Try to imagine for a little while that you live in a world without a lot of air. Breathable, inhalable air. Imagine whatever scenario you like; a radiated wasteland, an underwater research facility, a futuristic space ship, a groundbreaking colony on Mars. In this world, imagine that fresh air is both a scarcity and a commodity. Here it is treated like an item, a material good to be bought and sold as if it were an object. An item that with every tick of your heartbeat you need more of to replenish your life and sustain it, and now imagine that despite every fiber of your being crying out for it, you can’t have it because you can’t pay for it.
You forgot to pay the oxygen bill. You couldn’t afford it or you just spaced out and forgot it in …show more content…
It’s real! You can make so much more money in non-fiction nowadays, you know. The possibilities for dystopian horror stories to come true are all around the world, every day! Except instead of air, it’s water that is a scarcity; and instead of you it’s one of the million or more other people around the world who dies because they can’t pay for a natural resource. Like the elderly man dying of dehydration in Africa because his village is ‘too remote’ to warrant its own water pump and his legs can’t handle the journey any longer or the young girl dying of a contaminated water-borne diarrhoeal disease that is slowly starving her to death, you are probably asking, ‘Why is this happening?’, or at least, ‘What’s going …show more content…
The world is running out of fresh water and the demand just keeps increasing in tandem with our population (Barlow, Clarke, xi). To put it in a manner of speech, for every pint our water supply moves forward, we take a gallon back. That’s unsustainable. It “snuck up on us” (Barlow, Clarke, xii), us being the general public who only really understands laymen’s terms, not the previously small and specialized but now booming group of hydrologists, engineers, scientists, and city planners who used to be the only people who knew or even cared about this stuff (Barlow, Clarke, xii). We all care now, though, now that the crisis is well-documented and corporations have a reason to all throw their hats into the ring claiming a stake in a commodity that’s only going to increase in value as scarcity of it climbs. It’s an emergency now, a crisis with many
You forgot to pay the oxygen bill. You couldn’t afford it or you just spaced out and forgot it in …show more content…
It’s real! You can make so much more money in non-fiction nowadays, you know. The possibilities for dystopian horror stories to come true are all around the world, every day! Except instead of air, it’s water that is a scarcity; and instead of you it’s one of the million or more other people around the world who dies because they can’t pay for a natural resource. Like the elderly man dying of dehydration in Africa because his village is ‘too remote’ to warrant its own water pump and his legs can’t handle the journey any longer or the young girl dying of a contaminated water-borne diarrhoeal disease that is slowly starving her to death, you are probably asking, ‘Why is this happening?’, or at least, ‘What’s going …show more content…
The world is running out of fresh water and the demand just keeps increasing in tandem with our population (Barlow, Clarke, xi). To put it in a manner of speech, for every pint our water supply moves forward, we take a gallon back. That’s unsustainable. It “snuck up on us” (Barlow, Clarke, xii), us being the general public who only really understands laymen’s terms, not the previously small and specialized but now booming group of hydrologists, engineers, scientists, and city planners who used to be the only people who knew or even cared about this stuff (Barlow, Clarke, xii). We all care now, though, now that the crisis is well-documented and corporations have a reason to all throw their hats into the ring claiming a stake in a commodity that’s only going to increase in value as scarcity of it climbs. It’s an emergency now, a crisis with many