California Is Cautionary Tale for Wisconsin Groundwater

If Wisconsin gets hit with a drought anything like California's, the abundance of fresh water in our Great Lakes state will a become a resource of the past.

Justis Gillis and Matt Richtel have a piece in the New York Times on groundwater, the drought and Big Ag.

A couple of points from their piece on California:

• "Eighty percent of the water used by humans in California goes to agriculture."
• "'Farmers' are drilling wells at a feverish pace and pumping billions of gallons of water from the ground, depleting a resource that was critically endangered even before the drought, now in its fourth year, began."
• "One acre-foot of water is enough to flood a football field to a depth of nine inches."

Under Scott Walker's new approach, the Wisconsin Dept of Natural Resources is giving out high capacity water well permits like candy at Halloween or to use a more precise metaphor like political favors to campaign contributors like the Dairy Business Association and other Big Ag funding operations.

It's entirely possible the fundamentalist Scott Walker thinks the End Times are coming, so he may as well plunder and befoul our natural resources, take in $10s of millions, and move on to rightwing welfare after Walker is recognized as too dull to represent the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential election. (Lounsbury, The Progressive)