I'm reaching the saturation point with the news these days. It seems everywhere I look there is uprising, uproar, upset, and "up yours."

The world, I say, is burning.

In Texas that is literally true. Lately we've been in the news, ourselves, for reasons other than our deplorable educational status and the shenanigans of the electorate. We're in flames. One piece I saw described Texas as burning "from border to border." While not literally true from the vantage point of Amarillo every single day, it is true enough to invite our attention.

In 2005, when Mayor Debra McCartt was elected to her first term, her opponent, former Mayor Jerry Hodge, made water a central theme of his candidacy. In the years since that election the issue of water in this area has grown in its importance as a political matter and as a newsworthy item for local media. This is not an endorsement for an election long since lost, but I do endorse the issue as a matter worthy of our consideration in the coming mayoral election.

All who have resided in the Panhandle for more than two years knows that this land is "temperate" in its climate but "semi-arid" in its precipitation. According to the National Climatic Data Center we average slightly less than 20 inches of rain a year, most coming between April and September. We average less than 16 inches of snow annually.

So we pump our water. We pump it from a huge aquifer, an underground ocean created over eons by surface moisture which soaked through the porous stone into subterranean cavities. We pump water pretty much the same way we pump oil.

And, in both cases, we face an inescapable dilemma: We are withdrawing these mineral riches at a pace that vastly exceeds that of their creation and deposit.

All earth water essentially comes from the oceans. Through evaporation, the water is purified of its salt, and through surface winds this evaporated water travels over, and perhaps falls as rain or snow upon. At that point we start the stopwatch for how much gets to where we can take advantage of it. Equilibrium is the maximum use rate we can pursue without eventually running out of either water or oil, and it seems that in spite of our best efforts so far we are doing a miserable job of either conserving or restoring either one.

My wife and I made a trip to Friona a week or so back - our first, I might add - and were struck by two remarkable phenomena. The first was that the people who attended the writing workshop we presented were serious about their writing and that they were sophisticated, gentle, generous and irresistibly kind. The second phenomenon was the dust bowl we drove through there and back.

We couldn't see structures or machinery on the horizon. The ring of brown haze cut the visible horizon almost in half. It's hard not to "get it" - we're heading for trouble.

We've had our share of wide-area fires hereabouts over the past few years. Some have claimed the lives of those who fought them as well as those who could not escape them, and we grieve at the loss of those souls. But we are still tone deaf to the greater implication - that the drier we get the worse a fire hazard we face, a hazard that requires ... more water.

Some of the people who talk to me have begun wondering when the city was going to impose water rationing or an outright ban on exterior watering until we gain some relief from the weather. But it seems to me that as a region, it's time to start thinking more like some of the characters in the "Dune" novels.

And it would be a gift to ourselves if we began this shift in thinking toward "conserve, return, replenish" as a matter of personal choice. No matter how fast we murder each other, no matter how many of us die how fast, we're going to run out of oil one day relatively soon. There is little we can do about returning or replenishing there.

But water is different. All three methods are available to us. And we will either adopt this stance voluntarily, the sooner the better as I see it, or we will have it imposed upon us by official force when the need for it is undeniably in the public interest.

With the array of candidates contending for mayor in the coming election, I would like to hear all of them quizzed in depth about their views and intentions on this issue, with diligent follow up about how they'll do it.

I would like to consider their responses before I vote.

Greg Sagan is an Amarillo business consultant and freelance writer.