#1309 Water for a Dry Land with Char Miller

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2018

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

"Our technology that has unleashed such creativity has also unleashed the capacity for us to destroy the very things that we were creating."

— Char Miller

Clay and David speak with Char Miller, one of the three authors of the 3rd edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. Char Miller is Director of Environmental Analysis, and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College.

Drop Jefferson into western Kansas or Oklahoma. What does he say about the Ogallala miracle? The Ogallala aquifer is a huge underground water resource which stretches from South Dakota all the way to Texas — an underground lake the size of Lake Huron that most people have never heard of. The aquifer is used to create one of the best agricultural productivity zones on Earth. It supplies water to people, industry and agriculture, and it's expected to run dry by the end of the century. The aquifer is now living on borrowed time because of its decline as a fossil resource. How would Jefferson have reacted to all of this?

Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land is coauthored by John Opie, Kenna Lang Archer, and Char Miller.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good Day citizens and welcome to this podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour and welcome.
0:07.0	Great fun today, David. We had my friend Charmiller from Pomona College in Southern California on to talk about the
0:14.6	reissue of an important book one that he co-wrote Oglala, Water for a
0:19.8	dry land along with John Opie and Kenelang Archer.
0:23.8	Ogilala means the Ogilala Aquifer,
0:26.4	an underground lake in the Western Great Plains
0:29.5	that has created one of the great agricultural
0:31.9	production zones in the world and Charmiller is
0:35.6	interested in that resource and interested in how finite and unsustainable a
0:40.7	resource it is.
0:41.7	Yeah we've talked about water before and I think we're both of the same mind that maybe not,
0:46.3	but I shouldn't assume, but I firmly believe that as the decades progress, water is going to become one of the most valuable
0:54.6	natural resources we have if it isn't already I guess. Well in this book
0:59.0	Charmiller and his co-author say that 40% of the world's population does not have an
1:04.0	adequate supply of safe water. Think of that. 40% that's almost half. You and I
1:10.5	live in North Dakota. The Great Missouri River is here.
1:14.0	It backs up two gigantic dams, two reservoirs here.
1:17.7	We feel we have an infinite amount of water here and we don't have to be careful.
1:22.4	But I lived in Southern California
1:23.6	I taught at Pomona College at the beginning of my career and their water is
1:27.9	rationed very tightly everyone has a special toilet watering Watering restrictions are permanent.
1:34.0	People are conscious at a restaurant.
	...

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