Western Cape Crisis
As stress over water rises, don’t expect a brave new world
I have seen the future, and it works," proclaimed a celebrated New York journalist after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919. As Cape Town hurtles towards becoming the first major city whose taps run dry, we may also be the advance guard into a global future. Populations will continue to swell while resources dwindle. In the developed world, where citizens have long come to assume that running tap water is a right, social stresses will be particularly fraught. It has become common cause that wars in this century may be over water. But what of internal tension in densely populated cities? In Cape Town these days the norm is blue skies with not a rain cloud in sight. Lincoln Steffens, who thought he’d seen a workable future in the USSR, later disavowed that cheery sentiment. Today, as we face a parched crisis, the question is: will this emergency result in conflict or some sort of communal cohesion? Both globally and locally resources are unlikely to alter dramatically, so change will ...
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