In 1985, Barbara W. Tuchman wrote the book, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to the people’s interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.
The growing dominance of the industrial food system since 1985 could easily add another, even more alarming, chapter to Tuchman’s book.
Will today’s extractive globalized model of agriculture be written into history as the biggest folly of all?
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DAY ZERO – TRAILER 2021 – is a documentary about the impending global water crisis and how that is one of the most serious and pressing issues of our lifetime.
At times of the year, the Arkansas River no longer delivers snow melt from the Colorado Rockies into Kansas, and the South Platte River, after watering much of the expanding Front Range of Colorado, barely makes it into Nebraska, resulting in the Ogallala Aquifer losing two of its main traditional sources of recharge. Meanwhile, we keep on pumping and transferring the value of this precious and declining resource into the bank accounts of the world’s biggest agribusiness corporations, leaving dried-up and broken farming communities across the high plains.
Day Zero is coming fast for many of us. Like the marinas on Lake Powell, farm fields, livestock wells, and communities above the Ogallala Aquifer are running out of water. I wish the disappearance in our underground aquifers was as visible as in the above ground structures like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Would we react differently?
“Aquifers belong to everyone, and especially to future generations.”
Quote from the December 2021 Atlantic article, The Next Disaster Coming to the Great Plains:
“When groundwater runs out, myths of growth and profit collapse into dust. Drying aquifers can result in starvation, migration, and violence. Or they can prompt us to rethink our relationship to one another and to the irreplaceable natural resources that we share. Aquifers belong to everyone, and especially to future generations.”
According to the producers, Day Zero should be releasing soon on Amazon Prime Video.
Fore more, see: The Current State of U.S. Agriculture and Food Infrastructure, and Solutions and VICE: Meathooked and End of Water
