Last week I had the privilege of attending a seminar on the Global Water Crisis in San Francisco that was being put on by a non profit organization called Spark. There were two panelists that have been water rights activists for many years. They were Maude Barlow author of Blue Gold and Blue Covenant, and Susana De Anda of the Community Water Center in the Central Valley of California. They were both very interesting speakers and coming from such different levels of work. Maude Barlow's work focuses primarily on the Global Crisis, where as Susana De Anda's Work is more localized, in helping individual people in her area of America.
I had an economics professor in college who was convinced that the next major war would be fought over water, not oil. If it hadn't been for les imbeciles de regime cowboy, aka the Bush administration, he probably would have been correct. I believe that our food and water supply are the most important thing for us to protect at this time in history, and we are doing the exact opposite. We are centralizing our food and water supply instead of diversifying. If you want to protect your money, you don't invest it all in one place, you diversify. So why can't we understand this, with our most precious resources? In fact, a major reason for the spike in wheat and rice prices this year is because some of the major rice producers in the world are starting to realize the need to be independent. India for example is clamping down on rice exports, and as one of the worlds biggest exporters, it is bound to hurt our pockets and dramatically cuts supply. Some areas such as Australia are already facing major issues due to shortages of water. Third world countries feel it much deeper as they do not have the money and technology to filter the water that the first world has polluted. The levels of nitrites, perchlorate, and many other chemicals are off the charts in many parts of the United States. Unfortunately this water looks crystal clear and safe to drink, and when it is boiled many of these contaminants increase in concentration, particularly nitrites. Also of concern is the amount of medication, sedatives, birth control, anti psychotics that cannot be filtered out of water when it is recycled and which seep back into ground water. Many areas of the United States have undrinkable groundwater due to these pollution and contaminants. We will run out of clean water, if there is an area that I am pro technology, it is in trying to figure out how to solve this problem. The earth has an innate ability to heal itself, just as the body does, but it cannot heal itself if we keep thrashing it. Your body cannot mend a broken bone if you keep having someone hit it with a bat.
Our problem is our wasteful lifestyles. At the seminar a woman raised her hand and asked when we are going to realize that we need population control, in other words we need to stop over populating the earth. Overpopulation is not the problem, as Susana De Anda pointed out a family of 7 to 10 in rural Mexico probably produce less waste than a family of 2 in America. It is our lifestyles that lead to pollution, the draining of our resources by industrialization. Don't get me wrong, technology and industrialization have brought us many great things in America, our lives would not be the same without them. However, there is a line, bottled water is one of them. Coke and Pepsi both take water directly from the ground and bottle it. There is no filtering in most cases. You are paying for ground water, sometimes from your local area, and sometimes your local area supply might be safer. These companies are subject to sometimes monthly, often yearly inspections. In a city like New York, the tap water is tested multiple times daily. This use of fresh water in industry is also a major drain on water supply. In some areas there area actually pieces of legislation that state that in an emergency, water must be diverted for drinking and agriculture first before industry, but this does not exist in all or even most areas of our country.
The problem is not hopeless, but the time to act is now. If we run out of drinking water, we die. That is not a scare tactic, that is reality. And it is not a scare tactic to say that at the rate we are going it is inevitable. Conservation of water at a personal level is important for all of us, but it is equally, if not more important for our government to step in and regulate. We need to realize as a culture that water is not as renewable as we think.
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” Cree Indian Proverb
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