"And Gulliver Returns" Book 1 Reversing Overpopulation--The Planet's Doomsday Threat
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“We have already talked about the glaciers of the Himalayas that feed the headwaters of the Ganges, Mekong, Indus, Yangtse and Brahmaputra rivers. They supply at least some of the water for half of the world's population. According to the Water Management Institute, most of Southeast Asia already has a shortage of water. In five years, in 2030, India will have only half of the water that it needs to sustain its population at the level it had in 2010. In fact the world will have 40% less water than it needs in 2030.
LOSS OF WATER TABLES
“Africa and several countries in the Middle East, especially Israel and Jordan, as well as other countries, are depleting fossil groundwater resources. China has severe agricultural problems. In China, ground water levels are falling as much as a meter a year in the major wheat and corn growing regions of the north China Plain. Other areas in China report groundwater levels dropping at four times that rate. And in parts of India they are falling at 2 1/2 to 3 meters a year.
“In 2008 Saudi Arabia, which had been self-sufficient in raising wheat for over 20 years, announced that the aquifer it had used for its irrigation was largely depleted. They saw that as it depleted their wheat production was reduced by 12% per year until 2016 when they could no longer produce grain. They had to increase their wheat imports yearly to feed their 30 million population, a population the same size as Canada's. The Saudis, because of their nonexistent rainfall, must irrigate any crops they grow. And countries
like China and India, even with a good amount of rainfall, still require water for irrigation
and that water is disappearing too. California’s Central Valley has the problem now. Even though the state reduced the amount of water for farmers, many communities still don’t have water to drink. Texas is having problems too.
DROUGHTS
“Droughts are a fact of the nature of climate. There are wet years and dry years. When you have desert areas such as in the southwest United States, from California to Texas, the effects of a lack of rain are greatly magnified when the population increases. A drought in southern California or Arizona in 1850 when there were a few hundred
thousand people could be managed more readily than they can today with their multi- millions of people. The California drought in the early part of this century dropped the water reserves to under a year in 2015 and homes in Southern California had water bills of over a thousand dollars a month. Studies at Columbia University have indicated this clearly. And you can guess that the global warming will undoubtedly increase the droughts in some parts of the world.
WATER DISPUTES AND WATER WARS
“In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin said, ‘the wars of the next century will be fought over water.’ The first war fought over water was 4,500 years ago in Mesopotamia. More recently the genocidal conflict in Darfur early in this century that killed as many as 400,000 Africans, started, in part, over access to a diminishing water
supply. Darfur started as a local conflict but eventually included a whole region. Because
water supplies are not usually enclosed entirely within one country, water disputes can arise. If the country takes too much of the water upriver, the people downriver will probably suffer. There are many parts of the world where water rights are already a problem.
“Even in the United States there have been problems between Alabama, Florida and Georgia over a dwindling supply of water. Arizona and California have had problems over the distribution of water from the Colorado River. As Arizona's population has
increased it has needed to call on a greater percentage of the river water that was originally allocated to it. Even within California, where the high rainfall in the north usually has plenty of water, the desert of Southern California does not have enough. The Southern Californians want to share the Northern Californian watery wealth, but their northern brothers are not quite ready ‘to share and share alike’”
"That's right Con, we will probably have to cut back on our traditionally luxurious habits. You can imagine that with the increasing population, with our decreasing water and with our increasing temperatures, the poorer starving and dehydrating people of the world might be likely terrorist converts against the richer well-watered countries. If there are such things as human rights, as the United Nations would like us to believe, access to water would have to be extremely high on that list. We think of safety as being high on
the UN’s list of human rights, but life's requirements of air, water, and food must be at
least as high as safety in the priority of basic rights.”
"Commander, I think your global education program must emphasize the growing need for water, based not only on population increases, but also the needs of technology, and of course, the needs for agriculture to supply food to the growing population. Water may be our most important economic need and it is certainly our most important natural resource. And it doesn’t increase as population increases—it is reducing. By that I mean that as warming increases the melting of the polar ice caps, that freshwater enters the ocean and becomes salty. So our warming is actually reducing potential freshwater
available to humans.
"One obvious solution is to build dams. But the dams cover a good bit of arable
land. They also lose much of the water they hold to evaporation. Another problem is that there are natural salts in fresh water and the salts can accumulate in the lakes behind the dam. Then when that water is used for irrigation the salts can poison the farmland. We have already mentioned some of those problems of salinization."
”An illustration of the problem of reducing water supplies can be seen in the US where the town of Orme in Tennessee ran out of water in 2007. But the neighboring town of New Hope, Alabama allowed the people of Orme to bring in trucks to take back water to fill the town's water tank. Then they allowed a two-mile long pipe to bring Orme water from New Hope. So cooperation sometimes eliminates possible conflicts.
"To help to solve the water problem, more efficient uses of water are possible. About
70% of all water used by humans is used in agriculture and about 40% of that is lost
through evaporation and inefficient irrigation methods. If the more modern drip-irrigation technique is used, about 95% of the water would be used efficiently. Another way to save water is to plant crops that are genetically modified to grow with little or no water.
Desalinization, which we already mentioned, is expensive but the costs are coming down.
My experience though is that they use so much chlorine to purify it that it tastes terrible.
Of course another method is to just make water more expensive so that people will
conserve more. But then the poor would be hurt the most.
“I have heard a new term, ‘water footprint.’ As in the ‘carbon footprint,’ America
leads the way, or should I say hogs the way. The average American uses about 2,500
cubic meters of water a year. That’s enough to fill an Olympic size pool. I am talking here about water used for personal use, like bathing, and water used to irrigate the food we eat and water used in the production of things we use. The world average water usage is about half that of an American. And the average Chinese uses less than a third of what an American uses.
POLLUTED WATER
“There are many types of polluted water. It can be polluted by sewage, by pesticides, by naturally occurring toxins such as arsenic, and by other factors. In Bangladesh, for example, about half of its 150 million people have drunk tainted water, much of it with
arsenic. Arsenic can cause a number of diseases such as cancers, liver problems, and heart disease. In a study funded by the US National Institutes of Health, 1 in 5 deaths during the 10 years of the study were attributable to arsenic poisoning. But the physical health problems are only part of the picture, people who are known to be drinking arsenic tainted water are often found to be seen in a lower social status than they would normally occupy. This then can affect their choice of mar
riage mates and other socially determined factors in the lifestyle.”
CONFRONTING THE SKEPTICS ON LICENSING PARENTS