[Mb-civic] WATER PROBLEM

[Michael Butler]

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    The End of Insouciance
    By Gérard Dupuy
    Libération

    Wednesday 20 July 2005

    The weather's too beautiful: all evils start there. With an
indefatigable perkiness, weather forecasters announce, in winter as in
summer, sunny forecasts and high temperatures. A few minutes later, their
news colleagues deplore the drought and its costly consequences. Yet they
are all talking about the same thing. Apart from the heat wave, too painful
to go by unnoticed, the drought can make itself smilingly pleasant. The
water we lack today is the same water the absence of which made the winter
days beautiful. If, as is to be feared, rainfall is durably depressed, it
will be even more difficult to learn to live with that penury than to
protect ourselves during the few days of suffocating heat. Just as runaway
oil prices incite us to establish an "energy balance sheet" for our way of
life, so we must integrate the water variable at the level of our civic
values. Corn growers and golf players will have to learn the end of
insouciance. It's an old idea in Europe that water is both free and
abundant. That's passé. We must consume less and pay more. For years, the
Cassandras of the environment have announced that water in the climactic and
social conditions of the 21st century will be the basis for serious
conflicts, especially in semi-arid zones with strong demographic growth.
Here, to build a swimming pool one cannot fill is certainly not the
beginning of civil war. That nonetheless demonstrates the power of a
constraint that, through force of too-frequent repetition, will end up
causing more than a little private bad feeling, but also public fights. Fine
weather sows the tempest.

    Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie
Thatcher.