by DGR News Service | Mar 13, 2020 | Colonialism & Conquest, The Problem: Civilization
By Boris Wu / Deep Green Resistance Germany
Deep Green Resistance stands for the resistance against the culture of empire, aka civilization. For many people this may sound very new, strange and, understandably enough, frightening; most people associate something positive with the term “civilization”. As a person born into this culture it is not easy to question it, and even harder to perceive the culture itself as the major problem. This is where DGR’s analysis comes in.
So, what is civilization?
History begins about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped grunting in caves, invented agriculture and gradually settled down. Agriculture and sedentariness enabled the construction of ever larger cities, innovations such as the monetary economy led to trade relations and an increasingly complex division of labor. The development of writing systems made it possible to literally write history. From then on, a period of constant development began, with higher and higher, ever more complex forms of technology. Civilization was so successful that it has spread all over the world to this day.
This is just a short attempt to describe the common myth. Another description from writer Fabian Scheidler:
“The standard version – the myth of Western civilization – tells of a process of tediously achieved progress which, despite all adversities and setbacks, has led to more prosperity, more peace, more knowledge, more culture and more freedom in the end. In this version wars, environmental devastation and genocides are slips, relapses, setbacks or undesirable side effects of a generally beneficial process of increasing civilization.”
Wikipedia provides the following definition:
“A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.”
According to Derrick Jensen, civilization is “(…) a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (…), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (…), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.”
Deep Green Resistance uses Derrick Jensen’s definition of civilization. Civilizations are by definition not sustainable and never can be. Yet there are two possible ways for civilizations to end: Either they are consumed by a even larger and/or more powerful civilization, a process which is usually accomplished by the use of brutal violence and leads to deep, intergenerational trauma (as we’ve seen with the example of the Aztecs), or they collapse because they used up their resources and cannot expand any more for some reason (as we’ve seen with historical civilizations, and we experience nowadays with our own industrial civilization, which is on the edge of abyss because it is killing the planet).
This is why we advocate for a culture of resistance and the building of alternatives.
Civilization usually looks good only from the perspective of the civilized; Samuel Huntington puts it very aptly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
We, as members of Western civilization, should listen very carefully and respectfully to the voices of others, in particular indigenous peoples, since they have been and and still are being hit hardest by the violence of our culture. The Osage chief Big Soldier said:
“I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”
Apart from indigenous peoples, it is sometimes ethnologists who are able to see our culture from an outside perspective:
“On his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss came across a tribal culture that seemed irritable and highly dangerous to him. It plundered nature, devastated entire regions, worshipped arty idols, massacred its own kind and was notorious for its historical carnages. In the meantime, this exotic tribal culture has defeated all competitors and rules the world. Its name is ‘civilization’.”
Let me end with the words of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore:
“The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of ‘divide and rule’ in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.”
“Civilization, civilization, pride of Europeans… Whatever you strive for, whatever you do, you always move within a lie. When you see it, the tears flow, the pain screams. You are the violence before the law. You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. Everything you touch, you consume.”
“European civilization... is a cannibal civilization; it oppresses the weak and enriches itself at its expense. It lets envy and hatred shoot up everywhere, wherever it goes, no grass can grow anymore… Its power comes from directing all its forces towards the sole aim of enrichment… Under the codename patriotism, it breaks the given word, shamelessly throws out its nets woven from lies, erects monstrous giant images in its temple dedicated to profit, in honor of the God it worships.
Without the slightest hesitation we prophesy: this will not last forever!”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 10, 2013 | White Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Adon Apamea / Deep Green Resistance Middle East & North Africa
Dubai is an interesting city. A thriving futuristic metropolis in the heart of the desert considered to be the crown jewel of modernity with indoor ski resorts, gulf courses, fully computerized metros, giant air-conditioned shopping malls, and the tallest skyscrapers in the world.
Built upon the oil money and over the desert’s sands starting from 1970s, Dubai is rootless more than any other city in the world. With a few thousand original natives, Dubai attracts millions of people today from around the world who come to live and work, or to just take a look at the legendary city.
The dispossessed, like yours truly, come to Dubai for work when all other possibilities are blocked. Some of the latter enter the city with the dream of doing big money. Some come out of desperation while the rest are forced into cheap labor or sold as slaves for the sex industry.
The possessed – those who have loads of money and are possessed with making more money and power, also come to Dubai. Most of them come to squeeze the life out of the first group for profit while some just want to show off their fortune or discover what the fuss is about.
