INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
Water is life. Water is the thread that interconnects life itself—the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, plants, animals, and human beings. Water connects us all. We are primarily water, and we are all sustained by it. Water is a commons.
Because cooperation and self-governance are vital to protecting water as a commons, water creates conditions of peace. When water disappears, or competition over scarce water resources grows, conflicts and wars are the result. Many conflicts and wars of our times are Water Wars—but as a matter of convenience, they are given cultural and religious labels and pushed into becoming religious conflicts. Water Democracy is at the heart of sustainability, justice, and peace.
In the many years since I first wrote Water Wars, the lessons from water have become more evident, more sharp, more intense, more vivid. The processes leading to destruction, pollution, and privatization of water have intensified and accelerated, and so have the movements to protect water and defend its existence as a commons.
Every time nonsustainable human activity disrupts the earth’s potential for renewing life’s processes, we disrupt the water cycle and water pathways. Seen from the perspective of water, every violation of the water cycle is an act of war and violence against the Earth and life itself. Every time nonsustainable and unjust paradigms of water or land use enclose the water commons, crippling the capacity of ecosystems to sustain themselves and undermining the sustenance of communities and entire societies, it is a Water War. This triggers new conflicts and violence.
In the last decade and a half since Water Wars was first published, the two big movements for water democracy in which I have been engaged have been the women’s movement against Coca Cola in Plachimada and against the World Bank–driven water privatization of Delhi’s water. The Coca Cola plant in Plachimada has been shut down, and Suez—the multinational corporation attempting to privatize Delhi’s water—was not able to pirate Delhi’s water supply. Most privatization of water projects pushed by World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been stopped wherever and whenever movements for water democracy have arisen to defend the rights of water, the rights of communities to their water commons, and the right to life.
Unnatural Disasters as Water Wars: Climate Change, Maldevelopment, and Disasters
Maldevelopment and climate chaos have combined to aggravate the impact of disasters. I prefer to talk of climate “chaos,” not climate change, for two reasons: “change” suggests predictability, and change in itself is not a bad thing. What we are experiencing is climate chaos—there is nothing predictable anymore about when the rains will come, where they will come, how intensely they will come. The high-altitude desert of Ladakh which gets no rain has had intense floods in 2007, 2010, and 2015. Uttarakhand—my home region—had such extreme rain on June 16 and 17, 2013 that settlements, homes, schools, roads, bridges, and thousands of lives were washed away.
Uttarakhand is the source of the sacred Ganga and its tributaries. The sources of the Ganga—the lifeline of India—were designated sacred sites in order to protect the Ganga Himalaya, and hence India. The yatra to the four pilgrimage centers of Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath—the Char Dham—was meant to both connect us culturally and spiritually to these “Bhu tirths” (sacred sites of the Earth) and to connect us ecologically to the sources of life, the sources of our rivers, the sources of a civilization’s water.
June 2013 was peak pilgrimage season in the Char Dham, including Kedarnath—which was washed away in its entirety—the lone ancient temple standing in defiance amidst the rubble left behind by the flood.
While the melting of snow in the Arctic has attracted a lot of attention, the snow melt in the Himalaya—the Third Pole—has been largely ignored, even though the Himalaya and Himalayan river systems support half of humanity. The melting of the Himalayan glaciers first creates glacial lakes that lead to major floods when they burst. Over time, as glaciers recede, perennial snow fed rivers become seasonal rivers, affecting agriculture, livelihoods, and society at large.
In Ladakh, a high-altitude alpine desert, glaciers, which are the only lifeline for the villages, are disappearing. Instead, Ladakh had heavy rainfall and floods in 2007, and then in 2010, the might of the water erased entire villages from the fragile landscape.
The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is already taking place. The Gangotri glacier, from which the sacred Ganges originates, is retreating at the average rate of 27 meters per year. The Satopanth glacier is retreating at 26.9 meters per year and Dokriani at 15.7 meters per year. Chorabari—which feeds into the river Mandakini—is retreating at 10.2 meters annually. This snow melt has created the Chorabari Lake (3,960 meters above sea level), also known as Gandhi.
Sarovar is located about 4 kilometers upstream of Kedarnath, which is approximately 400 meters long and 200 meters wide, having a depth of 15–20 meters.
