An Oxfam report published recently predicts that the average cost of major food crops will rise between 120 and 180% by 2030. Oxfam warns of a tightening squeeze on people already struggling with inadequate food supplies. Climate change, with its higher temperatures and prolonged droughts, will cause at least half future price rises, largely because of catastrophic water shortages. We're sleepwalking our way into a chronically thirsty future, apparently oblivious of potential cataclysm. Our blue planet has many gifts to bestow, but none of them approach that of water -- truly our lifeblood.
This is a quiet crisis of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, and rising food prices in the face of rapid population increases. The crisis is upon us because the world's supply of fresh water is finite and always has been. Now there are billions more people than even half a century ago drawing on a fixed "bank account" of fresh water that is shrinking daily, with no relief in sight.
Weathering the Crisis
A tidal wave of books and articles offer prescriptions for weathering the crisis. Many have hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas. Farmers want to pump more water from aquifers and favor more dams. "Build more dams," Western farmers cry, but there is simply no more water to fill them. Nevertheless, systematic improvements on storage and delivery, and especially to the infrastructure behind water supplies, offer considerable promise. Underground reservoirs, lining earth-bottomed canals, and irrigating plants at just their roots with just the right amount of water could help a great deal. One could make farming less thirsty by using drought-resistant, higher-yielding, even genetically modified crops. This is much easier said than done, for significant technological breakthroughs lie a long way in the future.
We talk about desalinization, oblivious to the cost of energy to run plants and to transport the water inland. Then there are those ambitious souls who want to tow icebergs from the Arctic to water starved California, or pipe the abundant waters of the Great Lakes to New Mexico. All these potential solutions bristle with environmental and political problems that require both long- and short-term planning and debate -- and long-term thinking isn't exactly fashionable in a political world ruled by election cycles. Then there's conservation, which requires completely new attitudes toward water in a future world where water in many places may become more expensive than oil.
What the Sumerians Teach Us
There are lessons here from history, from as long ago as 5,000 years ago when Sumerian farmers irrigated their fields in Mesopotamia with water from the Euphrates. Their irrigation works endured for centuries, because they were organized not by anonymous officials, but by individual villages and farmers. Uruk in southern Iraq, now a desolate ruin, was once the "Venice of Mesopotamia." The villages that surrounded and fed Uruk depended on furrow irrigation and long strip fields. The fields formed large blocks laid out in herringbone patterns off both sides of canals. Such farming required local expertise, close cooperation between those who cultivated the fields and those who managed them, perhaps temples. Decisions about water allocation and digging canals could only be made by small communities and by officials who knew local conditions. Water was shared, water was precisely controlled, and water was precious -- a lesson for today.
Sharing and Local Solutions
Even countries like Britain, which usually has abundant rainfall, suffer from the water crisis. The world is warming, raising the specter of prolonged droughts in the United Kingdom. East Anglia, northeast of London, is one of the driest areas, where water pumping has to be sustainable in a future that will be drier and warmer. Add rapid population growth and an estimated 600,000 houses to be built by 2021, and all the ingredients for a water crisis are in place. With the Environment Agency's encouragement, farmers throughout Britain have formed Water Abstractor Groups (WAGs) that share water between members and often self-police their water management. In this way, individual farmers, not just large agricultural combines, have a say in water allocation.
Industrial societies tend to think of water on a large scale, each a patchwork of water authorities, water districts, municipal water companies, and so on. Until recently, most of them operated as largely independent entities, but change is afoot. Water districts in southern Nevada are cooperating with one another, sharing water in times of drought on a reciprocal basis that has enabled them to weather major shortfalls.
The trend is bound to continue, for it works. One is irresistibly reminded of small villages in East Africa, of the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptian villages, which allocated water by discussion and on the basis of mutual need. They sustained themselves for many centuries and so could we. We have much to learn from the hydrologists of long-vanished societies.
Both of these technologies have been advancing at a rapid pace. For industrialized countries, the cost of a desalinated water supply for drinking and personal consumption is more than reasonable.
Within 30 years, it seems reasonable that solar-powered desalination could provide water not only for drinking, but for irrigation as well. This would explode the food supply, allowing places like the Baja to become meaningfull land for farming and grazing.
While the author presents a real problem, we shouldn't pretend that technology isn't moving in the direction of addressing these issues.
Building nuclear power plants on large ships. Remember the Hospital Ship back in the 60's and 70's called the HOPE. Imagine a ship that could almost instantaneously supplying an area hit by a natural disaster with clean water, electricity, and of course medical supplies.
What percentage of the population live within 200 miles of a navigable ocean, sea, or even lake?
Water and electricity could be supplied to arid places like the Middle East, California, Australia, and when needed rushed to an area hit by a natural disaster.
Bringing HOPE!
Because when ever you have water and power there is always hope.
he analyses the situation from colonial times onward, actually from the loss of the commons during elisabeth the 1st onwards though this situation really gets going with the start of empire.
it's very readable , very broad and deep.
here is his website with blogs on recent developments.
http://rajpatel.org/
It seems to me there are many technologies that, if implemented appropriately, might allow us to weather this storm. Many of these technologies are viable, or will be in the near future it seems.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080229102053.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101013124332.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110503161411.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512082949.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100727142415.htm
The list goes on and on. Many other websites out there with even more info too. I wonder if the author himself has an agenda.
Starvation; wars over depleted resources including food and water; untreatable illnesses immune to any and all treatments; radical climate change to which we cannot adapt; and failure to reproduce due to a toxic environment. All of the above resulting in a massive "reduction in population" (RIP): high death rate coupled with low birth rate, causing a population reduction of billions of humans.
Once the smoke clears, those humans still standing (if any) will be in the enviable position to start over to treat nature with the respect she deserves. In our absence, she has millions of years to cleanse herself of our legacy, regenerate, create many new species, and perhaps evolve an improved human model. Or not.
Even though we are somewhere between The Age of Stupid and The Age of Arrogance, surely some will see at the last minute that what is happening to us is the same thing that has happened to other societies that have exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment - extinction.
See for example:
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/humans-will-be-extinct-100-years-fenner
Roy Mankovitz, Director
Montecito Wellness
A research organization
I don't know if you have tried to calculate the steady-state maximum population of people on the earth is. My own estimate is around 200 million. That's a lot of people but it is also about 7 billion people less than there currently are.
I have no doubt that civilization as I know it will collapse before 2100 and most of those 7 billion will die. You have suggested all will. I have no doubt there will be many survivors - maybe 200 million of them. But it will not be a fun time to be alive.
http://www.populationpress.org/essays/essay-pimentel.html
On a philosophical basis, I agree with you. However, I believe we have passed the tipping point where such strategies can have a meaningful outcome. Now, nature is fully in charge, and the outcome is not likely to be pretty. See “Collapse” by Jared Diamond for some examples.
Future generations will point to us, and question why we were so ignorant, so indifferent
to what is happening before our eyes - daily. The media ignores these issues, while pandering
to a small ignorant group of bible thumpers who are nothing more than shills for the corporations,
but they are too ill-informed to know that. The Democrats are terrified of the issue, and the
Republicans make fun of it. How can we stand by and watch this happening?
So part of the solution is to not create any more low income people, right? I mean, if there's plenty of water for people that can afford it, we'll just have to make sure that people can afford it. Simple.
See what I mean? People starve in Africa and Asia not because there isn't enough food, but because they can't AFFORD to buy food. Poverty is the problem- the distribution of wealth.