Friday, August 24, 2018

The Water Crises Aren't Coming-They're Here

Paper water is water the government grants certain farmers who are drawing water from a river or a watershed in, say, California.

Practically paper water is mostly notional water, conceptual water, wish water, since over the years California has awarded many times as much paper water as there is actual water-which, to distinguish it, is quasi-legally called wet water.

Paper water thus amounts to a type of hypothetical currency, backed by the Bank of Nowhere, Representing Nothing since 1960, when modern water troubles arrived in America and especially in California, where the wildly expanding citizenry required new state and federally managed water systems run by Watercrats.

There are two kinds of numbers, I believe, big ones and little ones, but here are some big ones by way of context: According to the World Health Organization, among the two billion people who have no drinking water provided to them, 844 million travel more than thirty minutes to a river or a tap, where they sometimes receive water contaminated by human excrement.

"An aquifer is not sustainable if humans pump it faster than nature charges it. The people in the Central Valley who have seen their wells go dry are experiencing peak nonrenewable water. There is still water there, but the groundwater level has dropped, and only the farms can afford to dig the deeper well. You could find other water for these people-you could hook them up to a municipal system that's maybe hooked up to a river. No one's dying of thirst. But we cobble together fixes when we run out. So you go back to this question: Are we running out of water? Yes, sort of, with nonrenewable resources, and yes, sort of, with renewable resources."

In 2014, in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society, he published a paper called "Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria." He described the area's water conflicts, which are ancient-the first, according to the Water Conflict Chronology, appears to have occurred forty-five hundred years ago when a king named Urlama diverted water through canals to deprive an enemy of it.

"But they had an influence. And after the civil war started, there were massive and unrelenting attacks by pretty much all the parties on civilians and infrastructure, including, explicitly, water resources. Attacks on the water-treatment plants in Aleppo, attacks in Iraq on local water systems-use of water as a weapon. ISIS took over dams on the Tigris and Euphrates and released water on downstream villages to prevent attacks on their bases."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22627850/global-water-crisis/ 

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