The dispossessed sit on the bottom while the possessed sit on top. The hierarchy looks something like this: native Emirati men – specifically those possessing money, power and oil – sit on top, white western men sit right next or beneath them managing the growth of one of the fastest cities in the world. Some brown men, mainly from Pakistan and India, sit in the third row, and more whitish people and some Arabs sit somewhere in the fourth row making the middle management and landlords of the city. East Asians sit on the fifth row doing all the blue collar jobs, answering phone calls, making deliveries, and fixing air conditioners. And last a majority of Pakistanis, Indians, Bengalis and Sirilankans sit in the last row, building the city in the scorching heat, cleaning houses, and opening doors. In the shadows, an unknown number of women, from all nationalities of the third world are sex slaves, without passports or means to escape their slavery.
In any work, being a white westerner ensures you get a salary four or five folds the one that any person of a brown nationality would get for exactly the same job. An IT engineer of Indian nationality might get a salary of 1500 USD. A British would get 6000 USD for the same job in the same company, just for being white. This is how the system works. Everyone knows it; brown people make jokes about it. White people rarely laugh. In Dubai you discover that racial hierarchy isn’t a theory in a book.
The dispossessed, however, largely share an illusion absent amongst the possessed, that they can join the upper class if they work hard enough. The banks are especially fond of fostering this hope: it just takes a few weeks of living in Dubai to become eligible for a fat bank loan. Agents will knock on your door, call your phone, and come to your office trying to sell you easy loans and premium credit cards. You can wake up a poor man in the morning, and in the afternoon walk from the doors of a bank with a small fortune.
And thus the mighty machine continues its march onward, greased by the sweat and blood of poor people… and by their dreams as well.
Being in the desert, everything in Dubai is imported and packaged in neat plastic or metal containers: water, food, cars, buildings, furniture, and people. The world’s most exotic fruits and foods are available at any supermarket year round, but everything tastes the same. High-tech electronics and the most sophisticated cars in the world are all here too. Even portable ACs, in case you wanted to sit on the balcony in the summer’s desert and you disagree with the temperature. One building in Dubai for example, Burj Khalifa, spends the equivalent of 29.000.000 lb (13.000 tons) of melting ice in one day on cooling. Dubai has 80.000 multistory buildings.
You don’t even have to go to the grocery store or any place else to buy your stuff; the bottom strata of the dispossessed class will cycle in the scorching heat to deliver anything you need to your front door so you don’t move your ass one inch from the sofa. The dispossessed then get a killing tan and skin diseases. The possessed get fat. Doctors and personal fitness trainers make more money.
People who spend a long time here speak of Dubai as a city designed to take back everything it gives to a person. If you don’t have what it takes, the attractions and the marketed lifestyle in the shiny city will invite you to put all the money you made on doing and buying stuff you don’t need before you step your foot again on a plane. Many people leave Dubai in debt.
Dubai is described as the highest expression of civilization, and it really is. It’s a money making machine, and it does a hell of a good job at it. The people who can see the truth, however, would call it for what it is: a monster. A monster devouring the desert, once filled with delicate ecosystems and countless animals and plants. A monster devouring the world, one packaged fruit at a time. A monster devouring its people, one broken spirit at a time.
Dubai though, is not an exception. If you really think about it, Dubai is every city in the world…
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 8, 2012 | Agriculture
By Rachel / Deep Green Resistance Florida
Industrial civilization is systematically destroying everything on the planet that life requires in order to exist. Since civilization demands infinitely increasing resources on a finite planet, its eventual end is unavoidable. It follows that the faster it can be brought down, the more likely it is that any chance at survival will remain for those who inhabit the Earth after the crash.
My friend listens attentively as I speak the words, but she’s smiling the way she always smiles when she thinks I’m at the end of my rhetorical rope. It’s lucky for our friendship that we like to argue on certain subjects, since our views don’t tend to overlap. Our favorite topics of discussion are the ones we’re pretty sure we’ll never agree on. We lived together for a year and never fought once over who last took the trash out, the setting of the thermostat, or the dishes left in the sink. We saved our fighting spirit for health care reform (I wanted a single-payer system, she thought any regulation was obstructing the free market), the relative merits of capitalism (the only fair system said she, the root of all evil said I), and the relationship of religion to morality (inseparable if you asked her, at odds if you asked me).
Our intense discussions at the kitchen table generally lasted long enough to bore our other friends to tears and often got loud enough to wake our other roommates from deep slumber, but today amidst the lunch rush of our favorite restaurant, no one is bothered by our fervor. She and I have prodded each other’s political sensibilities from so many angles that few of her arguments can surprise me anymore, but this time I’m leaning forward across the table in anticipation of her point.
