Remember the old movie Waterworld with Kevin Costner?
For those of you who have not seen it — and there is probably a lot of you out there — the movie takes place on Earth in the distant future. It was produced in 1995 and it was foretelling about our future. You see, it takes place after global warming has melted the ice caps and flooded the entire planet.
It is often rated as “one of the worst movies ever made.” But I watched it through and through. Costner plays The Mariner, a drifter who encounters a young girl named Enola (Tina Majorino) with a map to the fabled Dryland tattooed on her back. They try to find Dryland. Jack Black is there in an airplane. Everybody smokes cigarettes. Where the tobacco comes from, I don’t know. Mayhem ensues.
Anyway. It predicts our near future.
Or perhaps the other way around. No water.
Of course, we all know that water is the basis of life for animals and plants. But is also likely to become a contested resource in parts of the world in the coming decades.
According to UN figures, this report:
“Global water stress, i.e. the proportion of water withdrawn for use in industry, agriculture or private households in relation to available water, was manageable at 18.2% in 2020. In 2022, however, 2.4 billion people were living in areas that are exposed to extreme water stress in some cases.”
Scientists are currently working on predicting “water stress” scenarios because so many different factors are involved. However, it is certain that the demand for water will increase steadily and that many countries are already consuming more than they have available.
This infographic is based on projections by the World Resources Institute (WRI). It shows that 51 of the 164 countries and territories analyzed are expected to suffer from high to extremely high water stress by 2050, which corresponds to 31 percent of the population. That is bad, bad news.
Water scarcity is on the way.
I suppose, then, that Waterworld had things wrong. They had too much water.
And we have too little.
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Bruce Lee: “Be water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and the creation of a thousand lives is in one drop of water.”
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Benjamin Franklin: “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.”
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Water, water, everywhere. Not.
