Brenda Rosser, in her comment today, brought up the importance of water, prompting this posting.
Mark Twain was ahead of this time in writing “Whiskey is for drinking …”, but in Californian open warfare for water seemed to be immanent. The threat of water war is far more pressing today.
Below is a frank statement from Ariel Sharon about the importance of control of water for Israel. Maybe some of you can find a map I once saw on the web that showed how much of the water supply in the region is found in the West Bank. Gaza seems to have less water, so is expendable.
Sharon, Ariel with David Chanoff. 1989. Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon (NY: Simon and Schuster).
166: “While the border disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death. A dry country with a critical water shortage, Israel enjoys only a brief winter of rainy weather. Other than that, the three principal sources of water are the Jordan River, various brooks and streams alone the coastal plain, and large aquifer that runs under the coastal plain and extends into Samaria and Judiah. Before 1967 a third of the entire water supply came from Jordan.”
167: “People generally regard June 5, 1967, as the day the Six-Day War began. That is the official date. But, in reality, the Six Day War started two and a half years earlier, on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan. From then on the Syrian border was tense.
What follows is another article that generalizes the water problem , but also refers back to Israel.Postel, Sandra L. 2006. “For Our Thirsty World, Efficiency or Else; review of Fred Pearce. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water — The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press).” Science, 313 (25 August): pp. 1046-7.
1046: “Irrigation accounts for the lion’s share of the world’s water consumption, 70 percent globally and 90 percent in many Asian countries, where nature doles out long dry seasons. One-fifth of China’s wheat and one-seventh of its corn are produced, in good years, in the coastal province of Shandong, which is last in line to receive the flow of the Yellow River. Farmers have already abandoned millions of acres of cropland in the water-stressed Yellow River basin, and in the summer of 2000 a mini-water war broke out in Shandong as thousands of farmers tried to siphon water slated for cities from a reservoir.”
1046: “As major rivers dwindle to a trickle, farmers and cities alike pump more water from underground. Globally as much as one-tenth of the world’s food may be produced with water drawn from declining aquifers. In India, at least a quarter of the farmers are overtapping aquifers, withdrawing water faster than those underground sources are recharging, and setting the stage for a “colossal anarchy” as more wells and fields are abandoned.”
1046: “Today each Palestinian in the occupied West Bank uses less than a quarter as much water as a neighboring Israeli. Palestinian families around Nablus spend between 20 and 40 percent of their incomes to buy water, while Israeli settlers enjoy green lawns and swimming pools. Pearce calls the 1967 Six Day War “the first modern water war.”
1046: “Before that war, less than a tenth of the Jordan River watershed was within Israel’s borders; by the war’s end, Israel controlled the vast majority of it, including Syria’s Golan Heights and key aquifers under the West Bank.”
This brings to mind the water cycle, Malthus, peak oil and global warming and how to address them.
ReplyDeleteWater for peace? Given that Condi Rice has less than 1 year to make her legacy something other than the worst NSA head and Sec. of State ever - she needs to do something here.
ReplyDeletepgl,
ReplyDeleteRice can't dop anything, at this popint, to "make her legacy." Remake her legacy would be more to the point. She decided her legacy long ago when she decided to shill for corporate America and big oil in particular. It is very unfortunate that as the first woman
and the first black person to have achieved such a monumental level of governmental influence, that she made her pact with the devil in the form of the Bush/Cheney administration. One can never predict how history will reflect on one's performance in such a role, but it does now seem pretty clear that Ms Rice chose wealth and influence ahead of character and honesty.
pgl,
ReplyDeleteRice was NSC head, not NSA head, National Security Council versus National Security Agency. She certainly is not competent enough to run the NSA.
Barkley
One of the reasons Australia is experiencing the unprecedented crisis with the lack of water in the Murray-Darling River basin is because the Governments double-counted groundwater. This resulted in massive over-allocations of water to the irrigators.
ReplyDeleteThe Murray-Darling is Australia's wheat growing region. The nation has taken for granted that we would all enjoy the benefits of a reliable export industry in this commodity. Just like that, it's gone. One quickly unfolding year to disaster with the warning signs there for many decades.
I have family living in this region. They report of an anxious and depressed community with people putting their houses on the market in droves. Loss of jobs and fears of more to come. Rainwater tanks running dry. Household gardens and red river gums hundreds of years old dead or dying.
When/if the rains come again the land is loaded with the built-up toxic residue of pesticides which is expected to create yet another crisis. As a matter of fact some Victorian farmers have seen massive loss of their vegetable crops already from pesticide residues when they turned in desperation to a new innovation. The use of recycled water.
I recall an article in a Boston newspaper many, many years ago about the Quabbin Reservoir to the effect that if it didn't rain again its water supply would be ample for such a long period of time that people in the Boston area should not have cause for concern. Well, a prolonged drought did come about to such an extent that the Quabbin dropped to such low levels that buildings in the flooded area that created the reservoir became visible.
ReplyDeleteFortunately it did rain again and the reservoir filled up again, thank you. But the Quabbin forecast remains disturbing. Forecasts can be troublesome. Now take the Everglades .... We don't have Walt Kelly's Pogo to remind us of who is the enemy.
i wouldn't believe the hype. one of the promises given by yeshua, which came with deed and land, was water wouldn't be a problem any more than anything else. as the song from Gilbert and Sullivan in the popular youtube video about psychopharmacologists puts it, 'i got money in the bank, so tell me what you drink'.
ReplyDeleterecent research by physicist Paul Davies of the Templeton on the Mount Institute, using the dynamics of the time-independent shrodinger equation on curved spacetimes, has conclusively proven that, if you pay him enough, 'water' as a molecule is fine tuned by the Intelligent Designer (Watson that prick) to uniquely fit into plastic bottles that can be shipped to gaza and then recycled. Likely shipping the entire Templeton group to Gaza might get the application up and running in short order, assuming they can get the caps off.