On June 16 and 17, 2013, for more than 72 hours, intense and unprecedented rain poured down on the Himalayan range. The Chorabari Lake burst, leading to its complete draining within 5–10 minutes, as reported by the watch and ward staff of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG), who were present at the WIHG camp at Chorabari Glacier at the time. Usually floods come at the end of a heavy monsoon. In 2013, they came with the first rain. The monsoon came early, and the rainfall was far greater than usual.
This is climate chaos.
These are climate disasters and yet, just before the Copenhagen Climate Conference, the Government of India issued a report saying there was no impact on India’s glaciers. The Kedarnath tragedy shows how heavy the cost of this denial is. We need to recognize that our glaciers are threatened, and that melting glaciers will lead to more disasters, which will be greater in their might than we have seen. Disaster preparedness is the duty of government. But disaster preparedness needs honest and robust ecological science, and honest and robust participatory democracy.
The heavy rainfall together with melting of snow in the surrounding Chorabari Lake washed away the banks of the Mandakini River, causing massive devastation to Kedarnath valley and surrounding areas. The flood damaged the banks of River Mandakini for 18km between Kedarnath and Sonprayag, completely washing away the towns of Gaurikund (1,990 meters above sea level), Rambara (2,740 meters above sea level), and Kedarnath (3,546 meters above sea level). The roads and footpath between Gaurikund and Kedarnath were also damaged, leaving no way for the injured and stranded to be rescued for days afterward. According to local people, more than 20,000 people died in the Uttarakhand disaster of 2013.
June 2013 was more than a natural disaster. Climate change combined with maldevelopment to create the unprecedented disaster. The intense rain in a short period was typical of the extreme events climate change is bringing. And its impact was aggravated by the hydropower projects under construction in river valleys in Uttarakhand. The 99 Mega Watt power project at Singoli—Bhatwari, near Augustmuni, being constructed by Larson & Toubro, was a major cause of the devastation in Mandakini Valley in 2013. It is one of the 12 hydroelectric projects coming up on the Mandakini.
The ecological damage caused by maldevelopment has reduced the capacity of the mountain ecosystem to deal with heavy rain. Climate havoc adds to this vulnerability. The worst landslides occurred where tunnels were being built for these hydro-electric projects. Blasting the fragile mountains with dynamite, recklessly, for the construction of dams and tunnels has triggered thousands of landslides. When the first rain comes, these landslides fill the riverbed with rubble. There is no space for the water to flow. We are literally stealing the ecological space from our rivers and when they have no space to flow, they will overflow, cut banks and cause flooding.
The debris from the tunnels was dumped in the riverbed as well. When the floods carried the debris in the flood waters, the riverbed rose by 20 to 30 feet at places, the towering river waters washing away homes, villages, schools, roads, and bridges, killing the pilgrims as well as local people, who were all trapped. This destruction was aggravated by ignorance and greed.
We need to learn, once again, to have reverence for our sacred mountains and rivers. We need to be informed by the latest of ecological sciences, not by an obsolete “development” model, which is nothing more than an exploitation model that has led to tragic disasters, like the floods in Uttarakhand. The disaster is clearly manmade, climate change having been caused by man and made worse by man’s addiction to maldevelopment. Politicians, decision makers, and businesses need to take responsibility for the disaster their actions, policies, and greed have caused.
Today, driven by greed and corruption, the government has become ignorant of the Indian culture of the sacred and the ecological fragility of the Himalayas. The sacred sets limits; ecological fragility sets limits. Today these limits are being violated, as rivers are dammed and diverted for electricity, and the pilgrimage to the Char Dhams is being turned into crass, consumerist mass tourism.
In 1916, in his book Garhwal, Ancient and Modern, Rai Patiram Bahadur wrote, “We may say that there is no country in the world of the dimension of Garhwal, which has so many rivers as a traveler will find in this land. The district has 60 rivers of different size; besides these, there are rivulets, rills, springs and fountains in hundreds, showing that nature has been especially bountiful to this land in the matter of its water supply” (quoted in Semwal, 21).
Five hundred dams are planned in our region on the Ganga system. Swami Gyanswarup Sanand (Formerly Dr. G. D. Agrawal) has been repeatedly going on fast to save the Ganga. His efforts forced the central government to declare the area from Uttarkashi to Gaumukh an ecologically fragile zone. The present Chief Minister has been blocking it in the name of “development.” I hope that the disaster of 2013 will make him realize the value of protecting the Ganga Himalaya as an ecologically fragile zone. And it is not just the stretch between Uttarkashi and Gaumukh. We need to protect the entire catchment of the Ganga system as a cultural heritage and ecologically fragile, sensitive ecosystem.
Forty years ago, I joined the Chipko movement as a volunteer. The women-led Chipko movement started after the 1972 Alaknanda disaster, which was caused by logging in the Alaknanda valley. Women connected the deforestation to landslides and flooding. As they pointed out, the primary products of the forest were not timber and revenue, but soil and water. Forests left standing to protect the fragile Himalayan slopes provide more to the economy than when they are extracted as dead timber.
It took the 1978 Uttarkashi disaster for the Government to recognize that the women were right, when the government had to spend much more on flood relief than the revenues they were getting from timber extraction. In 1981, in response to the Chipko movement, logging was banned in the Garhwal Himalaya above 1,000 meters. Today government policy recognizes that forestry in the fragile Himalaya has to be conservation forestry, which maximizes the ecological services of the forest with protecting—not extracting—forestry. In 1983, the Supreme Court of India ordered a stop to limestone mining in Doon Valley, recognizing that the limestone that was left in the mountains contributed more to the economy than the limestone that was extracted through mining.
The 2013 disaster should wake us up to the social, ecological, and economic costs of destructive policies which have devastated our fragile and beautiful mountain ecosystems. The Himalaya are the youngest mountain system in the world. They cannot bear the violence of deforestation and dam building. They need gentleness and respect. Chipko shook our policy makers out of their slumber, which had allowed them to think of forests as timber mines, and woke them to the ecological functions of the forests in the catchments of our rivers. The 2013 disaster should shake them out of their current slumber, which is allowing them to see rivers as nothing more than 20,000 megawatts of hydropower. It should help them to realize that when respected, our rivers are rivers of life, and when violated, they can become rivers of death.
Industrial Agriculture, the Climate, and Water Crisis
In the previous edition of Water Wars, I wrote about how the climate crisis is not just an issue of increasing temperatures, but also of climate extremes. Climate extremes are about too little or too much water. As I cited from an old Oriya expression:
“Jala bhule, shrustinasa, jala bihune srustinasa.”
Too much or too little water destroys creation.
Intensification of droughts, floods and cyclones is one of the predictable impacts of climate change and climate instability. In the final analysis, India’s food security rests on the monsoon.
Monsoon failure and widespread drought imply a deepening of the already severe food crisis, which was triggered by trade liberalization policies and has made India the capital of hunger (Navdanya, “Why is every 4th Indian Hungry,” 2009). It also implies the deepening of the water crisis that compelled me to write Water Wars.
The monsoons recharge the groundwater and surface water systems. When there is a drought, there will be reduced recharge. Since 1966, as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution model of water-intensive chemical farming adopted under World Bank and US pressure, India has over-exploited her groundwater, creating a water famine. I had addressed this crisis in my 1984 book The Violence of the Green Revolution. Chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution use ten times more water than the biodiverse ecological farming systems the Green Revolution replaced.
In the 1970s, the World Bank gave massive loans to India to promote groundwater mining. It forced states like Maharashtra to stop growing water-prudent millets, like jowar—which needs 300 mm of water—and shift to water-guzzling crops like sugarcane—which needs 2500 mm of water. In a region with 600 millimeters of rainfall and 10 percent groundwater recharge, this is a recipe for water famine (see Navdanya’s “Financing the Water Crisis”).
A new study led by Matthew Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and published in Nature has shown that water levels in North India have fallen by 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) per year between August 2002 and August 2008. More than 26 cubic miles (109 cubic km) of groundwater have disappeared from aquifers between 2002 and 2008. Most of this groundwater has been extracted for chemical Green Revolution –style farming.
Soil is the biggest water reservoir we have. When we return organic matter to the soil, we increase the capacity of the soil to hold moisture. Soil moisture is the most reliable drought and climate insurance. As Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, has shown:
• Volume of Water Retained /ha (to 30 cm) in relation to soil organic matter (OM).
• 0.5% OM = 80,000 liters (common conventional level)
• 1 % OM = 160,000 liters (common conventional level)
• 2 % OM = 320,000 liters
• 3 % OM = 480,000 liters
• 4 % OM = 640,000 liters
• 5 % OM = 800,000 liters
Industrial agriculture destroys the water-holding capacity of soil. Hence, it requires more external inputs of irrigation. While contributing to climate change, it also makes agriculture more vulnerable.
