Waterworld

The purged label

While identity-politics fascisti are having cows over racist tea, Agence France Presse reminds us in superficially more rational terms about a more basic crisis in a beverage even more popular than Coca-Cola (tip of the hat to Old Atlantic Lighthouse):

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday. More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge. Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Why "superficially" more rational terms? Because genuine rationality doesn't confuse symptoms with causes. And in looking for solutions, a rational person looks for ways to eliminate or reduce the causes, instead of ways to accommodate the symptoms.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

In Beijing, home to 16 million, aquifers have fallen by more than a dozen metres (40 feet) in 30 years, forcing the government to earmark tens of billions of dollars for a scheme to ferry water from the Yangzte River in the south to the country's parched north. …

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

"Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities." Why can no one use the simple expression overpopulation? "Economic growth" is pretty much synonymous with "producing more because there are more people." What is this "population pressure," some force in physics? No, it's more people. Why are there mega-cities? Because there are more people, and they have to live — if you can call it living in places like Lagos or Beijing — somewhere.

But political correctness, which is to our age what the belief in witchcraft was in the 16th century, insists that we cannot, must not, talk honestly. We must find the root of every problem in demonology. Environmental afflictions are down to jolly non-green giants in the advanced world leaving carbon footprints and Satan's sidekicks who don't send developing nations enough money.

Dealing with real causes of all this "pressure" and "mega-cities" and pollution caused by economic growth would mean admitting that the world's poorest countries are breeding themselves into misery and death.

That's where we could do some good, if we had the courage and wisdom. As Old Atlantic Lighthouse says:

Third worlders consume and destroy. We have to stop their population explosion here and there. Here we need to introduce birth quotas. Those can be based on IQ or on other achievements, although these have to be done before teen child birth.

These could be based on their parents achievements or lack thereof. Children of drug addicts, high school dropouts, violent criminals, etc. might lose their reproductive rights and be sterilized before becoming teen agers. This would cut off the process in time.

We have to face the reality that 3rd worlders destroy. They are not productive. They are a burden to the planet. We have to face that and deal with it.

But we follow the tried-and-false path of desperately looking for technological answers to keep symptoms from killing the patient, instead of acknowledging that it is the disease, not the symptoms, that will guarantee a wretched life for billions. The mental disorder that forbids peaceful and humane population stabilization in backward countries is the same sensitivity, in a larger format. that cringes before charges of racism over a tin of "Southern style" tea.

Both are equally cowardly. But while it's easy to cave in and redesign a label, it's a lot harder to provide water to match the needs of Third World countries' mass production of babies. Want to find out what Nature means by "wholesale population migration"? Just keep putting your faith in politically correct, technological solutions.