remember, tuesday is soylent green day
Soylent Green is a local problem, too! Because it's made of people!
ENN:
Sandy gullies and endless sage brush offer little hint of the watersports mecca once envisioned for this small town near the Montana line.
Back when the Bighorn River flowed strongly out of the Wind River mountains, it backed up 72-miles (116-kilometer) from the Yellowtail Dam in Montana south to the outskirts of Lovell -- a man-made lake that once drew almost half a million visitors annually.
But for eight years drought has choked the river, chopping 30 miles (48 kilometers) off Bighorn Lake in recent summers and prompting tourists to go elsewhere. And now a U.S. senator from Montana -- anxious to tap the reservoir to feed a downstream trout fishery -- could end Lovell's recreational plans for good.
Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrat Max Baucus, has introduced legislation to ensure a steady flow of water out of Yellowtail Dam, further depleting the lake.
The bill stakes out yet another front in the water wars breaking out across the Northern Plains.
As the worst dry spell since the 1930s shows no signs of abating, many states are squabbling with each other and federal officials.
I blog lots on global warming and other big world-shakers, but as Jared Diamond notes over and over in Collapse, environmental struggles are ultimately local ones - very unsexy, very gritty community problems like the one above that require community solutions.
It'll be interesting - albeit tragically so - in the next ten or twenty years to see if the same kind of economic wallop the rust belt took in the 1980s hits the tourism and recreation industry of the mountain states.
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