Tuesday, October 4, 2011

"Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink"



And so goes the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I think everybody knows this poem, or parts of it anyway, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There is a good discussion about it on the Wikipedia citation below. I remember reading it decades ago and thinking that the one thing we would never run out of was water. I didn't figure on the massive population growth, the unprecedented destruction of the ecosystems of the world, or the disastrous climate changes that would plague us in the decades following the reading.
I guess most of us didn't either. But here we are. Not enough drinking water in places in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, California, New York, Africa, Australia, China, and the list goes on. And not enough water for agriculture in may places either. So crops fail, people starve etc, etc. etc.
I read a comment of Facebook this morning by a writer I don't know:

"Borden Beck: ‎"we" are apparently planning to pull water from the Columbia to replenish an already depleted aquifer in NE Ore so that life can continue... Where will Nevada get water to replenish this groundwater? Answer = nowhere... they are planning on the rapture or armageddon or the apocalypse to make concerns mute."

And you know what? I think Borden Beck may be right. There have been murmurs for years about the policy shifts in America to favor the "endtimes" and bring on the end. I have always dismissed these as lunitic fringe conspiracies. Now I am not so sure. About the conspiracy I mean. The longer the world plunges into the freefall of global disaster, the harder it will be to stop the fall and pull back. I don't see any real effort in this country to do that. Pull back I mean. Sad. Very. Bloody. Sad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Gustave_Dore_Ancient_Mariner_Illustration.jpg/220px-Gustave_Dore_Ancient_Mariner_Illustration.jpg

No comments: