Whether it falls as snow on the mountain or thunderstorms on the prairie. All God’s Water feeds All God’s Plants at one point in the cycle or another. I suppose that’s the point. Let’s say the water that God blesses us with from the sky is clean and safe to ingest. It isn’t; not always. But let’s say for the premise of a clean water argument: that rain water is pure and blessed by the heavens.
It’s enormous in scale, but the freshwater cycle on Planet Earth is a closed system for the most part. The world economy has been approaching equivalence in scale to Mother Nature. And here we have our fundamental problem. When cruising altitude on a jetliner is above the “heavens” from which our elixir of life blesses us, one struggles to Sleep Through the Static when we’re so clearly “beyond where we should’ve gone.” The scale of our mess has met the scale of our blessings.
If our hypothetical, pure rain falls in Appalachia – one of the beacons of biodiversity in North America – it falls on millions of acres of slurry ponds and overburden left over from a century of coal mining. It falls on a damaged water cycle that leaches chemicals and damages the soil and water. Then, it’s carried further into the water table by the increasing frequency of flash floods in the region from blowing the tops off of more than 500 mountains and destroying almost 1.5 million acres of native forest. While coal mining is steadily collapsing in the region, the ecological damage remains – that is, to say nothing of the economic damage – and the alternative isn’t much better. In this case, the health effects on humans start with cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and COPD and end with water flowing through river deltas that bleaches coral reefs and has decimated mangrove forests. Mother Nature is protective by default, but so too are humans destructive in the same way. We call it an ‘economy,’ and everyone depends on it to survive. It’s really great.
These altered Appalachian headwaters carry runoff east to the coast as well as into the Heartland. From the Allegheny into the Ohio and the Adirondacks into the Hudson. Every mine, lumber operation, commercial farm, chemical company, and whatever the Appalachian Regional Commission considers “heavy industries,” contribute to the Old Man Rivers, respectively.
Downstream doesn’t fair much better. For example, General Electric dumped toxic ‘forever chemicals’ near Fort Edward, despite being warned of the harmful effects of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) as early as the 1960s. Municipalities from Philadelphia to Baltimore struggle against either water contamination or water security from corporations. Pick a direction. Go south down the coast to North Carolina, the location of the largest gas spill in 20 years, where PFAS factories misrepresent emissions data, and plastics cleanup does exactly the opposite. In 2018 the Associated Press ran a piece on PFAS that used Horsham, Pennsylvania as an anecdote and identified the same chemical problem in water sources in 33 states.
But let’s not dwell on it, shall we? Further south still, PPE pollution ravages the Chattahoochee River Basin and Jackson, Mississippi runs headlong into the same water security issues as Baltimore.
Like America itself, shall we go West?
I’ve already mentioned the Ohio River, briefly. But to fully illustrate the lackadaisical standard of official conduct in regards to water protections we need look no further than the East Palestine train derailment in 2023. It’s a microcosm. The railcars were carrying a galaxy of chemicals you certainly don’t want in your water supply, most of which burned for two days, releasing harmful substances into the air to settle on soil who knows where. I know not which way the wind was blowing on that particular day. Then, to drive the illustration home, the chemical cleanup was apparently shipped through Houston without the knowledge of public officials, according to Lina Hidalgo’s office.
Further West still, the premier social revolution of the midwest before 2019 has been the effort to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. If we’ve learned anything about pipelines it’s that they inevitably leak. The thing about infrastructure is that it needs to be maintained. Residents from Minnesota to Texas suffer pipeline leak after pipeline leak, all while in the midst of increased fracking activity and commercial expansion of already massive ag conglomerates. All God’s Plants grow in the care of fewer hands.
As we move west across the states the water problem changes from contamination – the norm for the East – to scarcity – a hallmark of the Southwest, especially. The water that feeds the bread baskets of the West comes from the Ogallala Aquifer and the Colorado River. Both of which are being pumped dry for almonds and cattle feed. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “Cannabis cultivation can significantly affect water availability… [especially] during California’s dry season when water availability is significantly decreased.”
After World War II, center pivot irrigation accounted for an increase in major extraction of water from the Ogallala Aquifer. According to a 2011 Department of Agriculture report the aquifer supplies approximately 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation. Since 1950, the aquifer that supplies drinking water for the majority of the 2.3 million people on the High Plains has been depleted by an estimated 9%. The numbers aren’t particularly alarming unless ingested in conjunction with the fact that every surrounding water table suffers from the aforementioned afflictions and that it would take approximately 6,000 years to replenish the aquifer through rainwater runoff alone. Yes, the same runoff constantly being spilled, dredged, and dumped on – will refill one of the world’s greatest sources of natural freshwater.
Tyler Fry, heir to Fry Dairy in Holt and Antelope Counties in North Central Nebraska, told me on a visit in 2023 that each center pivot over the aquifer pumps “anywhere from 600-1000 gallons per minute, depending on the well.” The Fry family has been farming there for countless generations, and each well from the High Plains to the Texas Panhandle affect the volume and health of the aquifer. According to Honeywell there are roughly 150,000 center pivot systems in operation today in the US, covering more than 20 million acres of farmland. 150,000 x 800 gpm = 120,000,000 gpm per aquifer.
Marijuana and its tertiary industries will always be agricultural, and therefore exist in the same plain (punz) as traditional agriculture and suffer from the same set of problems. Yes, it can be grown indoors in meticulously controlled environments and this can eliminate some of the uncertainty that comes from outdoor agriculture. But it does nothing to address water security and only increases the cost. A cost that still overwhelmingly burdens the environment with emissions and other forms of waste. It’s especially current for an industry that’s developing its own waste problem, as reported by Andrew Ward here at Texas Trend.
The crisis of American water and farmland irrigation seem to be standing at the foothills staring up the mountain. In the fight for sustainable practices, an uphill battle, to be certain, is it possible to imagine better for both traditional farmers and new agricultural industries? For what’s good for the east is also good in the west when everyone is suffering from the same sickness. A sickness that costs at least $83 billion a year in the US and $479 billion globally. A sickness that could incur an additional $34 billion cost from lost pollinators and reduced water availability. It’s a cost that could feed a generation, should it be addressed.
The marijuana industry doesn’t get a pass on agricultural problems because it’s a black market or a trending new legal status. It’s one that has been folded and forged like Damascus steel in the gauntlet of an international drug trade, sure, but it will never outgrow it’s roots in the soil. It’s very efficient already – but is it sustainable? Will it bring wealth to small farmers, distributors, and adjacent industries? Or will it simply pile onto one of the worst problems in history?
