A recent Guardian piece tells the reader that "the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water in cities around the world will double by 2050" amid warnings of an imminent water crisis that is likely to 'spiral out of control.'" More rolling pearl harbors! It got me thinking about water. And life.
I noticed that water stocks at the aptly named America Water Works are up at $146.59. Aptly named because we'll be crying soon. Even our tears will need recovering. Keep a vial handy. We're already shorting it, as we run short of water. Good chance to get filfy rich as we collectively turn into raisins in the sun.
I've been doing a lot of reading about water lately. I've been drinking a lot of water. Bottled water. My son has a steady second income from cashing in the bottle at the recyclers. Then I think of the island of plastic the size of Texas they say is out there lurking like a horror movie prop, like a sequel to The Blob that absorbs all of us in the end, even the Tiananmen tanks they call in to stop it all. I think of the particles of plastic that are said to be in every living thing on the planet. Plastic comes from crude oil. Tell me the dinosaurs aren't having the last laugh.
But I was on about water.
Last year MIT Tech Review published The Water Issue (92 pages). It's full of great grizzlemibbles and gollywobbles about our global plight re:water. Floods, Droughts, Groundwater, Potability, Irrigation, Sanitation, Recycling. Oy. In the introduction to the special edition, Matt Honan, the E-i-C tells us, responding to news and social media footage of "the worst flooding in a century" in Vancouver in November 2021:
Watching that video of a highway covered in brown, muddy water, it occurred to me that I was viewing a sad microcosm of the premise of this issue: The way very many of us will initially experience climate change will be through water""either too much of it or not enough. We will flood. Or burn. Or both.
Goddamn it all. To forestall such damnation, we double-tapped God in the back of the head. Now we're free to operate without interference from the high horse element.
"California Dry" by Mark Arax, the opening article in the issue, is a terrific piece of environmental writing. It describes, often in lyrical detail, the vast historical disruptions to the land of floods and droughts. First things first:
As genocides go, the wiping clean of California's indigenous culture was protracted, playing out in three acts: Spanish mission, Mexican occupation, American settlement.
Then the 49ers came and the eventual sprawl and the 444-mile aqueduct that was at the center of private dick Jake Gittes and the Chinatown Syndrome, and later the German-born would-be president Arnold Scwarzenegger motorcycling down the aqueduct as The Terminator looking for John Connor who looks like Julian Assange who looks like he could use a glass of water. I'll be back. But the water won't be. Hasta la vista, baby.
In "California Dry," Arax goes to visit a native American farmer he knows who has a more holistic approach to understanding the nature of climate change and its effects on the land and the omens accruing thereof. The cycles of nature that we ignore at our peril. The farmer Mas, explains what happened to the raisins this harvest, what went wrong, in local visionary language:
He is talking about nature's cycle. Drought helped kill the trees in the forest. Desiccated by thirst, they were whittled out by bark beetles. Lightning lit that kindling. Kindling became smoke and ash. Smoke and ash occluded the sky. This slowed the ripening of grapes on the vine. This slowed the baking of grapes into raisins.
Floods, droughts, and waterworks. And boo-fuckin-hoo from the Elites.
The Water Issue has reports from around the globe about how folks are harnessing their resources, coming together to ward off disaster, implement innovations, stave off disaster, putting the time in, thinking about the issues at hand. While other people in other parts of the globe, especially Lefties, spend their time fuckin around, laughin till they cry when they should be just crying.
While The Special Issue gives us the lowdown on endless floods and droughts ahead, and what folks are doing about it, where they can, it also strikes cautionary notes about situations we may have overlooked on the water pearl harbor front, such as groundwater disasters popping up everywhere. In "The Creeping Menace: Rising Groundwater," Kendar Pierre-Louis talks about how "rising sea levels due to climate change are pushing up groundwater, often miles away from the coast. The result is widespread flooding--a largely unseen and ignored crisis that is rapidly getting worse."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
