The newspapers are full of tales of giant mining companies, real estate developers and massive agribusinesses moving behind the scenes throughout the country. They scoff at climate change.
They are actively resisting any reduction to their groundwater access. The problem is that the water is disappearing, rapidly.
Water policy over the past 50 years has allowed concentrated users to use even more, even as aquifers dwindle. Political policies have allowed influence by the biggest users to keep pumping at the maximum rates even though some communities are beginning to come up dry. But groundwater regulation — the stuff way underground — is a hot stove no one wants to touch, especially when waves of campaign cash keep the subject off the political agenda in the regions drying out the most in the West and Midwest.
Many Americans view water under their land as a domain of individual liberty, that no one wants the federal government or even the states to have authority over. Groundwater levels near the county’s biggest mines have dropped by hundreds of feet in the last two decades, reflecting the power of the largest mining companies. No one succeeds politicly in the West if they defy mining.
In Montana, it is builders of massive housing developments who are pumping away the groundwater for mostly second homes. In a closed basin like Montana and other states, there isn’t enough surface water, like rivers and lakes, for new users. But as the water is pumped out of the groundwater tables at these higher rates, the rain and snowmelt can’t replace the aquifers and refill below the surface.
It’s drying up. But the business interests keep suing to keep pumping at their breakneck speeds. If they don’t get it now, someone else will. Pump it as fast as you can. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, the Titans of Fossil Fuels — both oil potentates and industry magnates — have used the COP28 Climate Conference talks in Doha as a hollow shield to make oil deals and barter future leases in private meetings while global warming gets only lip-service. In a report released at the conference, one quarter of the world’s fresh water fish are in danger of extinction. But, around the world, they’ve made sure that unrestricted drilling and water use are protected national policies, no matter what the Cassandras of the world claim. There is no end in sight and little real political will.
Now one Cassandra from Gloucester, JoeAnn Hart, has brought out a book, living as it might be in the future, under this advancing new world. Rather than wailing about it, this book takes it for granted that it was going to happen. We’ve seen changes round us already, the colossal rain storms, heat waves, disappearance of water tables, food supplies, neighborhoods, jobs. The intensification of weather changes. The future has already shown the trend. But “High Wire Act,” written here in town, is a collection of short stories that show several different futures — the coming worlds of folks that they have to deal with as “normal.” Real normal, not sci-fi, but you and I — as it could be, maybe already is. Some are in the short-term future, others in the distant future. This book was published by Black Lawrence Press after it won its Hudson Book prize for climate fiction. Its sub-title is “& Other Tales of Survival” because the characters must survive — or not — in their various new worlds that she so deftly paints. Yet some of these worlds are alarmingly close to where we are now while others look back towards where we are now as if to the distant past.
Her 18 extraordinary short stories take you on a trip: to a dystopian future; to the tidewaters of Gloucester; to the chambers of a haunted mill. Her characters go to sea, deadhead flowers, raise crickets for food while an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. A woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor while another’s seaside paradise becomes her tomb. But in the end, the real place she takes us is the center of the human heart in stories generous, brilliant and fierce. Stories where the climate crises arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with COVID-19, ecological destruction, grief and mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. and with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales and delusions are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.
This book (her fourth) has been a long time coming and (spoiler), I should know, Joe Ann Hart is my wife and it is the best book I’ve read this year, anywhere. Get thee to the local bookstore …