The next thing to fight for: water
It is ironic to imagine that humans would go to war for water, considering that 2/3 of Earth’s surface is covered by ocean water. It has long been dreamed by humans to “recover” land from ocean, and it was actually done at Hong Kong and Japan. Yet there are huge number of people who do not have access to clean water for drinking and agriculture, especially in countries where population density is very high while public infrastructure is poorly developed, such as rural India, rural China, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and most of the African countries.
Forget about crude oil, that’s for the middle class and riches who have money to buy goods and drive cars. Water is the most basic need, second only to fresh air, for the poors and very poors, and there’re lots of them in the Third World! Forget about liberty, democracy, security, health, pollution; water is about life, and there is no substitute for it.
Humans have been taking water for granted, just like they’ve been doing for other natural resources, such as forest, metal, oil, and so on. We’ve been abusing the natural network of fresh water supply without thinking that one day we might run out of water, or that the people at the next country might not get as much fresh water as they used to get. We build dam, irrigation, heavy industry, while pourring toxic elements into the river and ocean, navigate heavily on them, killing most of the fish species in those rivers, and by consequence, killing the whole ecosystem around those rivers.
If you do not believe that we may one day go to war for water, consider this… Canada and United States have the luxury of having two oceans at both sides of the country, and not having to share much rivers with the neighboring country, yet we’re starting to see friction between the Canadians and Americans over the Great Lake lately, and there is a mounting fear among the South America countries (especially Brazil) that US will attempt to draw water supply from there rivers.
Now think about the highly populous Asian countries who live mostly on agriculture and share many of their rivers with neighbor countries, as well as the North Africa countries, it’s just too easy to blame the neighbor country for water scarcity or water pollution. So far most of the international laws only deal with land ownership, by mean of border line, which is pretty easy to protect but yet people still dispute over that constantly. Imagine how difficult it is to deal with water supply ownership where you can’t really hold on the water or own the river, because ultimately you have to let the water flow to the next guy down the river.
It might be apocalystic to think that human race has grown over the level that our planet can sustain, I’m sure somebody must have said that long time ago while world population was just a fraction of what we have today, and yet human race have managed to grow more populous while still manage to have better life quality than half century ago, in overall.
My feeling is that, human race have manage to grow larger, by retaining more babies alive while living older, than their level of productivity can feed them. In other words, the more populous we are, the more foods and water we need, but we haven’t been able to produce (or recycle) as much as we need, globally. We need better science and technology that can recycle or clean our water more efficiently, grow crop and rice faster, in order to sustain the world population. And before that happens, those who do not have “their due water” will fight as hard as they must, to stay alive.
Today we go to war for oil (certainly not for democracy as Bush is claiming, and even if was for democracy, it wasn’t for the Middle-East people’s democracy anyway), but tomorrow we will go to war for water, and eventually for fresh air, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, we’re just human…
Well maybe there’s a temporary solution: if we could manage to move some ice out of Arctica and Antarctica to meld them in our rivers, maybe it would help increasing the rivers’ level and add some freshness to them, but the cost would be prohibitive with our current technology and infrastructure. Bottom line: better science and technology is our only hope!