Not only has chemical agriculture mined and wasted groundwater, it has also mined soil fertility and contributed, in great part, to climate change. Chemical fertilizers destroy the living processes of the soil and make soils more vulnerable to drought. Chemical fertilizers also produce nitrogen oxygen, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The solution for the climate crisis, the food crisis, or the water crisis under which the world is reeling are the same—biodiversity-based organic farming systems. Biodiverse ecological farms address the climate crisis by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases such as nitrogen oxide and absorbing carbon dioxide in plants and in the soil. Biodiversity and soils are the most effective carbon sinks. They also adapt to climate change and drought by increasing organic matter in soil, which increases the moisture-holding capacity of soil, and hence drought-proofs our agriculture.
Biodiverse organic farms increase food security by increasing the resilience and reducing the climate vulnerability of farming systems. They also enhance food security because they have higher production of food and nutrition per acre than Green Revolution monocultures, which measure the yield of one commodity, not the total food output, nor the nutritional quality of food.
Biodiverse organic systems also address the water crisis. Firstly, production based on water-prudent crops like millets reduces water demand. Secondly, organic systems use ten times less water than chemical systems. Thirdly, by transforming the soil into a water reservoir through increasing its organic matter content, biodiverse organic systems reduce irrigation dependence and help conserve water in agriculture. Thus, maximizing biodiversity and organic matter production simultaneously increases climate resilience, food security, and water security.
The 1965–1966 drought in India was used to push the Green Revolution, which has increased vulnerability to drought. The 2009 and 2015 droughts, and the climate crisis, are similarly being used to push the second Green Revolution with GMO seeds and patents on seeds. This will deepen Indian agriculture’s vulnerability to drought.
The severe and frequent droughts in India and other countries is an opportunity to put water conservation in place, and through agriculture, at the center of agricultural policy. Instead of selling costly seeds and chemicals to produce nutritionally empty commodities, we must grow nutritional food, using less water while increasing the soil’s capacity to hold water for times of scarcity. It is vital that Governments not allow themselves to be used by corporations as a marketer of GM seeds and Roundup in the midst of a water and climate emergency, to not allow the establishment of soil and climate data monopolies under the garb of climate-smart agriculture.
Having contributed to the creation of the crisis, corporations who have profited from chemical industrial agriculture are attempting to turn the climate crisis into an opportunity to control biopiracy-based climate-resilient seeds and climate data, while attempting to criminalize genuinely climate-resilient biodiverse organic agriculture. Monsanto now owns the world’s biggest climate data and soil data corporations. Armed with proprietary big data, Monsanto is ready to profit from a crisis once more. The worse it gets, the better it is for Monsanto. Mitigating the crisis would not be profitable to climate deniers like Monsanto.
The Gates Foundation and the fertilizer and biotech industry—the Exxons of agriculture—joined hands at the Paris climate summit to push the false solution of climate-smart agriculture. The Gates Foundation, along with the other biotech evangelists of our times, have it completely wrong—climate-smart agriculture and “One Agriculture,” packaged in a PR bubble, will starve the world and worsen the refugee crisis, which is already spiraling out of control. The Gates Foundation, pretending to feed the world, is proselytizing the very model of agriculture that has contributed to half of the climate problem as a solution.
One Agriculture, for the profit of one company, is hardly a mitigation strategy for climate chaos. Agroecology is already helping check climate change, by converting fossilized carbon to Green Carbon. Every seed is an embodiment of millennia of nature’s evolution and centuries of farmers’ breeding. It is the distilled expression of the intelligence of the earth and intelligence of farming communities. Farmers have bred seeds for diversity, resilience, taste, nutrition, health, and adaption to local agro-ecosystems. In times of climate change we need the biodiversity of farmers’ varieties to adapt and evolve. Climate extremes are being experienced through more frequent and intense cyclones which bring salt water to the land. For resilience to cyclones we need salt-tolerant varieties, and we need them in the commons.
The delusional corporations have not “invented” climate-resilient traits in seeds. They have simply pirated the traits from farmers’ varieties. Fifteen hundred patents on climate-resilient crops have been taken out by big biotech. Navdanya/Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, have published the list in the report “Biopiracy of Climate Resilient Crops: Gene Giants Steal Farmers Innovation.” With these very broad patents, corporations like Monsanto can prevent access to climate-resilient seeds in the aftermath of climate disasters through patents—which grant an exclusive right to produce, distribute, sell the patented product. Climate-resilient traits are not created through genetic engineering, they are pirated from seeds farmers have evolved over generations. For thousands of years, farmers, especially women, have evolved and bred seed freely in partnership with each other and with nature, to further increase the diversity of that which nature has given us and adapt it to the needs of different cultures.
