WMOD00398

• Project Name: Project Skywater
• Title: Precipitation Management and the Environment - An Overview of the Skywater IX Conference
• Date: 9/1/1977
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

rates at least an order of magnitude greater than cloud seeding can reasonably be expected ever to
attain, has indicated concern over silver as an environmental pollutant. Finally, the seeding-agents
group has recommended an effort at public education to allay the fears aroused by past
speculation.
A further task of evaluation that needs to be accomplished is to scope some of the remaining
speculations. If dry ice contaminated with amides might be harmful, what is the chance that one
might find dry ice contaminated with amides? What process of physical concentration might be
envisaged that could elevate the silver concentration significantly above background? What is
known about potentiation of other heavy metals by silver, in what sorts of processes, and with .i
what sorts of results, that might be looked for in areas of past heavy industrial contamination of
silver? Lacking such information, the fruits of speculation are unripe and are likely to be thought
sour.
With this changed perspective, the role of Skywater is likely to turn mainly toward
coordination with agencies concerned with the higher silver levels resulting from industrial and
agricultural contamination, accompanied by monitoring directed principally at identification of
cloud-seeding silver in precipitation itself rather than in parts of the environment where the
background is very much higher and more variable.
The second level of conclusions and recommendations is that of concerns for indirect effects
coming about as a consequence of development, with increased population, increased industry,
increased cropland, etc.
There has as yet been no identification or analysis of processes. The connection seems perhaps
to have been made backward rather than forward, from deep and widespread concern about the
issue of development toward any object that swims into the field of sensitivity created by that
concern, whether the connection is explicitly described or only assumed. The existence of these
concerns, their depth, and their pervasiveness must be acknowledged. We cannot afford to ignore
them. We must be responsive and responsible in our reaction to them. But how?
Population, industry, agriculture, and ranching, as well as other environmental changes in the
United States have a history of great dynamicism, of great sweeps of change that have run their
course or been obliterated by new and different sweeps. While the sweeping changes have been
forced to accommodate themselves in some measure to the realities of climate, there is little
indication that climate has played an appreciable role in initiating these changes, or that it will do
so in the foreseeable future. It is water demand, not water availability, that has set the tempo for
water development.
Skywater will heed the message. Plainly, many people are deeply concerned over what
development (in its many manifestations) is doing to the quality of life. If there were not
heightened awareness of the problem, and heightened concern for the future, the issue would
scarcely have arisen at the conference. And somewhere in this broad land there must be those
who are striving to understand better what makes development tick and how it may
be controlled. It behooves us to discover who these people are, to get in touch with them, and to ~
learn enough about their work to discover whether or not the kind of input that precipitation
management might make is or might be important to the processes they are studying. After all, a
managed decrease in precipitation is a reasonable possibility; and if the effect of a managed water
shortage on development were calculable and significant, this might become a tool for

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