Say What?

The people making those kind of statements are not hydrologists - they're developers and builders. ... That kind of attitude is kind of sticking your head in the sand. Hydrologists and geologists have been studying the basin and they say it's dropping.

- Jim Mital, rural Moscow resident and member of the Palouse Basin Aquifer Committee Citizen Advisory Group, "A thirst for answers: Water concerns are a flood of opinions and a drought of facts," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, August 2, 2008

There are a lot of hypotheses, but the frustration is that we just don't know much. There's a lot of gray area. The Palouse isn't going to run out of water anytime soon so communities don't need to dig deeper and deeper or drastically move to a plan B. We're going to run out of oil far before Moscow and Pullman run out of water. It's not a critical situation, but it's something that we need to watch.

- Professor of Hydrogeology, University of Idaho, "A thirst for answers: Water concerns are a flood of opinions and a drought of facts," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, August 2, 2008

...the idea that a community can only thrive with unlimited growth and development is a notion that must disappear, hopefully before the water does.

Post-World War II economy was based on a planned scheme for consumerism —and it worked. The economy grew, people consumed and planned obsolescence became an accepted norm. We become anxious when we consider voluntary reductions of any type. But, we must begin to imagine a “restorative economy” where having less is truly more satisfying, more interesting, and of course, more secure.

In the relatively near future, we must achieve a balance between what we are consuming and the capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to provide, according to author and businessman Paul Hawken. “We need to create an economy… that is not an either/or argument, but a means to create the best life for the greatest number of people precisely because we do not know the eventual outcome or impact of our current industrial practices. In other words, we need an economy based on more humility.”

- April 2003 Moscow Co-Op newsletter

Let's call a spade a spade. The only people calling the water situation on the Palouse a "crisis" are not water experts either. They have a distinct agenda of social(ist) engineering, just the same as those warning of "global warming crisis."