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Thursday, October 11, 2012
Photo Credit: Columbia Law School
Yesterday, I talked about the forum on groundwater storage issues, taking place at the Louden Nelson Community Center tonight. I really do recommend that you think about attending. Check yesterday’s Land Use Report blog for more information.
If you do check out that Land Use Report blog, you might notice a link at the bottom to my personal blog, “Two Worlds.” My daily blog postings attempt to explore what I call the “Two Worlds Hypothesis;” namely, that while we most immediately inhabit a human world, which we create ourselves, we ultimately live in and are dependent upon the World of Nature, which we did not create, and which we cannot reconfigure the way we can reconfigure our own world. We need to be careful not to think we can ignore the laws of Nature. And we need to be careful not to think that we can’t change the laws that govern our own world.
A recent statement by UCSC Professor Brent Haddad, printed in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, illustrates how important it is not to assume that the constraints of Nature aren’t really constraints at all. Speaking about the proposed desalination plant in Santa Cruz, he said:
Desal is technology that is more profound than we think because, in the broadest sense, we are reversing the water cycle that has flowed in one direction since the beginning of Earth.
Something worth thinking about as we start trying to reconfigure the World of Nature.
More Information:
“Desal? Or Not?” Two Worlds Blog Entry For September 29, 2012
Former Santa Cruz County Supervisor Gary Patton talks about land use, and land use decisions, with an emphasis on public participation and how the land use process works.