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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
In the last three editions of World Ocean Radio, we have examined the exemplary address of water by the nation of Morrocco where customary law and government policy have identified water as the most valuable natural resource around which to organize structures and behaviors that have evolved over time to sustain community, past, present, and future.
Morrocco is an arid land, a rough topography of extremes where water has always been scarce and human adaptation a necessity of survival. In an extraordinary museum of “water and civilization” in Marrakesh, this progress of water is presented as a social system, successful at all levels of community development, from nomadic tribes to rural settlements, from caravanserai in the desert to ocean ports, from self-sustaining harvest to international agricultural exchange, from small-scale use to urban volume, from utility to ritual, a function for the nurturing of a nation state to the well-being of its soul.
Thus, water is top of mind and body, a reality recognized by measurement and scale and need, by national policy and local governance, at once by collective commitment to sustainability and individual acceptance of responsibility and account. Morrocco has founded a “school for water,” to study and innovate for water conservation at every level of society in the 21st century and beyond. It is a living model of what we have long advocated here, of a “new hydraulic society.”
The challenge is to raise water consciousness to the level required to sustain supply to a burgeoning population worldwide. While water is understood as necessity, we have long taken it for granted, always available until it isn’t. Many geographical areas have lived with water scarcity for a long time; but many others, seemingly water rich are just now having to deal with inadequate supply, further diminished by climate change, new weather patterns, drought, fire, erosion, and desiccation that have confronted past complacency and assumed reliance with disappearing aquifers, shifting distribution, exhausted wells, and inadequate availability for the needs of manufacturing, energy production, sanitation, and other key elements of human health. Water is becoming a source of conflict: [it can be argued that crises in the middle-east and Africa are the ultimate outcome of territorial disputes linked to water access,] from polar melt to river volume, to commercial commodification, to the detriment of communities and conventions suddenly upset by inequitable distribution and critically diminished availability of a most necessary element for successful living.
Morrocco has a National Water Policy; most nations do not.
To adapt to the loss of what is a finite supply, we might take a look at our water habits: to the many little things we could change, from dripping faucets and home laundry to long showers and garden irrigation and, even the things we buy. We each have a water footprint; In addition, we have also a water shadow, indirect use hidden in manufactured goods, things we eat, power we consume, and more. There is water hidden in production lines and fashion, energy demand for cooling generators and data centers. Water, water, everywhere even when we can’t see it, it is there, like a shadow, blocked by light, proximate, sometimes oppressive. Just for a moment think about our inadequate treatment of enormous volumes of recyclable water, that could be put back into the cycle for therapeutic use; when I do, I feel a consuming sadness…over the waste, the unthinking self-destruction, the failure to use well what we know will make our life better, indeed best.
The Moroccan example speaks to the fullness of water and civilization. To ignore this relation is an absence, a dark silence, a failure that by saying nothing, doing nothing, we conspire against society and ourselves. It is unforgiveable.
Water is life. The sea connects all things.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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