If you watch the news you will have seen the pictures of the vanishing Colorado River. It is especially evident in both aerial and ground photos of the low water levels behind the big dams. Long boat ramps are completely cut off from the water. Human remains are appearing. The hydroelectric plants that were supposed to provide sustainable, non-polluting electric power are approaching dead pool, meaning not enough water above them to turn their turbines. But almost scarier is the news that accompanies these pictures. The governors of the states that depend on the Colorado to irrigate their crops have failed to arrive at a new agreement on how to divide up the diminishing supply of water.

There is other news about low water levels. The Rhine and the Danube are so low that shipping has ground to a halt. Some media outlets are reporting on how this is affecting the auto, steel, and coal industries, but I have seen more stories about inconvenienced American tourists being bused around by their cruise companies and about the appearance of sunken Nazi warships and medieval rock inscriptions. I have not seen stories connecting the European drought with the American drought.

Some outlets have reported historic low levels in the Yangtze and Mekong Rivers, but it seems that the farther the drought is from New York and Los Angeles, and the fewer white people are affected, the less coverage the catastrophe gets. The stories that do get publicized tend to question the dam-building practices of the People's Republic of China. I have seen nothing that compares them with the questionable legacy of our own Bureau of Reclamation's dams. And, again, I guess there are stories connecting the drought in east Asia with the drought in the American southwest, but I haven't seen them.

Worse is the invisible loss of water. This drought has been going on for years. How have the western states continued farming, golf courses, and water parks? By drawing on underground aquifers, which don't get recharged by a snowy winter or a rainy summer. They are a treasure that won't be replaced. Deep wells are going dry all over the west already.

Then, this morning, public radio had a story about Republican governors opposing land conservation efforts. The Nebraska governor had language about excluding humans from our land. And he claimed that voluntary programs interfere with property rights. For most of the last hundred years, conservation has been an uncontroversial goal of both parties. Maybe "piety" is a better word than "goal" because of the ratio of lip service to actual action, but at least it was non-partisan and uncontroversial. Now? No more.

In the early 20th century, conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt understood our relationship to water, land, and forests as a business proposition: imagine nature as capital and then manage it so that it keeps on yielding profit in the form of lumber and crops. For the last few decades, though, actual businesses have stopped managing actual capital for long-term yield and begun looting their own properties for immediate gain. Like vampire Aesops they ask: "Why not cut up and kill the goose? Those golden eggs are coming from somewhere!"

Apply that logic to the natural world and you get:

• unrestricted burning of fossil fuels (and note that word "fossil" meaning produced in another geological era
• failure to manage our dwindling water supplies
• genetically-modified seed crops that allow (actually require) the massive application of herbicides and insecticides
• clear cutting our surviving forests

The results are not hard to predict and we see them all around. They include soil erosion, vanishing fresh water from both reservoirs and aquifers, massive die-offs of bees and other insect pollinators of our foods, killer heat waves, rising sea levels that poison farmland, and annual "500-year" and "1000-year" storms. Put this together with politicians who insist that it is God's will that "Man" (by which they mean capitalism) should use the bounty of creation and the situation becomes apocalyptic. Literally.