Best. Article. Ever. on the Western states water crisis.

Man, I do love me some good Salon writing. Much as James Howard Kunstler's amazing book The Long Emergency ( a must-read for any Doom readers!) predicted, the unsustainable idiocy of building sprawling, lawned suburbs in the freaking desert has led to trouble. Of course, as we all know, the residents of Nevada, Arizona, etc. are looking north to the Great Lakes, rationalizing that if oil can be piped from Alaska, they can have golf courses in Scottsdale. Fail.
This article takes the whole bloody fiasco to the only rational answer- these people have to move back into the emptied cities of the industrial north, where the effing water is.

"Bill Richardson, governor of arid New Mexico, had his region's plight in mind when he told the Las Vegas Sun that Northern states need to start sharing their water: "I want a national water policy. We need a dialogue between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology, water delivery and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water." (emphasis mine)

Sun Belters, there's a man in Detroit with the answer to your water problems. "They can have all the water they want," says Hugh McDiarmid Jr. of the Michigan Environmental Council. "All they have to do is move here." There's plenty of room. Some Detroit neighborhoods are so bereft of houses that pheasants hide in the vacant lots. And the cost of living is unbeatable. Earlier this year, an auctioneer was trying to unload a bungalow for $18,000. When no one would bid, he reminded his audience, "You get the land under the house, too."

OK, so Detroit's a tough place to find a job. How about Cleveland? It's half the size it used to be, which means 500,000 people are driving on freeways built for a million. Commuting is a breeze. Syracuse would love to have you, too. They've lost a higher proportion of young people than any other city in the U.S., perhaps because they engineered their own demise, being the headquarters of Carrier Air Conditioning, the appliance that made the Sun Belt possible."

Read this article, please- funny, concise, and dead on point. We can't keep doing this anymore.

Link to fantastic article.