Biodiversity and cultural diversity have mutually shaped one another over time. Along coastal areas, farmers have evolved flood-tolerant and salt-tolerant varieties of rice—such as Bhundi, Kalambank, Lunabakada, Sankarchin, Nalidhulia, Ravana, Seulapuni, and Dhosarakhuda. After the Orissa Supercyclone, Navdanya could distribute two trucks of salt-tolerant rices to farmers because we had conserved them, as a commons, in our community seed bank in Orissa.
What needs to be done is clear. In the case of climate change, the key strategy should be a reduction of emissions and strategies for adaptation. We must move away from industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture and away from a centralized, global commodity-based food system that exacerbates emissions. Biodiversity conservation will be central to adaptation. In place of the biodiversity destroying industrial monocultures, including those based on GMO seeds, we need a shift to agroecological practices that conserve biodiversity and ensure biosafety.
We cannot depend on a mechanistic mind and its unscientific denial of the sciences of the interconnected nature of living systems and ecosystems to get us out of the crisis it has created. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.” Centralized, monoculture-based, fossil fuel-intensive petrochemical systems, including that of GMO agriculture, are not flexible. They cannot adapt and evolve. GMO technology has failed across the world. We need flexibility, resilience, and adaptation to a changed reality. This resilience comes from diversity. This diversity of knowledge, economics, and politics is what I call Earth Democracy.
Desertification, Displacement, and Conflicts: The Emerging Face of Water Wars
When we make a transition from chemical agriculture to ecological, organic agriculture, we conserve water by making soil a water reservoir. This reduces demands for irrigation, making more water available to sustain ecosystems and societies. Industrial globalized agriculture is using up more than 75 percent of the global water supply for irrigation. Through the combination of water exploitation and climate change induced extreme droughts, it also contributes to soil degradation, desertification and displacement of people from their land when the land can no longer support life.
In Terra Viva, a Manifesto we released at the Expo in Milan on 2nd May 2015, we have traced how the refugee crisis, which has displaced millions from Syria, and is now threatening to destabilize Europe, can be traced to the soil and water crisis, and of course the resulting wars and conflicts.
Across the world we witness new violent conflicts emerging as ecological consequences of the predatory economic model. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), 40 percent of the intrastate conflicts over a 60-year period were associated with land and natural resources.
Moreover, 80 percent of the major armed conflicts in 2007 occurred in vulnerable dry ecosystems. Whether it is the rise in violence in Punjab in l984, or in Syria and Nigeria today, the conflicts originate in the destruction of soil and water, and the inability of land to sustain lives and livelihoods any more. Unfortunately, however, the conflicts are not seen in their ecological contexts and are relegated instead to religious motives, with more violence and militarization offered as solutions.
The exposure of more and more people to water scarcity and hunger opens the door to the failure of fragile states and regional conflicts. In sub-Saharan Africa, the combined challenge of an increased population, demands on natural resources, and the effects of climate change (particularly drought) on food and water supplies are likely to lead to tensions, which could result in conflict.
The convergence of financial, food, climate, and energy crises impacts soils and peoples in many ways. Coupled with wars, these translate into waves of internally and externally displaced persons. Uprooted people are vulnerable to other exploitations, and the soils they once knew and defended are open for appropriation, despoliation, and general harm. In rural areas where people depend on scarce productive land resources, land degradation is a driver of forced migration. An estimated 42 percent of households intensify their seasonal mobility in the event of poor harvests, while 17 percent migrate when there is crop destruction, and 13 percent leave in the case of strong climatic events such as extreme droughts. By 2050, 200 million people may be permanently displaced environmental migrants.
Syria is part of the fertile crescent where agriculture evolved. Many of the crops that are now the staples of humanity are gifts from this region. For thousands of years, farmers sustained the soil and water. A few decades of the spread of uniform seeds bred for chemicals has drained the soils and groundwater. The extended drought between 2006 and 2009 triggered displacement; the refugee crisis; and the consequent conflicts, wars, and extremism that have now engulfed our world. Before the Syrian uprising of 2011, 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced the most severe and prolonged drought, causing crop failures in the land where agriculture began and has endured for 12,000 years.
