The Limits to Growth ...

Some of the last homes currently being built in Oakley, Utah. The town has cut off new development because it doesn’t have enough water to go around.Credit...Lindsay D’Addato for The New York Times

In A Prescient Precursor, BRT discussed how forward thinking MIT's 1972 Limits to Growth truly was in terms of describing how business as usual was plundering earth's resources at an alarming rate. Well, a first salvo in proving this prediction to be true revolves around a small town known as Oakley, Utah thanks, in part, to global warming.

OAKLEY, Utah — The mountain spring that pioneers used to water their hayfields and now fills people’s taps flowed reliably into the old cowboy town of Oakley for decades. So when it dwindled to a trickle in this year’s scorching drought, officials took drastic action to preserve their water: They stopped building.

A harbinger of things to come?

So this spring, Oakley, about an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, imposed a construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want of water in a new era of megadroughts. But it could be a harbinger of things to come in a hotter, drier West.

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller