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WATER POLITICS

As recently noted by Circle of Blue,  Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated:

“If you look at where the violence in the world is right now, in the worst cases — places like Darfur, Sudan, like Somalia, like the Middle East, like Pakistan, Afganistan — these are all water-stressed regions. We call them Islamic fundamentalist regions. We should call them water-stressed regions. We should understand that these are places that are hungry, where livelihoods have been put in grave danger, where old, traditional ways of living such as pastoralist communities are under life and death threat. And we then blame religion or we blame militarism or we blame terrorism without understanding those are symptoms of a much deeper challenge, and water is at the center of it…And we’re already, in my opinion, seeing the resulting violence that can come from it. We send the army in response — we solve nothing. We spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. We need to send engineers, not the army. And it’s until we understand that the fundamental problems need to be addressed — not the symptoms — we’re going to continue to get it wrong, waste lives, waste our money and not find solutions.”

As the report states, if we are to conquer war, we must court water.