World Water Day is March 22nd and it’s a great opportunity to connect the dots between overpopulation and water scarcity. Here is a not so fun fact, there are approximately 2 billion people world-wide who do not have access to potable water according to a United Nations report out just last year. It shouldn’t be rocket science to figure out that adding millions more people to our watersheds is just going to make matters worse. When you have a bank account there is a limit to the amount of cash you can withdraw before it is empty. Water is no different. When you take out more that can be replaced, the taps, wells, hoses and faucets will run dry.
In my late father’s lifetime, we added 6 billion people to the planet and the water did not and could not keep up. Our population growth would be impressive with innovations in disease and accident prevention if our planet were an unlimited place. But it is a closed system infused with slow-moving cycles evolved to accommodate only so much demand. Conservation technology can stretch some of those resources, but the demand for fresh water is just too great. Water is a renewable resource but only if demand doesn’t exceed the ability of a water resource to recharge or replenish. For example, the Ogallala aquifer which ranges from Texas to Kansas recharges slowly ranging from .024 to 6 inches a year, even less when droughts occur. Since the 1920’s, the US population increased by a whopping 221 million people. Water may be a global cycle, but it is experienced on a local level and must be managed as such by controlling demand as much as possible.
The United Nations should be sounding the alarm on the water crisis. Instead, in its not so infinite wisdom, the UN is taking this opportunity to announce its WATER FOR PEACE campaign. Scan their website:
https://www.un.org/en/observances/water-day for insights into overpopulation’s impact on water scarcity and you will come up as empty as the wells in Mexico City. This megalopolis has a scary 22.5 million people in it up from 3.3 million in 1950, so it should be no surprise that its authorities have just announced it is running out of water. But as usual, they are blaming everything but the elephant in the room which keeps stomping all over our lives. The UN is supposed to be a source of leadership in our bedraggled world and yet they completely ignore that as we grow by over 80 million net gain each year on an already overpopulated planet, there will be anything but peace. There will be water wars and people are already investing in water rights ownership so that they will be the ones to profit from a lowered water supply. LIMITS TO WATER DAY is a much better name and will help to educate people about how water is a precious resource which must be protected. It is far more precious than the money we hoard.
It is not just what we need to drink and wash our clothes with it is the element needed to process everything from lettuce to gasoline and its cycle is being broken by overdemand and human caused climate change. Of course, the more humans, the more climate change.
Water is a great opportunity to shed some light on how water supply is local even though the earth’s water cycle is global. The US is not immune from the perils of our looming water crisis. There are currently 2.2 million people in the US who live in homes without running water. Yes, we could, at great expense, install low flow shower heads and any number of water-saving devices but it cannot make up for the mess of being in such deep overshoot. Depending on where you live in the US, your water source is either from a nearby river, and underground aquifer or mountain run off. None of these sources gets stellar marks in the supply department. Mountains must have snow if they are to provide water so that is nothing to bank on either. To this we keep adding more people gambling that somehow water will be coming out of our taps years from now.
Across the US, aquifers are being over-pumped and rivers are running dry because they cannot keep up with a demand of 336+ million Americans using an average of 82 gallons per person per day. The US is currently growing mostly by mass immigration. We must realize that there are answers to decreasing demand, perhaps ones we do not want to hear, but we are doing a great injustice to those already living within our borders. Keeping our borders open to more thirsty people will just use up our dwindling water supplies more rapidly. Real leadership would demand that we have the challenging discussion of keeping our demand in line with this life-giving resource.
We know what happened when bankers loaned subprime mortgages to people who did not have the resources to pay them back. It is no different when we are not firm about limiting population growth to the best of our ability in a country suffering from low supplies of water exacerbated by the unstable weather events of climate change.
It’s hard not to loan people money who want to live in home and it’s also very difficult to turn people away at our borders even if they have the proper paperwork because it will just mean we are just going to run out of water in a shorter period of time. But it is the right thing to do if we want to be able to drink water, wash our clothes and cook our food in the future. You can take that to the bank.