Three Essential Causes for Human Survival: Water, Housing and Energy
Fresh water, affordable housing and abundant energy remain the defining challenges for humanity’s future.
Through the course of my adult life, there have been three “big picture” causes that I still feel are essential to the continued life of human beings on this planet.
They are these: ensuring there is enough fresh water, ensuring there is enough housing and ensuring there is enough energy.
I still feel there is a need for Manhattan Project-style mobilization efforts on all three fronts, out of fear that shortages are dooming us.
The Need for Fresh Water
On the matter of enough fresh water, I used to advocate for something that went by the name of the North American Water and Power Alliance, or NAWAPA. Devised in the 1950s by the Ralph Parsons Company, it was a very ambitious plan to divert the massive flows of fresh water in Canada and Alaska southward to address water shortages in the U.S. Southwest, from the depleted Ogallala Aquifer on the high plains to the Los Angeles basin and even northern Mexico.
Yes, I went around that whole region giving talks in the 1980s, from western Kansas to Phoenix to Salt Lake City to Torreón, Mexico. Often my sidekick in those efforts was the late U.S. Senator Frank “Ted” Moss, the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Utah. He had introduced documentation on NAWAPA into the Congressional Record.
But I am no longer sure that something like NAWAPA, fashioned as it was on the big fresh water diversion projects that brought water to California’s Central Valley and to Los Angeles itself, is the right approach today.
After all, we live on a planet that is covered mostly by water. It seems to be a better prospect to make our oceans a safe and reliable source of fresh water than to divert the small amounts of water that move over our land surfaces.
The key, then, is in effective and inexpensive desalination technology. A Manhattan Project-style effort toward that end is essential to our species’ long-term survival.
The Housing Crisis
Second, on the issue of housing, where the world, including the United States, is now entering a period of existential crisis, some good-faith efforts are falling woefully short because the current costs of construction are simply too high.
This is not primarily due to organized labor, but to a lack of sufficient creative thinking.
Do you remember the Katrina cottages that gained notoriety following Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago? They became part of a “tiny house” movement that has apparently stalled out badly, due, I fear, to politics. But it was in the right direction.
Truly affordable modular housing is capable of putting every man, woman and child under a roof.
When I walk on a downtown street in the nation’s capital on a sunny morning and pass by a tent where someone inside is coughing, it really pains my heart. It should not be like this.
The Future of Energy
Third, on the issue of energy, I am pleased to see that we are nearing the point where a net gain in energy out versus energy in, using nuclear fusion technology, is about to happen — thanks in large part to my congressman, Don Beyer of Northern Virginia.
But the development remains too slow. This truly revolutionary technology, which replicates the process by which not only our sun, but all the energy in the universe, is unleashed, is by virtue of that fact alone the de facto solution to what will eventually provide all our planetary energy needs.
Using ordinary water as its fuel, nuclear fusion may one day not only power the Earth, but become the way we move around the universe.
A Remarkable Age for Humanity
After all, we cannot overlook the remarkable age in which we now live. In the 13-billion-year life of the universe and the five-billion-year history of Earth, you and I are alive in the time when we, as a sentient species, are for the first time demonstrating a capability of moving beyond our own planet.
In doing so, we are establishing the grounds for spreading ourselves across the cosmos.
How extraordinary.