My favorite drink is and has always been water. It is the most refreshing and life-sustaining drink on the planet. Champagne is OK, but without water there can be no life, and unfortunately, it is getting scarce… everywhere. Very soon, this humble drink is going to be more valuable than gold, and humans will fight for it.
“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” – Thomas Fuller
Undoubtedly due to climate change, we have had torrential rains, hail the size of golf balls, and at the same time, acute drought all around the world. Ironically, while some people are drowning in water, others are dying of thirst.
Precocious Greta Thunberg rightly said, “no more blah, blah, blah”, the time to make changes is NOW, not 10 years from now. She is absolutely right. As far as I know, relatively little has been done to manage water anywhere and a lot of it gets wasted. It is time to mobilize and treat water like it is out to be treated, with care and reverence.
Never mind Mars or the Moon, what is happening on Earth today is more pressing than colonizing these far away planets. The problem is here, on earth, not millions of miles away. Electric cars are fine, but what is going to fuel our bodies while we are cruising on highways?
Water management ought to be everybody’s primary concern. You don’t wait until the well runs dry to do something about it. Preparing for drought is very similar to preparing for war. It is not when the enemy crosses your borders that you mobilize your troops. You anticipate the threat and prepare for it, years before it happens.
Desalination plants, despite their imperfections, are part of the solution, but we still have very few of them. In California, with nearly 39.2 million residents across a total area of approximately 163,696 square miles, we have only 12 of them. it is not enough.
By comparison, tiny Israel with only 8,630 square miles and a population of 9 million people, runs 5 mega-desalination plants. Two additional plants are now in varying stages of construction.
The biggest is not always the swiftest, nor is the battle always to the strong… Remember this old saying : « On a souvent besoin d’un plus petit que soi… » (We often need someone smaller than ourselves.)
California, America wake up… forget your idiotic, sterile quarrels, and if need be, take a trip to Israel. It might be worth it.
“No water, no life. No blue, no green.” – Sylvia Earl
It is that simple.
Alain