse decisions. With some exceptions, humans have been permitted and encouraged to use ever increasing amounts of the Earth’s resources, thereby reducing the capability of ecosystems in the long run to provide nutrients, food, wood, and clean water and air, and relying on scientific ingenuity to invent ways to sustain high rates of economic growth. I suggested to my colleagues that they consider engaging in land-use planning meetings in their local jurisdictions where they would come face-to-face with balancing short-term preferences expressed in the local town plans against the need to manage land use and the environment for the longer term and provide space for disadvantaged people rather than opposing it. My former classmates and I are senior citizen middle-income people living in
places with economic resources and political capacity that can adapt to GCC, but a measure of our society is how would we assist poor people living in places with limited resources and political power adapt, as described in the last part of the chapter. Toward that end, this chapter uses freshwater resources as an illustration to
discuss risk issues related to natural resource use. After looking at the water resources issue from the global perspective, and providing a brief case study of China’s efforts to solve one of its water resource issues, the chapter focuses on South America, Australia, and especially Africa, in other words, the Global South, where the challenge of land-use conversion, water resource shortages or deluges, population growth and migration, and conflict are already serious stressors. Because I chose to report on every continent to some extent, readers may find
some of this presentation tedious and you are not discouraged from skimming through all the details and concentrating on the major observations, with the exceptions of the final discussion of alternative futures.
