Greenville's free alternative weekly

Rain O’er Me

By James D. McCallister

Water, water everywhere. The construction of the two-headed exclamation point that is the new fountain at Saluda and Blossom is finally underway and while perhaps not an entirely necessary prolongation of our orange cone infestation (this new body of water is smack dab in the middle of the flood zone, after all), one more decorative touch probably won’t hurt the ambience in our little village. In any case, mischievous, late night merrymakers will have a new place to dump their boxes of phosphate-laden laundry detergents.

But the confluence of the fountain construction ramp-up, along with the news that southern metropolis Atlanta is only months from running out of water, got us at the Neighborhood Affairs Desk thinking anew about something we’ve heard about off and on for years now: the coming global conflict over resources. But not oil …this time it’s drinking water.

In 1999, Klaus Toepfer, director of the U.N. Environment Program, flat-out predicted such a dreadful occurrence in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology. “Everybody knows that we have an increase in population,” he said. “But we do not have a corresponding increase in drinking water, so the result in the regional dimension is conflict.”

Lest you begin to worry that upon the orange-pink dawning of the new day you’ll need to order stillsuits and brush up on your sandworm-wrangling techniques, this crisis probably won’t affect Americans to the degree that we need to take up arms and shed blood so that we can continue to hydrate our artificially emerald lawns and scrub clean our gleaming Hummers.

Unless you live in Georgia, that is, where the situation is apparently dire enough that, according to a USA Today article, Gov. Sonny Purdue is trying to take legal action against the Army Corps of Engineers to make them stop releasing water to Florida (which the Corps says is crucial for the sunshine state’s agriculture). So, the first homeland war for water appears to be well underway already, albeit only in a political sense.

But the war is a hot one in some places around the globe already. According to Jeffrey Rothfelder, writing in a 2002 Boston Globe article, “nearly 2.2 billion people in more than 62 countries…are starved for water.” He cites conditions (at the time) in places like Haiti and Cambodia, “where residents subsist on an average of fewer than six liters per day.”

What precipitates humanitarian crises like Darfur? Ideology, yes, but perhaps it is more often an environmental disaster like drought, and the concomitant privation that comes with the sometimes sudden depletion of scarce, vital resources.

Imagine the day when Americans may be asked to restrict their usage of water. Oh, wait, you don’t have to fantasize about such an eventuality: Georgians—and not the Central Asian kind—are being asked to do so already, to stave off what is being described in the national media as an incipient crisis.

And how soon until South Carolinians themselves face the same crisis? Ask yourself: How often has it rained in the last few months? Our state sits partially atop the largest aquifer in the Southeast, so one presumes that we ought to be all right in the short term. Unless, of course, that same aquifer gets adulterated by toxins like Tritium from the Savannah River Site bomb factory. Keep an eye on those waste-pool liners, folks.

In any case, if we have in fact entered into a long-term period of drought here in the Southeast, the time may be nigh for us all to take conservation measures, before we are asked to do so in a mandatory fashion.

Then again, that probably won’t happen until it is almost too late. After all, we aren’t asked by our leaders to sacrifice anything at all in this supposed time of war (except perhaps for a few pesky civil liberties here and there), so why should they worry us about something as fantastical as a shortage of drinking water?

Why indeed. The water of life is life on this planet. “Food is the whole story,” Kurt Vonnegut once wrote in an article about the 1960’s Biafra famine. Water, though, is the precursor to any story that has ever been told.

So, in this time of saber rattling and bloodshed over precious, subterranean pools of black gold (not-so-cleverly cloaked as an ideological conflict), it may be time to thoughtfully reconsider when and how we use the water that we have left.

In the meantime, I’ll be filling up my emergency hydration supplies from the newest source right outside my shop’s windows. If we aren’t careful, the Five Points fountains might be the only water source left.

Postscript to “Cell Phone Suzie” from the last issue:

Literally the next day after my column excoriating cell phone blabbering motorists was published by this fine tabloid, my wife Jenn go T-boned by a nimrod blowing through a red light while on yap-yap-yapping on a phone. The kicker? The other driver’s phone was a hands-free device. So maybe my proposed relief in the form of a law requiring such behavior would indeed make little difference. In any case, Jenn’s okay, and that’s all that matters in the end (though my insistence at giving her a new nickname—“T-Bone,” naturally—has not gone over well at all). Just thought you would all find that interesting.

James D. McCallister is a longtime Five Points merchant, as well as the author of King’s Highway, a novel published in 2007 by Red Letter Press.