The first and last resource
Potable water may very well be the oil of the 21st century.
Unlike oil, however, which is finite (when the last drop is refined, it will be gone forever) water is renewable and ever abundant — if you have the good fortune to live in the first world. We shower with little thought about the clean, sluicing water spilling over us. We turn on the tap and out comes water we can instantly drink. We water vast golf courses, wash our cars, sprinkle our lawns, and watch it run across the saturated sidewalks into the gutters. Clean, sanitary water, free of waterborne microbes that can cause life threatening illness.
Water is life. An individual can live some 40 days without food and only five days without water. It is estimated that every person needs at least 50 litres of water a day. Most of us drink two or three litres, the equivalent of a toilet flush, the rest is used for cooking and bathing. Americans consume an estimated 500 litres, more than any other people on earth. Europeans use half that.
For those who rise every day with the same sun, but live in the third world, access to clean water is a completely different matter.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, reporter Michael Specter wrote extensively about the global crisis involving potable water. He stated that more than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. "Half of the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease. In the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than have been killed in all armed conflicts since the Second World War." Thirty percent of all schools in the third world have no water of any kind.
Every morning, Specter writes, long before the sun touches the horizon, the people of the Kesum Purbahari slum in New Delhi walk, buckets in hand, to a tanker stop and wait for the water truck to arrive. The city pipes emit a brown liquid that is known to kill people, and so is used for laundry and bathing children but never for drinking. When the tanker finally arrives, most carry away about 100 litres in their buckets. Even those in more affluent areas of New Delhi have access to drinking water only three to four hours each day and what comes out of their spigots is suspect at best.
The contrasts to the first world are stunning, the realization of how desperately most of the world lives can be haunting if not paralyzing. The shortage of drinkable water in Kesum Purbahari and across India may be prescient as well.
Specter points out that the earth's population has increased exponentially in the last two hundred years, and more than tripled in the 20th century alone; water use grew six fold in the same time period. Demographers predict that in the next 50 years the population will grow again by another 50 percent. By 2050 there will be at least nine billion people on the planet, most living in developing countries. India, for example, has 20 percent of the world's population but only four percent of the world's water. China has less water than Canada and forty times more people and, according to Specter, China's wells are "draining aquifers far faster than they can be replenished." In India, there were two million wells 30 years ago; today there are over 20 million. As the water tables drop, people have no choice but to dig deeper, risking contaminating the wells with saltwater and arsenic.
The pressure on resources will be staggering and access to drinkable water for the earth's inhabitants will be increasingly critical. Factor in global warming and possible massive droughts, along with rising sea levels, and global civil unrest and destabilizing population migrations loom large.
The United Nations, has designated 2005-2015 as the decade of "Water for Life." But the U.N.'s hope that only 30 to 70 million people will die in the next 15 years (more than two million per year) is slim to none given the level of commitment by member nations. Specter quotes Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, who asks the question: "How can any government that cares for its people let them die of something so simple as lack of clean water? But they do, in numbers that are staggering. This problem is so fundamental and so widespread, yet it's not like curing AIDS or eradicating malaria. It is not scientifically challenging. It's just a matter of whether we care about the most vulnerable people on our planet."
Gleick also makes the point that there is not a water shortage globally, per se. What countries are unable or unwilling to do is capture, conserve and equably distribute this resource. What is required is worldwide acknowledgment of the problem and the will of nations to act. And therein is the rub. In the end, this isn't just about the most vulnerable. It is about all of us.
