A new report from Unicef shows that over 1.5 million children a year die because of unclean water. That’s around 1 every 20 seconds. A 9/11 every 16 hours. Around the same rate as the Holocaust.
We know how to make water clean. We even know how to make it clean cheaply in most cases, in fact so cheap that we flush gallons of the stuff away without a second thought. Yes it gets harder in deserts, remote locations and countries that lack all sorts of basic infrastructure, but none of it is beyond the wit of man. No, there are only two things that stop us from fixing this before the year is out:
1. The cruelty of the people in charge of many of these regions, who would rather consolidate their power than help ordinary people.
2. Our indifference (and I do mean ‘our’, yours and mine).
We can’t do anything about the first one today. But the second we can. So go make a donation today. You could do it directly, via someone like PlanUSA. If you prefer a more long-term, ‘teach a man to fish’ approach find someone who provides microcredit. Or just go to an Oxfam site and donate, and let them do the thinking. I’m trying to find a suitable organization to give to in the UK (so they can get a tax credit on my donation) – once I do I’ll give them a fiver. That will literally make no difference to me, but could save a child’s life. Imagine that.
4 Comments
In my opinion this is a form of “false compassion”, because you are compounding the problem by “giving them a fiver”. The reason why the water is dirty in the first place is what people should be thinking about. And the answer is obvious: today the human biomass is larger than all mamillian biomass combined. Even ten years ago this was not quite true. We are the problem. Not our ability to clean the water.
Nobody will deny that people dying from unclean water isn’t a tragedy. Me least of all. But our usual reaction of “treating the water” is only delaying a further, larger catastropy.
I’m sorry this is a very un-P.C. response to the problem, but it is more humane than just giving them a fiver, I think. More people in Africa are dying as a result of our policies of “feed the hungry” than ever before.
I think we’ve had part of this debate before. Surprisingly I’m partly in agreement with you – we’ve only got one planet, but billions of people, so I’ll happily spare a few million people if it helps the one planet.
I’m coming to the conclusion, however, that it’s a false solution. People are incredibly determined to live and reproduce, and the fact that they and their children will probably suffer, struggle, and ultimately die young seems not to be much of a disincentive. The only thing I’ve seen that does reliably deter population growth is comfort – once you’ve got a pretty good life you’re not so interested in the insurance policy a soccer squad of kids will give you.
For me, then, the challenge isn’t to manage the number of people on the planet directly, but instead get everyone to a decent standard of living, and crucially do this in a sustainable way. I’ve yet to work out if that’s even possible. Theoretically I think it is, but perhaps you can’t get there from here.
Your thesis is predicated on the idea that an individual’s impact on the biosphere is uniform and linear all over the world. China’s population is actually well under control, but their impact on the world’s biosphere is going up exponentially because their “comforts” are increasing. For instance: Chinese average of number of people per household is going down. This would argue that your thesis’ operation in the world is actually the opposite of your intentions.
The problem originates in the basis of our civilization’s broadest, most fundamental memic pattern in history, where we assume we are the “end result” of the universe: Its very purpose to unfold. The sort of thing Gallileo was almost burned at the stake for, but it still exists, even in the most scientific-minded people. It just has more Cartesian sensitivity. It’s more refined.
What other species not only denies food to its competitors, but actively hunts down and destroys them, and converts its biosphere indescriminantly for mass food production only for itself and for the food it eats?
You may not consciously believe this “memeic pattern”, but you are enacting it nonetheless. I’m part of the problem, too.
China remains a problem because the level of comfort they’ve achieved isn’t, on average, high enough for them to reach stasis. That’s why I said the big challenge is not controlling population, but controlling the impact of such luxury; comfort would probably include at least one car per family (or something very similar) and it’s not clear to me that this is sustainable – certainly not with the internal combustion engine.
If we want to thing about memes, however, the biggest one is ‘live and breed’ – that’s pretty much the defining characteristic of life, to keep on being alive and to have offspring. We’re just a great deal better at it than most other species, and at the same time have the power you mention to screw everything up. As compelling as the idea that we are what the universe was made for is, it pales in comparison to the compulsion to continue. We’re just lucky that reasonable affluence seems to subdue the ‘breed’ part of that enough to give us a chance. Not much of one, unfortunately.