Last week I read a NPR online news article about the sorry state of the Colorado River.

Apparently this guy decided to traverse it from beginning to end, down one of the most prominent waterways in the United States. His adventure, abruptly ended with him in a canoe stuck in mud 145 kilometres short of the Sea of Cortez. The mighty Colorado simply dried up or mudded up. This isn't the kind of joke I belly laugh to.

For 6 million years the river flowed freely from the snow caps of Colorado to the gulf. Along its route the silt laden river provided sustenance for all manner of species and habitats. Where it emptied into was considered, by people who quote these things, to be one of the most diverse seas on earth. So what happened? Rivers do not go dry out without a cause.

We do not have to look across the Pacific to find our own Colorado's. A year ago the Murray Darling Basin was in similar direness, a river on its knees. The long drought hit hard and big cuts in water usage were urgently required to save it. This was grim news for the farms and towns whose livelihoods depended on the river. Then the floods came and I remember driving through Horsham, Victoria one day and the next it was waylaid under four feet of water. Today the river is flowing, but despite the massive dump of cyclonic rain from Queensland the Basin is still in trouble.

Continuing with the old ways of irrigation and other infrastructures isn't helping. As the Basin produces over one third of Australlia's food supply, risk losing it isn't an option. So we have no choice really, but to be smarter with more sustainable solutions to implement. Imagine if the river went belly up how much everyone and everything it provided for would suffer.

We can't be blithe about the environment for without a healthy sustainable environment we couldn't live there, and now the Gas companies want to drill holes all over these vital agricultural lands the impact on the water table system could be extreme. Isn't it obvious or is it just me that no economic windfall can justify any loss of an indispensible ecosystem like the Basin? Its akin to shooting yourself in the foot, its plainly insane to jeopardise a major food bank and water source.

Well I don't care much for the Colorado river story or for short term money gains. And at the expense of saying so we certainly don't need to repeat the same mistakes here.