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Aug. 24, 2006 Many extremist Muslims (but not many ordinary Muslims) want to "Darfurize" Israel. (I just made up that word!) There isn't any big desert into which the extremists can push the Jews, but there's always the Mediterranean Sea, and I think that's where Hezbollah wants them to go --- without a boat. Actually, I think the whole world is very much overpopulated, but I don't want to see existing people getting killed --- I'd much rather see families having fewer kids. And I think that will happen automatically, partly because of a shortage of clean water in future years. Israel is using the Jordan River, but they also are making lots of clean water from the sea, via nuclear powered "reverse osmosis" and similar high tech means. However, there's no way China and India, with a billion people each, will be able to afford much of that. For example, if you look at China, far away from the coastal cities where primarily-American technology is providing a locally high standard of living, it turns out that the Chinese Gross Domestic Product in the year 2004 was only $218 per person --- nowhere near enough for making high tech water widely available. This is compared to $14,000 in the U.S. for that year. (In your public library, you can see this in World-Watch magazine, October 2004, page 31.) You probably know that China is trying to solve its water problem with the Three Gorges Dam, but many observers are predicting disaster there. As reported in The International Herald Tribune, January 5, 1997, China has had some fantastic dam failures, like the one in 1975 that killed 230,000 people(!), with 11 million displaced and starving. I'm certainly not hoping for another of those, but it could happen, and also in India (and at the Aswan Dam in Egypt). (By the way, "The Trib." is operated by the N.Y. Times. I was in Europe in 1997 and couldn't see the N.Y. Times reference itself, but there probably was one.) In India, the N.Y. Times of July 6, 2006 (page A21) reported a Gross Domestic Product of $728 per person, and they said 380 million Indians live on less than a dollar a day. According to the Economist magazine, August 12, 2006, page 64, half of the houses in India have no electricity (a bit hard to believe, but possibly true). Not much energy-consuming reverse osmosis water for them! What does all this have to do with Darfur? Well, it's all related to "too many people on not enough land," in my view. Cultural and religious differences make it much worse, of course. And big droughts, possibly intensified by global warming, are not going to make poor people become more tolerant --- especially in the areas of both the Middle East and Darfur, where there's severe competition for clean water. What should we do about it in the U.S.? All I can think of, while wearing my pessimistic blue glasses, is "Stay strong, if you don't want to get Darfurized." ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email: shanefield@ieee.org Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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