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Drought and Water, War and Peace
Part 2 of 4
Water security is not an idle curiosity and it may be the leading edge of the climate crisis for many people. Without water civilization degrades rapidly. This article from the Washington Post documents how one Indian city of more than 9 million people, Chennai, is grappling with the problem in real time. Three other Indian cities are on the cusp of a similar situation.
Perhaps the first thing to consider about the impending, actually unfolding, global water emergency, is that we’ve been here before. Not you and me, but the human race. Water insecurity is one form of existential crisis that happens as a result of population increases. Other forms of crisis that our species has successfully faced include finding enough arable land and local food availability.
When population increases stressed the food supply of foragers, they moved to less populated areas where the pickings were better and when they ran out of places to move, they slowly invented permanent settlements based around cleared lands where they grew food crops part of the year or tended semi-wild livestock. Converting from foragers to farmers was a slow process that likely took generations but at some point, we were foragers no more, or more precisely small bands of foragers had moved on deeper into the forests. You can still find some in places like the Amazon…
