The water conundrum: Crippling our future to continue the run for money now

Part of this is the disconnect between people and the environment: nature is that thing there to serve humans. Most people only know water by taste and availability; if it tastes okay, and it comes out when we turn the handle, then all’s right with the world

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Two-steppin' Rose and Conley –
"I'm your huckleberry."

Photo courtesy

By Clay E. Ewing

I’ve been sending support to County Commissioner Will Conley the last few years for commissioners to have more power over both residential and commercial development. Representative Patrick Rose opted to support this same idea over the ground water district being granted full powers, and now both measures are apparently dead.

Where to now? Have we cut our throats to keep the food from our stomachs? Surely there are few out there who still believe the old mantra—It’s my land, and I’ll do with it what I want—is anything but passé, even outright stupid; there’s almost nothing we do anymore that does not affect our neighbors, whether good or ill. Consider, too, how there are few things more intrusive into one’s neighbor’s lives than putting a commercial operation or residential development next door.

If what Ben Franklin said over two hundred years ago was true then, it must now be the gold standard: One’s rights end at the tip of their nose.

There are a few truths about the future that are so painful to the freewheeling, no-codes-no-regs business interests among us, they’re willing to cripple our future to continue their run for the money now. That they might claim otherwise is perfectly sensible; if you ran over a loved one, would you allow them to die rather than take them to the hospital?

Currently, our loved one—the Hill Country—is not dead, but we have participated in running it over with an abandon that makes less and less sense as the years go by. How many decades must pass before we accept and embrace things we knew twenty, thirty, even fifty years ago?

One could make the argument that it was obvious in 1973 that our world oil reserves were finite, and, as a nation leading the world (as we pride ourselves in thinking), we should pursue not just oil independence, but energy conservation with the same vengeance we pursued energy consumption. But, to put it in succinctly, we did not.

Despite ample evidence—which was not suddenly available in 1973, and, in fact, had been an open topic of discussion for decades—that energy is far more limited than we act, we base our actions not on the evidence, but on the price: when cheap, we buy huge, gas guzzling vehicles we actually do not need, and buy reasonable, more efficient vehicles only when the price of gas goes up.

Hardly the actions of a leader in anything except the denial of a viable future.

If the evidence was there about energy, and we blithely ignored it to congratulate ourselves with bigger cars, bigger houses, unlimited energy consumption based on what we can pull from our wallets, why would we approach water consumption with any greater sense of urgency or even respect?

Part of this is the disconnect between people and the environment: nature is that thing there to serve humans. Most people only know water by taste and availability; if it tastes okay, and it comes out when we turn the handle, then all’s right with the world. This Panglossian view was Voltaire’s satire on the unrealistic nature of the human specie, but even he, two hundred years ago, could not conceive how divorced from the reality of our own actions humans would transgress.

The idea that modern humans do not see the world past their own lifetimes—that, the world began the day we were born, and it ends the day we die—and thus find it easy to rationalize behavior wholly self-centered and ultimately destructive, is perhaps in error: one would find scant evidence that we are guided by a time frame that even encompasses a lifetime, and are guided instead only by what we get, how much we get, and, consequently, that we got ours.

Based on this rationale, it should be no surprise Patrick Rose has backed neither a winning nor a losing horse in the race to a well watered future, but no horse at all. If he’s listening to the loudest voices, they might well be the business interests in the area rather than the individual constituents he’s supposed to be representing

And yet, he has really not failed us, but that’s the shame: apparently he is listening to who’s talking, and if most of those tilting his ear are business interests and not individual constituents, then it would seem unfair to blame Rose when it has actually been us who are allowing the future to wither so we might have ours now.

Mr. Rose’s surprising flaw is his lack of vision. When our elected officials cannot see past their own term, or the interests of short-term business gain, then guard your shins from the swing of their cane.

Clay Ewing is a former op-ed columnist for the Texan Express (Goliad ’84-’86), edited a regional bicycling newsletter in South Texas (1990-2000), on-going blogger and writer of short stories, landscape and color abstract photographer. Mr. Ewing is a practicing Realtor in the Wimberley area.