THE WATER OF LIFE - AND DEATH

The recent incredible scenes from the United States, where the Mississippi river and its tributaries ran amok, may have seemed a peculiar but just recompense to a vast area which only a couple of years ago suffered a disastrous drought. Water was all they asked for then. Now they have it, but in quantities so enormous that it all seems like some huge global joke.
The trouble is, the rain may have fallen on the wrong part of the United States. The real water shortage is south and west of the worst-hit areas, in the basin of the Colorado river. This is the giant sculptor of the grand Canyon. It drains a fifth of the old Wild West. Yet, not a single drop of its waters actually reach the sea. Along the way it is dammed and diverted for urban and agricultural use alike.
And such is the insatiable demand of a modern society for water, that the Colorado is not enough. Americans have also drilled deep into the earth to tap the giant Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground freshwater sea. So much water is drawn off that the level drops by four inches a year, but only half an inch percolates back through the rock. And sadly, since the recent rains mostly ran off as flash floods, they will have done little to help.
The only benefit that might accrue is the deposition of millions of tons of mineral-rich alluvium all over the grain growing area of the American MidWest. In time it might make up for the colossal losses that have occurred. But most of the floods, billions of gallons of rich loamy suds, have washed downstream out into the Louisiana swamps and the Gulf of Mexico, to no discernible effect.
One can imagine farmers in drought-ridden areas all over the world gritting their teeth in agony at the thought of such wealth gone to waste. Because that's what it is, wealth.
Water, in fact, is probably a more central resource than oil. All around the world we can see that regions that are dry are regions that are dead. And sadly, most of the blame for the dryness can be laid at humanity's door.
A recent article in the Observer magazine forecast that the agricultural abundance of the American Great Plains would only last another 20 years. Peking's water table is falling at the rate of six feet a year as its groundwater is pumped out. So much water has been pumped out from beneath Bangkok that the city itself is sinking.
Deforestation and industrialisation have their roles to play, as do increasingly unusual weather patterns. Bangla Desh is now inundated every four years: it used to be every fifty. And why? Because the Himalayas have been stripped of their forests, which used to absorb huge amounts of rainwater and melting snow. Now, the soil and silt of the mountains is being lavishly redistributed into the Bay of Bengal, where it ain't much use to anybody.
But the activities of the Indian government and industrialists upriver are just as significant, as their barriers and waste pollute, channel and block the river during the dry season.
It is this kind of conflict that is emerging all around the world, and which emphasises the centrality of water to the world that we have become used to. The late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, when signing the Camp David Agreement, commented that *the only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water*.
He wasn't joking. Any one of eight countries upstream on the Nile could jeopardise its water supply. Egypt has already blocked a loan from the African Development Bank to Ethiopia, because it believed that it might be used to finance damming or irrigation.
You might ask if this is just: after all, were we not all electrified into compensatory action by Saint Bob Geldof after we had all seen television depictions of the famine there, which had been caused by a combination of war and drought? Surely the Ethiopians have a right not to starve? And to use the river accordingly?
But what if, in irrigating their crops, they cause economic ruin and starvation further down the Nile valley? These are profound questions for areas in which the Irish have carved out a significant role for themselves as development sponsors.
Meanwhile, there are similar disputes between Israel and Jordan over the West Bank Aquifer, between Slovakia and Hungary over hydro-electric projects on the Danube, and between Iraq and Syria and Turkey over a whole plethora of projects and proposed dams on the Euphrates which have led to threats of war on all sides...And those are just a sample.
Indeed, there is now a stark possibility that once the present round of ethnic horrors have abated, the next set of world or regional conflicts will be about securing access to water.
It makes you think, doesn't it? We may have many complaints here in Ireland, but shortage of water isn't one of them. Not at present anyway.
Mind you, some of the same conflicts exist. A couple of years ago, Wicklow county council were proposing a water charge on Dublin City, which absorbs copious quantities of Wicklow water. And there is little doubt that bigger dams would allow for greater conservation of supplies of water. But that's another day's discussion.
No, the real issue is how, on what is essentially a water planet, humanity can keep its cool and balance the conflicting demands of increasing industrialisation, rising expectations of living standards and uncontrollable population growth. It's already happening here and there, in Texas where farmers have reduced their use of water, in Israel, which re-uses one third of urban waste water for irrigation, in Japan . . .
But these are among the most advanced industrial societies. The crunch will come among the emerging economic powers, the densely populated countries that developed along the tracks of the great rivers of the world and which are now at risk from the developmental activities of their poorer upriver neighbours.
It always seems strange to an Irish person that parts of the world could be short of water. But that's the way it is. And since humans are largely water themselves, it is a matter of life and death.
Re-treeing the world would be a start. Curbing population growth would be a whole lot better. But both are contingent upon higher living standards, which are in turn contingent on infrastructures, economic growth and... resources like water.
Seems simple? It probably is, if the rich world got out of the poor world's way. But when the latter tried to break a series of logjams at the Rio summit, they were blocked and diverted at all stages, even (on the subject of birth control) by the Vatican.
Don't say it; it isn't worth the effort.
But after the debacle, you could hardly blame the poorer nations from blocking the water of the richer nations, now could you. I mean, look what the oil blockade of the 1970s did for Arab economies . . .
When linguists conducted a study some years ago of all key languages in an effort to find the first words used by humans, they came up with a list of twenty.
One of them was *wagua*, (excuse the phonetics!) or water. Another was *maama* for mother and milk. It's that central. The global agenda for the 21st century begins to take shape.