let’s talk water

We so often hear that the world is running out of water.

People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers.

Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.

People aren’t dying because the world is running out of water.

Activist Derrick Jensen says, “They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

And/Or as Matthew Josephson’s Robber Barons draws on the worries of the well-known radical Thomas Jefferson,

freedom came to mean “the natural right of every citizen to satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the national resources in the measure of his shrewdness.”

And the strong, as in the Dark Ages of Europe, and like the military captains of old, having preempted more than others, having been well seized of land and highways and strong places, would own because they owned.

Chieftains would arise, in the time-honored way, to whom the crowd would look for leadership, for protection, finally for their very existence. They would be the nobles of the new feudal system, for whom the great mass of men toiled willingly.

These barons resembled their forerunners, since they traced their ownership back, as Veblen has said, to the “ancient feudalistic ground of privilege and prescriptive tenure…to the right of seizure by force and collusion.”