Water Scarcity, White Guilt & You (Vegans)

hey I'm according this early in the
morning before I get on a train that is going to take me far far away another 14 hour long train ride from one end of Europe to the other but I thought I would make a comment on a knot of political issues that I've seen reflected on especially amongst vegans lightly because vegans have become sensitized to the whole question of water scarcity and the sense in which meat agriculture the production of meat impacts the water available for other purposes now it has always been the case it has been the case since the invention of photography that people have had their emotions stirred by seeing of the human beings suffering due to lack of water there have always been within my lifetime stirring images of people around the world whether in Africa or otherwise afflicted by lack of access to water and now these are sort of backed up with statistics that are interesting but misleading about how many millions of people lack access to water often presented adjacent to a sentence telling you that so many people struggle to carry water as a burden for so many hours per day over so many kilometers per day and so on water scarcity is actually a completely different issue from lack of access to potable drinking water potable just mean safe to drink now safe to drink immediately this seems like a simple issue for charities to get involved in for human people with humanitarian ceased to get involved in for vegans involvement and it's not like most things in development economics it's profoundly technical and its technical terms of Social Sciences its technical in terms of geology and the Natural Sciences its technical in terms of the technology you're going to use to get the water to people and the political barriers concerns and considerations are also very technical many of the things i see vegans saying about this issue seems to presume that water is a globally transferable resource and it's not the fact that there is a water shortage in California does not mean that you can improve that water shortage by using less water in Alaska and actually Alaska and California are quite close together I mention Alaska for the reason that it has been repeatedly proposed by both private companies and by the government in Alaska that they start sending boats oil tankers large boats full of water from Alaska to California that's been proposed several times and every time it gets proposed somebody with a degree in economics gets out their calculator and their pencil and does some kind of feasibility study or sketch and says look guys it's not happening it's never going to work it's never economically going to make sense to pump water out of Alaska onto a boat and send to California even though water is indeed abundant in Alaska and it is indeed scarce in California now which I would even broader gaps between ecological niches shall we say if you live in New York City using less drinking water is not going to help people in Africa in any way the message of this video is not as simple as that the difference between water scarcity and lack of access to potable water lack of access to foot of water is for example a problem in Brazil it's a problem in Laos and Cambodia where I lived but all three of those countries are basically drowning in rain loss of Cambodia have plenty of rivers and swamps and lakes and everything else the problem with making that drinking water potable drink safe to drink is mostly overcome by boiling water you could also have a filtration plants you can do all kinds of things to make water safe to drink but again to imagine that when you're looking at a raw statistic for how many millions of people lack access to boiling water well the problem there is not people millions of people in the middle of a desert who have to walk many kilometres to get a bucket of water and bring it back again and it's very misleading to think of it in those ways now what are the solutions as I've just mentioned the solution is not filling up a boat with water in Alaska and even carrying it as far as California which is quite close much less could it be filling up a boat with water in Alaska and moving it to Africa or Cambodia or anywhere else these are problems that have the solutions in reliance predominantly on local government I remember reading a study that was claiming Brazil could solve its potable water problems one hundred percent through decentralized collection of rainwater and then passing that rainwater through a very simple filter the collection of rainwater was cheap technology it's why I use the word decentralized you can set up little tanks here and there made out of concrete basically you just collect rainwater into a tank pump it through a filter than people to take showers and and so on now i do not know that reporting claiming a hundred percent that may be exaggerating at someone but obviously a very large percentage of the water needs drink drinking water needs fresh water needs for countries like Brazil could be provided through collecting drinking water and you know there are hard limits to international intervention I used to live and work in Laos and Southeast Asia international intervention can solve problems it can also create problems terrible long lasting problems we had christian charities coming into laos and digging wells so these are called deep wells it's basically you take a metal pipe and drive into the earth and start pumping up water now I know the charity I'm not going to need it's a crisp it's a it's an American religious charity then I'm thinking of in particular I assume this charity was doing this partly just out of habit because they had past experience doing charity work in Africa other places where water scarcity is a big deal why they thought these wells were needed it was a problem to begin with the second problem was the water these del with hurt me the water these wells started pumping up was actually poisoned with arsenic so you get people of good faith people who are true believers thinking they're doing something positive and in fact they're doing something as terrible long-term consequences one of the reasons to leave these projects in the hands of local people in the government is precisely so that there is local responsibility for these projects whether that's just a bunch of concrete tanks that collect rainwater or it's digging up wells or it's more grandiose plans for them putting a dam on a river pumping water out of aquifers one of the problems international intervention is people buy an airplane ticket they fly in and then they buy another airplane ticket and they fly out and there is no long-term engagement with responsibility for the issues and water is on the list of tremendously long term issues and it is on the list of things that local governments need to be able to take care of themselves they need to have the capacity to take responsible for that how does this whole thing relate back to begin zhem well vegans tend to be highly ethically motivated people and I understand that they look at a photograph of someone in Africa who apparently lacks access drinking water and they want to try to sell veganism as if by you eating more bananas and less meat you're going to help these people in Africa and the example could be from Latin America or Asia happens the photos I've seen lately America and that is not true it to me it's not even appealing illusion or myth it's misleading in many ways in terms of the continent of Africa what you really need to look at is population growth Africa has just undergone a period of doubling its population as a continent and whether you want to save them congratulations or not whether you see that as a crisis or bringing impending doom or not the reality is that whatever infrastructure they had before whatever sources dream more than four are now taxed in a way they were not previously the distribution of human population around the globe has always been attached to rivers and streams and lakes human beings as a species have always developed in close connection to sources of drinking water and even within the comment of Africa that's true you look at where the deserts are and you look at the number of people per square kilometer always has been true but it's always going to be true and although africa's population has increased dramatically also now the rate of urbanization is increasing dramatically so people are moving from the countryside possibly from savannah areas from deserts and arid countries and areas they're moving to cities and those cities are inevitably positioned on lakes rivers and other source the drinking water so there were a lot of different dynamics at play and it's exactly the sort of not of political and ecological issues that you really do not want outside amateurs getting involved in just like those Christian missionaries I mention Laos is easy to have your heart in the right place and to do the wrong thing for the right reasons