by Noel Bell

Created on: February 11, 2009   Last Updated: February 14, 2009

For centuries, water from the Yellow River has been used to irrigate the rice growing plains of China, but this vital water supply is threatened by competing human demands for sewer systems, drinking water, and irrigation systems. Farmers have tried to do their part by waiting for rainfall, but when the dry seasons come, China resorts to water mining to meet the country's competing water demands. Water mining alone destroys the fragile water tables and the environmental balance of fresh and polluted water.

China, however, is not the lone player in this process. Most other industrialized countries try to balance their water resources in response to these same demands. This intercontinental trend to balance water resources, coupled with global climate change and political pressures, strains the world hydrologic system to its limits.

Individuals, therefore, must change their fundamental attitudes and behaviors on a very large scale to have the capacity to change the declining world water supply. Organized governments have the ability to inject resources into the improvement of tired and inefficient water management systems and policies, but they can also ruin it. We have to reorganize ourselves to act and change our organizations at the individual level and beyond or the resulting imbalance of water resources could trigger catastrophic intercontinental water shortages and conflicts. We must rethink agriculture, politics and our attitude toward the environment.

Agricultural practices alone can change the way we think about water. "Historically, water scarcity was a local issue," asserted Lester Brown in his March/April 2008 article in the Humanist. He said, "because it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain" that grain becomes a trading tool for water. According to Brown, as a population grows, a country's demand for both grain and water grows simultaneously. If a country chooses to save water by reducing grain production, thereby saving the 1000 tons of water per ton of grain, then the country must start to import its grain from other countries. In turn, importing grain increases the strain on the water supply in the other grain producing countries like the United States where water consumption is off the charts. If Brown's cycle creates a condition where more countries like China must import their grain, then the global demand for water could force the system into irreversible decline. More importantly, the cycle pushes the water supply issue across

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