On a visit to Bedouins in the sands of Jordan, once upon a time, my host brought over a clay jug for washing the flatware â€" my fingers. When I started to dip a hand into it, he recoiled as if my arm were a puff adder. That jug was the camp's daily ration. He was offering just a few drops.
I recalled my stupidity on reading that piece from Kansas the other day about the hammered High Plains Aquifer. The scale and circumstances are vastly different, but nothing focuses the mind on water like the fear of it running out. Nomadic peoples figured this out long ago. But in much of the world, industrial excess, lax control and blind greed foreshadow serial calamity ahead. As water grows scarce, special interests hurry to get it while they can.
Anyone who bothered to notice could see crises building. Back in 1985, Boutros Boutros Ghali, then Egypt's foreign minister, remarked, “The next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics.â€
In 2000, I wrote a global series on water. I found the Sea of Galilee so low that Jesus could have walked across it by stepping on stones. In northeast Indian villages, neighbors killed neighbors over access to dwindling supplies.
In my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, where hydrologists predicted water might run out within a decade, an elderly couple stunned me to silence near a decorative fountain jetting up a geyser at their gated enclave in the foothills.
It's recycled, they told me. It wasn't, actually, I replied, and in any case the summer evaporation rate is 50 percent. They looked at each other and shrugged. “There'll be enough for our lifetime,†the man said.
Even back then, more than a decade ago, scientists warned that America's groundwater levels were dropping at alarming rates. That caused little talk and less action.
Now the science is plain. It is getting hotter and drier in water-stressed areas. Agriculture, industry, and a growing urban demand draw increasingly on fossil water deposits that can date back more than 100,000 years.
America is particularly profligate. When oil prices rose, speculators bought huge tracts to grow corn for biofuel. Corn takes three times more water than sorghum but fetches a higher price. Pivotal irrigator hoses project streams that allow farmers to squander hundreds, or thousands, of gallons per minute.
The Ogallala Aquifer, a vast but shallow component of the High Plains deposit, supplies about 30 percent of all irrigation water in the United States. It could run dry within a generation if not poisoned earlier by an oil pipeline spill.
Elsewhere, commercial farmers buy costly new pumps and work them hard to amortize them before it's too late. Industry gulps down all it can; city dwellers water lawns with little thought for tomorrow. And now the fracking that so many people embrace consumes and contaminates huge amounts of water.
When those the oases of those Bedouins in Jordan dry up they pack their camels and move. One of these days, perhaps sooner rather than later, large populations in places we call civilized will be doing the same thing. And a whole lot of others will be looking hard for their next meal.
