A response to the documentary 'Water Pressures'

Yesterday I saw a documentary entitled ‘Water Pressures’. A number of Northwestern University Students from Chicago visited a part of India where water scarcity is an overwhelming problem. The question that arose most often for the students was: how can we help these people? The answer was: we don’t know. The whole theme focused on an extremely anthropocentric interpretation of this issue. The only take home message was to practice austerity in the use of water at home. The desperate and scary message was that due to water shortage we will eventually go to war and it was made clear that three of the countries sharing this dilemma have nuclear capabilities.

The real elephant in the room was not even brought up. – human population. India has a population that its territory cannot sustain. The social-cultural fabric that has brought about this unsustainable condition must be challenged. We cannot treat religion and cultural values anywhere in the world as uncontestable if these are the vehicle of environmental degradation. Human population exponential growth is what is causing this problem worldwide. The treatment and social standing of women is the central issues to face. Plenty of evidence exists that when women are educated and liberated from a male dominated culture populations decline. We should be weary of solutions that involve great migrations of people. The historical invasion and migration into the Americas have amply demonstrated the destruction that follows.

Much was said about the great quantity of fresh water available to us in Chicago because we have Lake Michigan at our front door. This is a terrible interpretation of reality; yes it is a large volume of water, however 90% of this water is remnant from the last glaciation, and only 10% can be used without disrupting the environmental conditions that replenish this water. We have greatly depleted the local aquifers to the point that some communities are going to be out of water in the near future. So, yes we must reduce our consumption and greed. This will not help the people in this part of India.

A couple of students were frustrated because they wanted to do something about the problem but were told that they were there to learn not to act. I must admit that I felt the same frustration, the only lesson this community had to share was that of having to live with this water scarcity and that community efforts required collaboration. As wonderful and sincere this message is; it is not going to resolve their dilemma. My question to this community and its leaders is: what is being done to prevent further desertification and improve the natural habitat of this region towards a healthy ecosystem? By simply being frugal will only lengthen the process of decline not solve it. For example: why is there not an intensive replenishing of the native vegetation of the area? It can be started with just a little patch and then expand according to results. Can some land be set aside for restoration? Possibly a rotation program can be established for grazing. By having more vegetation more water can be captured by the plants and kept in the ground. It was clear by some footage that rivulets of water formed on the parched earth, why is this liquid not recovered and used to nourish plants? There are forms of low tech innovations for collecting water through the process of condensation, it seems this is one of the conditions were these systems can be introduced. We are all in this together, we live on a closed-loop planet, the answer is not to invade and routinely consume other biomes. The answer lies in meeting the carrying capacity of this planet for every living being including non-human species. That will mean controlling our own species population growth. The best analogy I have come across for this is how bacteria grow in petri dishes. They grow in all directions until the sugar content is depleted, right to the very edges of the dish and then begin the process of death. Are we humans those bacteria that will not stop unbridled consumption until we are ourselves dead?