Global Water Bankruptcy and Other Things I Thought About in the Bath |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Global Water Bankruptcy and Other Things I Thought About in the Bath
Los Angeles aqueduct, Owens Valley, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The water in my bath had gone lukewarm before I noticed.
The book was balanced on my chest. The traffic outside the window had disappeared. Even the condensation spreading across the glass seemed irrelevant. I was concentrating.
Then I read a phrase I couldn’t stop thinking about:
global water bankruptcy.
global water bankruptcy.
Suddenly the bath didn’t feel like a place to relax in, though when I say relax, I don’t mean lying in warm water as empty-headed as possible. What I like to do is write on my phone as well as read. The suds on the surface of the water slowly disappeared unnoticed. The traffic outside the window continued unheard. Condensation on the glass, like an over-watered abstract Milton Resnick painting, might as well not have been there.
Concentration was, as so often, all.
One of the most unsettling ideas in water policy is what a recent United Nations University report calls “global water bankruptcy”: a condition in which drought, overuse, pollution, and climate change are depleting water resources faster than they can recover.
While I was reading or writing, the water was doing something unusual: it was being ignored.
For billions of people, that remains impossible. Water is still something that must be fetched, rationed, filtered, carried, worried about.
One of my favourite facts as a boy........