In some ways, it would be a relief to be proven wrong this time. See, new information has been leading me to some unsettling conclusions as of late. Being right about them means that the world I’m used to cannot continue, will not continue, on its current trajectory. Being right means that the situation is a lot more urgent and intractable than I’ve previously been able to appreciate. Being right means that we have a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it. Today at lunch I tell some of these conclusions to my friend, more than half hoping that she can talk me back over to the more familiar side of the line.
“Doesn’t that sound a little extreme, and kind of alarmist, Rach?” she asks. If you’d asked me that as recently as two years ago when I first became heavily involved in activism of any sort, I probably would have told you it sounded both alarmist and extreme. I would have argued then, just like my friend proceeds to argue now, that civilization doesn’t destroy the things we need, it provides them for us. It’s a word to describe the highly advanced state of human society that we’ve achieved.
Civilization means progress through scientific prowess, global connection and trade, a longer lifespan through modern medicine, more comfort and leisure time due to mechanization, and a million thoughtless comforts and distractions to improve our lives. The main problem with these definitions is the fact that they are written by the civilized, for the civilized. For me, the word civilization used to connote an almost holy weight, and to bring civilization to a place was synonymous with bringing hope, progress, and power. Here’s a more accurate definition:
Civilization is the phenomenon of people living in cities, more or less permanently at a high enough density to require the routine importation of resources into the city center; the culture of institutions, stories, and artifacts that arises from such an arrangement.
On its face, that definition sounded pretty innocuous to me on a first reading. More than just innocuous, to me that definition sounded absurd. Of course people live in cities, I thought, where else? People have always lived in close proximity to each other because we’re social animals desirous of community and relationship. Of course, I thought, people in cities need to import food and other essentials, but what’s wrong with that? Importation is necessary because without industrial production and agriculture, we couldn’t make enough food and other necessities for everyone, and industrial agriculture needs the empty space outside the city to grow our food. What else would our culture and mythology arise from, if not civilization? How could anyone want anything different?
To even approach beginning to answer these questions, it was necessary to gain a basic understanding of how privilege works within individuals and institutions. When you are the one being privileged, that privilege is usually invisible to you. Most men do not consciously acknowledge that the dominant construction of masculinity is based on hatred and erasure of women, and even fewer can address the ways that hating and erasing women grants them privilege within the system of patriarchy.
During a speech at Occupy Oakland, activist Lierre Keith articulated patriarchy, capitalism, and civilization as the three main frameworks that direct our culture’s interactions with power and oppression. Just like the violence of patriarchy is invisible to those it benefits, the violence of capitalism is either rationalized or outright denied by those middle to upper class individuals that are benefitting from legions of wage slaves below them.
You’ve heard them do it, maybe you’ve even engaged in some rationalization yourself. It sounds like, “anyone can get above their circumstances if they work hard,” or “people get what they deserve.” In a perfect world, that may be true, but in a capitalist world, people get whatever those with more power deign to give them. A privilege can be the power to oppress or use others, or it can be insulation from the violence that permeates and enforces the system. I’ve been sensing the blinders of privilege in my periphery, like a dog senses a cone around its neck. The occasional glimpse of the outside world is illuminating, but there’s no getting the cone off, and so the scene will always be incomplete.
The violence of patriarchy and capitalism did not become visible to me overnight – I’m a white, middle class American, a social position that carries enough privilege to blind most to the inherent flaws in these two systems, which means that even once the basic systems are visible to me, most of the effects of those systems are still invisible to me. Still, these systems were relatively easier to identify as oppressive than the third system, civilization.
The first person to suggest to me that civilization itself is inherently destructive and unsustainable was my roommate, Sam, shortly after she moved in with me. The first time she mentioned it, I rejected the idea out of hand. Humans have always lived in close-knit communities, I said, and our need for community is one of the most intrinsic attributes of humanity. To reject civilization seemed equivalent to rejecting the whole spectrum of human social behavior as inherently destructive. I recognized much of human activity as destructive, but labeling our every activity as inherently destructive seemed a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If humans themselves are irredeemable, then what can we possibly be working toward?
My understanding changed when I read a different definition of civilization – people living in cities. To me, cities once seemed eternal and inevitable. As a young child, I learned that the first cities appeared less than ten millennia ago in the Middle East. On the same day, I learned that humans are evidenced in the fossil record for two hundred thousand years.
For the bulk of human existence, we lived outside the bounds of civilization, and without the framework of privilege and oppression that civilization necessitates and enforces through violence. At the time, my still-developing brain had no conception of the width of one year, much less the scope of change that stretches between ten and two hundred millennia. To my child’s perception, that day’s history lesson were not facts, they were a familiar story. We each know the trope by heart: regardless of whether they exist by design or by chance, humans gained intelligence surpassing that of all other species. Over time, we used our superior faculties to improve life for ourselves. The changes we have created are inherently good as well as ultimately inevitable, and working toward the spread and advancement of these changes is both noble and necessary.
