Water, Water Everywhere and Not A Drop To Drink

I rarely read the New York Time, but on the last day of 2011 something drove me to glance to the right upon entering the coffee shop across the street. On the lower right corner, there was an article on fracking in South Aftica. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of using lubrication and pressure to reach previously unreachable oil reserves. If the process is artificially stimulated, there is a risk of permanently contaminating the water supply and sterilizing the land. (I shall resist the temptation to use sexual metaphors to describe the process). The region of South Africa in which American multimationals wish to engage in this practice is the Karoo Desert, the very name of which ('thirsty land') indicates the scarcity of water. The quoted opponent of the fracking, Chris Hayward, is from Beaufort West, and only recently had to slaughter 600 of his 2000 sheep for lack of water. Although I do take an occasional interest in South Africa, the explicit naming of a South African ordinarily would not elicit such a response, much less a blog post. The only son of a South African sheep farmer in the Karoo I have ever met, however, is named Stuart Hayward, a contributor to the South African-themed blog Southernwrite.




How did I meet a shepherd's son? It was a winter, quite a while ago, up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which this year also lacked the requisite amount of winter water. We were on our way to a ski resort, and all along the road there were young employees from the other hemisphere seeking a ride to work. The long-standing dispute of the wisdom of picking up hitchikers was not an issue, and the young man came into our car. Thus began an association that continues to this day.



Now we ought to return to the Karoo and its dry environs. Water, especially fresh water, is limited throughout the world, as is oil. Human beings, however, cannot drink oil. Although this time the ones who will suffer in Africa are white rather than black, it is the American companies who stand to profit and the locals who stand to suffer. This is the human condition: even the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles brought suffering and death to the ordinary soldiers. Another unfortunate psychological flaw of humanity is the sacrifice of long-term prosperity in exchange for short-term gain. The most egregious example I have seen lately (taken from the same article) is Indonesia's willingness to drill into an active mud volcano where the last attempt displaced 30,000 people. I do not know where the march of the thirty thousand went after their villages were destroyed, but surely it exacerbated some other domestic issue.



The combination of too many people and too few renewable resources will lead within the next fifty years to resource wars. Since the human race seems reluctant to decrease its numbers in a peaceful manner, we will need all the resources we can preserve. Corporate greed, particularly the unsustainable model of eternal capitalism, threatens the long-term survival of many of our species by poisoning the environment, but that's a post for another day