WATER IS LIFE

Like energy, it needs attention and money

           

You cannot live without water for more than three days. By the third day, you will be willing to pay anything to get it. If you survive, then you will understand that “wealth” starts with reliable access to water.

Most of Europe (including the UK) is suffering from severe drought this year. There are now more than a hundred villages in France that need drinking water trucked in from elsewhere. And most of Europe has been a water rich part of the world for as long as records have been kept.

Now it is haunted by the sort of water poverty that has been deepening in the Southwestern US for more than twenty years. This will be the second time people in the southwest (and Southern Californians) have faced re-desertification in the past eight hundred years.

The first American desert pioneers that we know of, the “Hohokam”, also built a civilization based on irrigation and urban development. “Hohokam” wasn’t their real name. That’s just the Pima Indian term for “all used up”, or “those who are gone”.

You may believe that civilization in Europe and the western US will be more adaptable than those of the indigenous people in the New World. But when I was in Iraq during the American phase of that region’s wars, I was repeatedly struck by the Biblical place names across the dusty desert. Empires in Babylon and Nineveh were watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was the “Fertile Crescent”, and one of the origins of civilization. That is not obvious now.