A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 14

in

14th of a series

It’s the same the wide world over,

It’s the poor what cops the blame,

While the rich, he ‘as his pleasure,

Isn’t it a bloomin’ shame?

-Traditional English Tavern Song

“Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires,” reports The New York Times in its major series, “Uncharted Waters”. “But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.”

As we discussed in an earlier post, the total amount of the earth’s water hasn’t changed since the world began. But everything else has – in particular, us . . . and our enormous impact on the rest of creation. Earth’s human population is approaching 8 billion, a fourfold increase since 1900. The World Resources Institute recently released a doomsday scenario that forecasts unsustainable population growth in many of the world’s poorest and most water-stressed regions, places that climate change is already making even drier.

But don’t blame the poor. Jesus told his disciples that they will always be with us, but he was vague on the numbers. Today, after two millennia of growth, modernization, and scientific and technological revolutions, about six billion people (or three quarters of the world’s population) live on less than $10 a day. As we look at images of teeming cities and streaming refugees, of rivers that seem little more than slowly moving sewage systems, of too many people fighting over too few resources, it’s all too easy to think that there are just too many poor people and to blame our problems on their misery.

This is not new. Almost 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift addressed a similar situation in his country. In “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” Dean Swift proposed a solution to the overpopulation and hunger then ravaging Ireland. The poor, he wrote, should sell their excess children to the rich, arguing that a “young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

It is true that every additional person, regardless of wealth, increases the stress on our water and other resources, but rich people are in a league of their own. By one account, they use 12 times more water per household than the poor. It’s not only swimming pools and rolling lawns, it’s the lifestyle, and, in particular, the much richer diet. It takes, for example, 1,799 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. Because the poor don’t eat a lot of steak, they are making a significant, if involuntary, contribution to protecting our water. This is something that zero population groups sometimes forget to tell their big donors – that it is not just people who stress the system, it’s money.

The Yamuna River begins in the Himalayas as a pure blue stream. By the time it reaches New Delhi, “[it] is essentially a running cesspool.” The Yamuna is the world’s 16th most polluted river. Our own Mississippi is number 5. Its high levels of fertilizer run-off create the 4,000-square-mile Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.