Last weekend I fortuitously watched the classic David Lynch film Dune and today I read a recent editorial in The Economist on the world’s water shortages. Dune’s inhabitants were equipped with suits that recycled fluids enabling them to survive for weeks in the open desert.
The thought intrigued me and made me think about what life would be on earth in 50 years, let alone 10,000. The Economist discussed the potential for a water shortage in the future, but for reasons we might not think.
It requires 15,000 liters of water to produce one kilo of beef, and the meaty diet of Westerners requires an average of 5,000 liters/day to sustain. The vegetarian diets of Africa and Asia by comparison require just 2,000. As economic conditions improve in these regions meat consumption increases dramatically – for example, the average Chinese person ate 20kg of meat in 1985 vs. 50kg today.
Moreover, in the future almost all of the 2 billion people added to the world’s population will be added to third-world cities, and city dwellers consume more water than their rural counterparts. There is also evidence that global warming is speeding up hydrolic cycles, or the rate at which water evaporates. This leads to increases in floods and droughts, which place great stress on water reserves, and accelerated melting of glaciers and ice caps that otherwise act as natural regulators of the global water supply.
All of this reminds me of how prescient Dune was regarding what life might look like 10,000 years into the future. My historian’s intuition tells me economics will dictate policy and lifestyle changes more than green advocacy, much like the clean car movement has finally got some legs with the impending collapse of the Big Three and high gas prices.