The impact of the drought was aggravated by nonsustainable use of land and water through the promotion of nonsustainable, chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. More than 80 percent of crops failed and more than 75 percent of livestock died, wiping out livelihoods and forcing a mass migration of more than a million farmers and herders to cities unable to handle the influx, resulting in social instability and the country’s civil war.
Syrian Refugees—A snapshot of the crisis in the Middle East and Europe, by the Migration Policy Centre European University Institute, Florence, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused- by-climate-change. html?_r=0
http://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/is-climate-change-behind-the-syrian-civil-war http://www.voanews.com/content/drought-called-factor-in-syria-uprising/1733068.html
http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/
An estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011, taking refuge in neighboring countries or within Syria itself. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), over three million people have fled to Syria’s immediate neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. Six and a half million people are internally displaced within Syria. A million refugees have arrived in Europe by sea, and 34,000 over land. Many lost their lives, including little Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed ashore on a beach and reminds us to change our ways.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911
The massive influx of refugees has destabilized Europe politically and culturally, creating divisions between countries and within societies. The displacement of Syria, which is rooted in drought, is erased from the public mind by blaming religion for the upheaval. This is how water wars mutate into culture wars and religious conflicts.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram is presented as an extremist religious movement. However, as Luc Gnacadja, the former head of the UNCCD has attested, “the depletion of Lake Chad helped create the conditions for conflict. In much of northern Nigeria, Muslim herders are in competition with Christian farmers for dwindling water supplies. The so-called religious fight is actually about access to vital resources.
It is not just about Boko Haram, in the Sahel belt, you will see almost the same challenge in Mali and in Sudan. Furthermore, men who were or would have been gainfully employed as farmers, fishermen, fish sellers, and pastoralists have now been conscripted into Boko Haram, with many of them participating in the deadly night raids of the terrorist group. Without a minimum of security of access to the land, restoration of land through investment is not possible. Peace is a prerequisite.”
The disappearance of Lake Chad and the emergence of conflicts are interconnected. The Lake Chad basin is one of the most important agricultural heritage sites in the world, providing a lifeline to nearly 30 million people in four countries: Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. Lake Chad gets the name Chad from a local word meaning “large expanse of water.” It gave its name to the country of Chad. It is the remnant of a former inland sea, paleolake Mega-Chad, which at its largest covered an area of 1,000,000 square kilometers sometime before 5000 BC.
Since the 1960s, Lake Chad has shrunk considerably. In 1983, Lake Chad was reported to have covered 10,000 square kilometers. By the year 2000, it had shrunken to less than 1,500 square kilometers.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has called the situation an “ecological catastrophe.”
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), a regional body that regulates the use of the basin’s water and other natural resources, maintain that the damming of rivers and irrigation methods used by the countries bordering the lake are partly responsible for its shrinkage.
The lake is mainly fed by the Chari River through the Lagone tributary, which used to provide 90 percent of the lake’s water. The diversion of water from the Chari River to irrigation projects and dams along the Jama’are and Hadejia Rivers in northeastern Nigeria preventing the lake’s recharge. As parts of the lake dry up, most farmers and cattle herders have moved toward greener areas, where they compete for land resources with host communities. Others have migrated to Kano, Abuja, Lagos, and other big cities.
The impact of the drying lake is causing tensions among communities around Lake Chad. There are repeated conflicts among nationals of different countries over control of the remaining water. And conflicts have grown between farmers and pastoralists.
As people are displaced and insecurities grow, identity is transformed and destroyed. Among these vulnerable cultures and identities, terrorism, extremism, and xenophobia take virulent forms. Vicious cycles of violence and exclusion—cultural, political, and economic—predominate.
These are the roots of the rise of the new terrorism and extremism. This is the new face of Water Wars.
These vicious cycles of violence begin with violence against the Earth, violence against water, and violence against the rights of communities, which are all sustained by water.
To make peace, we need to make peace with water and with the Earth. We need to cultivate our deeper identities as earthlings and as water beings. We need to remember that we are water, soil, seed, and earth.
That is why, at the Paris climate meetings, I joined movements from across the world to plant a Garden of Hope and made a pact to protect the Earth and each other.
http://seedfreedom.info/campaign/pact-for-the-earth/
February, 2016
Delhi, India