Articles by Sarah K. Burkhalter

From Cooling to Cooing

Burn, baby, burn The Nevada desert is hot. So, coincidentally, is the planet. Enter Cooling Man, an online carbon calculator for this week’s Burning Man arts festival (which features such […]

Today’s list of places you don’t want to live

Hello, and welcome to this edition of Whew-I'm-Glad-I-Live-Here-and-Not-There. Today's list of places you're glad you don't live:

Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming

A blistering drought is bringing on conditions that are being compared to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, leaving farmers and ranchers desperate. No really, desperate:

Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, who has requested that 51 of the state's 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area, recently sought unusual help from his constituents: he issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.

Water scarcity will cause lots of scary things to happen.

In anticipation of World Water Week next week, news on aqueous gloom and doom abounds. This is, um, not comforting:

Cholera may return to London, the mass migration of Africans could cause civil unrest in Europe and China's economy could crash by 2015 as the supply of fresh water becomes critical to the global economy.

That's nearly as frightening as Snakes on a Plane (all the hype surrounding it, not the movie itself).

But seriously. By 2015? That's damn soon.

Analysts from 200 of the world's largest companies, brought together by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, made the grim forecast, also predicting (hoping?) that water scarcity will spur better management and water-saving technologies. As a third of the world's population already lives where water is overused or inaccessible, future conflicts over water are virtually inevitable.

The analysts, who took three years to study future water availability, came up with three potential future scenarios:

Eat it up

Maybe y'all knew this already, but I read this today and felt sick to my stomach:

Rijsberman said the price of water would have to increase to meet an expected 50 percent increase in the amount of food the world will need in the next 20 years.

Emphasis, and trepidation about the not-so-distant future, mine.