Waging War Over Water, Or Whatever

MANY YEARS AGO, in the midst of what must surely have been an engrossing meeting of intellects, a good friend of mine stated his opinion that future wars would be, for the most part, fought over water. This meshed with what one of my professors in graduate school had once said, that all wars ever fought, past, present, and future, are fought over mineral resoures, of which water is one, and land and all that lies beneath it, another. Lebensraum! I can recall, in the midst of our intellectual discourse,trying to think of wars past, any wars present, which were demonstrably fought fought over something, anything else. I quickly realized that all specualtion concerning motives for the bahavior of large numbers of human beings is vague at best, and becomes bogged down in disparity of opinion, and interpretation of facts. Its just damned hard to say. History, as they say, is one damned thing after another. Regarding the precise causes of wars, as they say, the jury is, mazingly, still out. We're still studying the matter. All wars are different, that much we know. Human natuer is...complex? I also recall that at the time I was somewhat skeptical of my friend's wars over water theory, and though I could see his central point, his overall argument seemd a bit hyperbolic to me, melodramatic, overstated. Now, all these years later, I'm not so sure. In fact, it now begins to seem as if my fiend's predction was spot on, as we like to say, almost prophetic, and that the signs of it are even now among us, and beginning to be apparent. I'm pretty sure that my friend made his prediction a bit before climate change became the universally agreed upon and blatantly obvious reality that it is now, but, maybe not. I can't recall for sure. Indisputably, the world has become and is increasingly hotter and drier. The water wars have begun. A documentary on educationl television provided an overview of the world's growing water problem; too little fresh water to be divided up among too many people. Many of the mega huge cities in India ad throughout Asias now regularly maintain less thana thrity day supply of water, not by choice, in their urban water systems. That is belowe mergency level. All Americasn knwo about the Colorado River, and how it has been and isbeing drained to a dry gulch by the millions of people who rely on it all teh way to El A. Obtaining enough water to fuel a growing agriculture industry to feed a grwoing world population is increasingly difficult and insufficient. The great states of Florida and Gerogia in the land of plenty have waged a decades long legal battle over water which both can use but both claim entirely to own. The two feuding confederate states have reached a tenuous, fragile arrangement, which a good drought could disrupt in a few short weeks. We humans have treated water as we have treated air for far, far too long; as if it were a renewable resource which is readily available to us in unlimited supply. Both, we are belatedly beginning to learn, are neither. We have polluted almost beyond reclaimation nearly every source of fresh water in the world, using lakes, oceans, and rivers as trash dumps. Now, at long last, we are starting to pay the price for our centuries of wasteful folly. I have long favored desalination, even though evidently it costs a billion dollars to build a desalination facility that provides enough fresh water for three hundred thousand people. That would be about thirty billion to adequately supply Los Angeles. You have to pay the piper, as they say, and sometimes the price is high.