Is water the next major geopolitical issue?

hello from tucson. i figured this was a great place to talk about water.

So there’s a lot of conversations out there about water being the only resource that really matters and water wars in the future and you know, to a degree there’s something to this.

Water is essential for agriculture, for human existence. We all need at least 50 gallons a day in order to maintain a moderate industrial lifestyle and a lot of agriculture happens in desert regions because you can precision control the water inflow and get really high yields so long as the water isn’t expensive.

It is a common political issue within countries, but it is only very rarely a geopolitical issue across countries and it has to do with how we as humans have developed.

Most ethnicities began…..i’m sorry let me rephrase that. 

Most ethnicities that dominate the world today began as tribes that existed along a water course and because they had access to reliable water and more reliable farmland and more reliable food supplies, they grew in number and expanded up and down that water course until they controlled the whole thing.

So there are Russian rivers and Chinese rivers and French rivers and so on. 

That means that for most rivers and for most peoples, the water course and the ethnicity are intimately tied.

There are very, very few places in the world where this is not the case, and where a water course is shared. Now of course those are important. The biggest one in Europe of course, is the Danube, which starts in Germany goes through Hungary and Serbia and Romania, Bulgaria on its way to the Black Sea.

But that’s not one that’s really geopolitically tricky outside of trade because the whole region gets more than enough rain to support agriculture without irrigation.

It gets a little bit more dicey when you’re talking about the Nile because it starts in Ethiopia goes through Sudan.

And the Ethiopians are building a giant dam that the Egyptians fear, reasonably, is going to destroy their way of life and maybe kill tens of millions of people, so expect tension there. 

But that sort of tension or in central Asia is limited, because most of these water courses are internal political and economic resources.

So all the strife you can look forward to happening within your country as opposed to with a neighbor. until next time and another vista.