Cholera may return to London, the mass migration of Africans could cause civil unrest in Europe and China's economy could crash by 2015 as the supply of fresh water becomes critical to the global economy. That was the bleak assessment yesterday by forecasters from some of the world's leading corporate users of fresh water, 200 of the largest food, oil, water and chemical companies.
I take little pleasure in noting that I have already highlighted some of these on these very pages. These drive me to prayer, and have me considering how to plan for the next 20 years of my life so I can be part of the solution and get away from being part of the problem.
The annoying thing is that we've essentially known the problems since the mid 70's. For many of us it is hard to do otherwise because we are embedded in systems that direct our patterns of life and co-opt our imagination. The principalities and powers, the corporisations of human activity, have us by the short and curlies. While some of us have the means and freedom to do something ourselves [and should do so], others of us have to act within our means constrained as we are by lack of resources, commitments to others who are not so sympathetic, lack of skills or access to vital resources and so on. We need to act in terms of pressure, voting, voluntary self-restraint, questionning others, setting what example we can, talking to others, praying so that systems get changed and ordinary people can find it increasingly easy to make good choices and then increasingly hard to make bad ones.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Cost of water shortage: civil unrest, mass migration and economic collapse
Filed in: water, climate_change, geopolitics, migration, economics, unrest
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