I've liked that term and linked its source before.

The metahistory that I think I see lurking in the foundations here is a tricky one, and a lot of effort will be required to bring it to light. We will have to unlearn assumptions about scarcity. At the scale of living things, making more copies of living things may be thermodynamically incredibly cheap. At the scale of post-Fordist mass production, making more material wealth may be much cheaper than we tend to assume. We will have to root out our presumptions about efficiency and optimality and recognize that many real-world systems whose results we depend upon, from the immune system to the brain to capitalist economics, depend upon inefficient effectiveness (productive non-optimality, wasteful utility).

As noted in earlier posts it may not be only a matter of unlearning assumptions since humans do not have an intuitive grasp of some important physical systems, such as stocks and flows. That's one of the reasons that water policy is difficult. To save water you must waste it.

Odd as it sounds, in some places the smartest way to safeguard the water supply is to let it drain out of the reservoirs and soak into the ground. That's what been discovered in local water shortages in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico – all of which could be microcosms of water shortage issues looming throughout the Western U.S.

Not just the US of course, this is a world wide issue.

In the case of the City of Hays, the trouble starts 20 miles upstream at the Cedar Bluff Reservoir. Because of changes in farming practices, the reservoir gets only half the inflowing water it did when built in 1949. It now loses 75 percent of its inflowing water to evaporation. As a result, water losses most years now equal or exceed inflows. Reservoir releases were cut in 1979.

"You get to the point where you can't afford to lose that much water," said Brikowski, "and your only other alternative is to store it underground."

But how do you do that? In the case of Hays, nature had already provided for underground storage in the form of the Smoky Hill River aquifer. The aquifer has provided half the city's water supply for decades. Since the building of the Cedar Bluff reservoir, however, stream flow on top of it has dropped by 50 percent. That stream water recharged the wells, which, in turn, kept alive the town of Hays, Brikowski explains.

At the behest of the City of Hays, Brikowski and Anderson created a detailed three-dimensional model of the sandy, gravelly ("alluvial") ground beneath the Smokey Hill River. Anderson analyzed the water balance of the reservoir. Next they simulated what had happened to the dropping water table, how much groundwater the aquifer could store, and how long a drought it could endure.

"It's a clear case that the shut off of water (by the reservoir) limited how much water Hays could pump," said Brikowski. It also showed that by releasing water from that same reservoir they could kill two birds with one stone: recharge the aquifer and reduce the evaporation loss rate. According to Brikowski, "It was pretty hard to argue with the conclusion."

They also found that by releasing reservoir water to recharge the Smoky Hill River aquifer, users could survive even the worst recorded drought with full production from municipal wells.

Huge amounts have been spent to do just the opposite, to line streams and canals with concrete to prevent "water loss", destroying ecosystems along the route. One of the changes in farming practices has been to "be less wasteful" of water, to seek "more crop per drop" as the politicians mumble. Penny wise and pound foolish again, a failure to step back from the problem far enough to get a useful perspective, consider multiple objectives, secondary effects or cumulative effects.