Hello and welcome, Radio Readers to 2024! For this year’s Spring Read we’ve lined up some great reads on the subject of water. A few years back, a Radio Readers series focused on sources and usages of water. This time, our theme– “Water, Water—Neverwhere”—invites consideration as to whether and for how long, both regionally and globally, we will have water, enough good water, to sustain life and livelihoods, and when we don’t, can we adapt?
Already, agencies like UNESCO and the World Bank estimate that minimally four billion people, mostly in Asian countries, undergo scarcity of water at least one month each year. Nearly 500 million people experience water scarcity all year. Globally, use of water is anticipated to increase 20-50% beyond current levels by 2050. This increase corresponds to anticipated growth in population and also in economic growth. Gains in wealth tend to pay out in lifestyles that use more water – because of food choices, for example, and larger homes with greater landscaping, with households and businesses showing increased demands for travel and transportation. Greater demand and usage of water will necessarily result in growing scarcity and insecurity, which, in terms of water, means lack of access to appropriate quantities of good water necessary for health, ecosystems and production. All of which underscores the reality that water is a limited, and increasingly scarce, resource. This reality is compounded by drought, a phenomenon familiar to those living and working on the High Plains.
The dustbowl of the 1930’s is likely the most documented drought in our region, but other notable droughts occurred in the 1950s’, the 1980s, and, to date, through the past decades of the 21st century, each period with significant hits to agriculture, production, and local economies and impacts ranging on local population and lifestyles.
That’s why, Radio Readers, this spring, we are set to explore water insecurity by exploring its causes—such as drought—and possible responses—such as limiting access—through the lenses of fiction, memoir and poetry. Our 2024 Spring Read, starts off with a novel, written by Western writer Elmer Kelton. The Time It Never Rained takes place in 1950’s West Texas as a rancher refuses government assistance during a drought. Lucas Bessire, whose family farmed through five generations in Ulysses, Kansas, offers a revelatory meditation on reckoning with environmental change and one’s personal and familial responsibility in Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains. Nicholas Souter’s The Water Thief anticipates a time in the not-so-distant future when water is a contraband commodity. Poet and philosopher Anne Carson, with what has been called her “inscrutable brilliance,” creates a tribute and anthropology of water in her allusive collection Plainwater.
It all starts now, with book leaders Pat Tryer (West Texas A&M), Hannes Zacharias (KU), and Jarrett Kaufman (Oklahoma State – Panhandle) and contributors from across our High Plains listening area! Remember to check out Radio Readers at HPPR.org and on Facebook. Mark Sunday, May 5, from 1-3pm, for Radio Readers Live on-air discussion of the Spring 2024 Read: “Water, Water, Neverwhere.”
For High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda, from Dodge City, Kansas.
Will someone bring me some water?
Resources
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/understanding-droughts/
https://www.doi.gov/priorities/addressing-the-drought-crisis
https://drought.unl.edu/Education/DroughtforKids/DroughtEffects.aspx
https://www.drought.gov/tribal
