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How to Grow Beyond a 'Post-Crisis' World
It Starts with Having a Right Relationship with Water.
The world has moved beyond a water crisis into a “post-crisis” state. That’s according to the authors of a recent report from The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). “Post-crisis” means “broken,” as far as I can make out. It means that for many parts of the world, there is no recovery of the water systems our ancestors experienced.
It appears our “long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits,” where “irreversible or effectively irreversible damages make full restoration of the old baselines and past conditions unattainable.”
Corpus Christi understands. Recent reporting from Dylan Baddour at Inside Climate News, republished by Deceleration last week, should be required reading here. Water collapse appears imminent. And, to be clear, not because the Earth's ability to provide water suddenly broke down; it wasn’t natural systems that failed. Climate stress is real, but Corpus's hammer fell due to operational failure: prioritizing the needs of industry profits years on end, while the people, already living one boil-water notice to the next, were told they had to go without, to tighten up. The city pledged to find water somewhere in the future while it kept hooking up pipes for polluters. Now the bill has come due.
The situation is eerily similar to the climate crisis, where reports of imminent collapse of key global climate regulating systems (our coral reefs, the Amazon forest) grip our attention with increasing frequency, and as heatwaves shatter records again and again. (Our "all time" March record just shattered with a monstrous heat dome bringing summer heat back to Texas in March.)
As weather reporters work to normalize crisis—by invisibilizing the 11 atomic bombs worth of heat that fossil fuels add to the global atmosphere every second, by wrongly distilling this heat into the familiar language of La Niña and El Niño cycles "long-term climate trends." In this, they are essentially pushing around the drinks cart on the ocean liner (sorry, all out of ice, I'm afraid), explaining away the rupture in our hull as mere background noise. Maybe turn up the radio, if it's upsetting the young'uns?