Arguably – metaphorically – when it is Australia’s Murray-Darling, as recently described:
the canary, and the coalmine, for the world when it comes to water stress.
(photo, copyright Doug Spencer, shows the Murray at Echuca, 6.53 pm on 12 October, 2018)
The most stingingly “quotable” remark in Charles Sturt University freshwater ecologist R. Keller Kopf’s article, published in the Australian edition of The Guardian on 11 February, 2019:
Temperatures in Death Valley are sometimes that hot, but then again no one is growing cotton or cod there.
Kopf’s article is succinct and sensible, alarming but not alarmist.
A few key sentences:
Given that less than 2% of all water pumped from the Murray-Darling goes to household consumption it’s hard not to sympathise with those who argue that corporate irrigators have something to do with water stress.
Unlike the fish, people and small farms spread throughout the Murray-Darling – a few lobbyists and several hundred rice and cotton irrigators, occupying less than 1% of the land, profit from using about 40% of all water extracted.
There is plenty of water to go around for people and the environment, but not enough to simultaneously sustain the current irrigation entitlements.
Banning cotton and rice and degrading farmers will not solve the problem.
Click here to read the full article.
Then click here for a disturbing report in The Guardian today; it refers to the latest warning from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.