![]() We still often see water as an essentially free and unlimited resource. ![]() Many climate scientists think that our big problems with global warming will come less from the warming itself and more from the big changes in hydrology that it causes – droughts and floods, dried out soils and ecosystems, empty rivers, and maybe the worst, the sheer unpredictability of where and when we will have water.But water also defines quite well our problems in moving from a world of apparently plentiful resources – a world in which if we screw up we can move on – to a world of finite resources, where we have to manage carefully to get by. In truth, I’d put water up there with global warming at top of the agenda. Right now we seem to be good at finding technical and organizational fixes (none of the above are really insuperable problems), but rather poor at finding ways of making them happen. Most of them arise from Homo sapiens having to work out how to live together in ever greater numbers on the one planet. Why do you say water is the “defining crisis of the twenty-first century?” Oh, there are plenty of things to worry about. Our list of things to worry about – global warming, oil shortages, bird flu, terrorism, etc. Fred Pearce is an environment and development consultant whose latest book is When the Rivers Run Dry : Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century.
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