Now, to smear your borders means facing the Long Island Sound. A maple syrup slick? Makes oil on the water sound positively pallatable!

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/

On a more serious note, yes changes will have to be mandated, probably through taxes and fines. Americans think with their wallets (when we think at all). Only when it becomes prohibitively expensive to park a Hummer on your perfect lawn after a long, hard 100 mile commute will behaviors change. And it’s going to hurt. Those of us who live 25 miles from town will pay the price just as much as the rich folks in the ‘burbs.

2) Don’t be too sure about Cascadia being safe. There’s actually been plans proposed to divert Canadian rivers to the US Southwest.

3)Yes, the Aral Sea is one of the worst environmental catastrophes on the planet.

I probably should have predicated the previous with g’da woulda’ said something about lawns being for people who don’t know how to grow food, which I find to be a valid socio/anthropological comment on american society today. The opulent pretense of a blood sucking lawn masks the subconscious horror that were offal to make contact with an oscillating unit the super markets would close. Very, very,/i> few had a gun at eight, a pony at ten, and learned to garden at their grandparents’ knees.

Opulent, and pretense, being the operative words.

BTW, the California acqueduct, which supplies much of southern California’s water, only delivers about 15% of its water to the cities in southern California. The rest is devoted to flood irrigation and other wasteful practices in California’s central valley, raising low-value crops like rice and alfalpha. Years of wate have been subsidizes by absurdly-low prices set largely by the Feds to support agribusiness.

And before anybody says anything about how this is typical of capitalism and socialism would NEVER do such a thing, take a look at what is probably the biggest environmental disaster in history: the cotton fields in Central Asia, created by the diversion of the waters running into the Aral Sea, which has virtually disappeared. To make matters worse, the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow the cotton have been deposited into the Aral Sea through runoff, and as the sea shrinks, the pesticides and fertilizers are exposed to the winds and deposited all throughout Central Asia and breathed in by the residents. And this done under a socialist government. Man’s ability to do stupid environmental tricks, alas, transcends the economic system under which the society operates.