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Water Crisis
As the Independent reports, British armed forces are preparing to intervene in future wars over water. Tony Blair will now host a British "crisis summit" about this.
But why is this a British or Western problem?
We do waste a lot of water. A British person uses about 50 gallons of water per day. A U.S. person some 125. A lot of this waste could be helped by better management and a "real" price for water.
But globally, even if waste would be avoided, the coming changes will exceed the resources in many places and lead to serious conflicts.
Some critical points are already visible. Turkey is increasingly using the water of Euphrates and Tigris with harsh consequences for Syria and Iraq. Israel occupies the Golan highs to control water flow. Ethiopia in future will use more Nile water for itself ruining significant parts of agriculture in Egypt’s desert plantations.
While past climate changes lead to the migration of a few millions, the coming changes will move tens to hundreds of million people around. Conflicts are thereby guaranteed.
But what are few thousand British/European/Western soldiers to do about this? Why should we intervene at all? How?
If nomads lose their grassland to the desert and move into areas where other people have settled (i.e. Sudan), what can we do about this, except maybe kill either the settlers or the nomads? The grassland will not come back.
Will you send your children to fight Bangladeshi who move north into China or to stop Chinese and Mongols moving into Siberia?
I doubt "values" or "enlightenment" make western societies superior in solving these problems. So what can western armies do about this?
Maybe we could use the chaos to grab some valuables. Now that would be a good reason to get our armies prepared.
Is that what this "crisis meeting" is about?
When I lived in lower Manhattan, snow, as everything else, was viewed as an aesthetic event.
The rare blizzard would bring a pristine whiteness, a silence, a calmness, to the city, like a prayer at easter. There was a reassuring sense of the medicinal, the therapeutic, in the cotton ball whiteness and fluffiness of it. Dignified business types would revert to a repressed wilder side and roll in it in full suits, skirts, high heels. The very soul of the city was redeemed.
As the days went by, the snow would slowly transmogrify. The second day, you would no longer need your sunglasses: the shocking whiteness was gone. The snow was piled into hummocks wherever space permitted.
By the third day, the snow would take on a decidedly grayish cast. The tint would deepen over suceeding days; the snow began to appear like intricate newsprint collage.
Ignominous clumps of brown would appear among the shrinking haystacks. Every so often, there would be an angry smear, a brushstroke of gaudy de Kooning mustard where some rushing foot had misstepped.
A thaw would bring a new element to the mix. The grayness would collect, and puddle up into dalmation spots. The snow would become a Jackson Pollack composition in black and white, and unfortunately, brown.
As the days went by, the snow began collecting objects, some ordinary like the blue plastic top of a water bottle or a gum wrapper; some fantastical, causing you to stop, squat down, and examine the thing. Could you even identify it? Was it some melted lipstick, or a deliberate streak of paint? A cockroach or a morsel of food? What part of a car or truck could this convoluted piece of metal be? Now you had a sort of Motherwell assemblege, some things glued on top, and some embedded within the matrix that the snow had become.
It was now hard to call the thing snow at all, just as you cannot call gesso a painting. But it was shrinking, concentrating, intensifying, becoming surreal.
Then a rain would come and wipe the entire canvas clean. The objects, slowly overcome by the power of water, would gather in rivulets and colorfully parade their way to the sewer grates.
A freeze would follow. You were left with broad raised random crossing brushstrokes of semi-transparent ice, a Franz Kline in negative upon the gray pavemment.
Then, one day you notice that the snow is gone. The black soot and grit remains, a pall, among the chic black clad New York figures rushing to and fro. The vast color field that had shimmered like an obsession before your eyes has finally been rationalized, and you are left with your last composition, an enduring one: Ad Reinhart’s Black Painting No. 34
Posted by: Malooga | Mar 2 2006 16:37 utc | 19
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