We all know this story, and to call it a story gets much closer to the point than calling it history. Someone wrote down the facts in our history, if they are indeed facts at all, and that person or group of people had to decide what to include or omit, which words to use, and how to arrange those words. There is no objective account, no hard historical fact. Even when solid empirical evidence can be produced for a historical “fact,” each kernel of physical reality comes to us swaddled in a story, a fabric of accrued belief to which is added a final and significant layer – the gloss of supposed objectivity is a tool of erasure based on privilege. Those who benefit from a system are likely to protect it and speak well of it. Those who have to live the violent cost of our culture don’t tend to get jobs writing curricula.
What cost? Well, I’m glad you asked, but I probably would have told you even if you hadn’t. I’ve observed fear and violence from the security of a suburban bubble, seen the desperation of lack and then returned home to stocked shelves, and glimpsed the reality of civilization’s true nature only from the window of a moving car. If, as I hope, I’ve managed to learn anything about how the real world works, I need to acknowledge that my charmed life has afforded me an education from a safe distance.
More each day, I know that the comfort and safety I call home are wrung from the pain and violation of others, and if the guilt you feel at this knowledge doesn’t tear at the pit of your gut, you may as well be a fucking corpse. The nagging suspicion that the certainty and urgency I feel in this moment will subside with my youth and naiveté offers little relief. The picture of reality that’s taking shape behind my eyes doesn’t fit with the story I once knew best, and there isn’t room for them to coexist. Increasingly, I’ll relay the conflict to anyone who’ll listen, as though my frenetic speech was an incantation to exorcise the myth from my mind.
I still haven’t answered the question – what cost? The answer can and does fill volumes, and this paragraph should be proof enough for no one, but here is what I’ve been coming to understand. Today, let’s take only our source of food as an example. A given ecosystem can only support a certain number of organisms living on it at one time. If the population surpasses its carrying capacity of organisms, members of the species consume too much of whatever it is they need to eat, and the population’s numbers plummet as resources inevitably become scarce.
Not only do members of the species die, but the carrying capacity of that land is lowered lastingly. If there are too many deer on an island, the deer food on the island is unable to replenish itself fast enough to support them. The upward motion on the population graph comes down hard, and can never rise as high again. That island will likely never hold as many deer as it once did.
Now, when humans began living in high concentrations in cities, these physical laws were an immediate obstacle. If a square mile of land can only produce enough resources for one person to survive, placing fifty people in that square mile means that the resources need to come from somewhere else. Every industrialized city in existence exceeds the carrying capacity of the land its built on, so where does the sustenance come from?
In the case of food, the answer is agriculture. We grow food outside of the bounds of the city and ship it in to the people living in the center – these people could not grow enough food for themselves if they wanted to, because in most cases, the environment that yields nutrients has been replaced by concrete. Are we on the same page so far? Good. Here’s where things get dicey. This arrangement appears to work well to the people in the city, since the food (usually) arrives consistently from beyond its borders, but the less copasetic effects of agriculture are two pronged.
First, the only way that monocrop agriculture (the most controllable method in the short term and, predictably, far and away the most profitable for some) can successfully produce food is by waging a war against all other parts of nature. A monocrop means killing everything on a piece of land, all the way down to the bacteria in the soul, so that nothing interferes with the growth on the desired plant. The clearing of the land is only the first wave of death that agriculture sets in motion.
There are reasons that monocrops don’t exist in nature. The only way to maintain the biotically sterile environment necessary to grow anything with a monocrop is the use of pesticides, and the gut-wrenching realities of even the most mild of these are demonstrated best by the scars they’ve left on our land, lives, and limbs. In addition, plants overshoot the carrying capacity of soil just as organisms do their habitats – too many in one place, and the necessary nutrients run out. Soil takes thousands of years to regenerate, and we don’t have thousands of years – most of the soil on the planet is already dust. If you’ve followed my explanation, which I hope you have, you can guess what happens next.
Here’s a hint: the exact same thing that would happen to any other species. The human population graph stays steady until the start of civilized societies with agriculture, and then the line climbs straight for the heavens. It hasn’t been stopped yet, but it will be. What will be left when we get there? Agriculture also necessitates backbreaking labor to actively maintain its war against biodiversity. We commonly refer to technologies as “labor saving,” but in most cases, we just saving the labor for someone else. More specifically, we’re saving it for someone who we can justify exploiting.
Fewer people buy their slaves nowadays, but renting them is all the rage. When wringing labor value from someone else’s body and time doesn’t work, we wring it from the Earth itself. All the unpaid labor in the world cannot change what monocrops do to soil, but fossil fuels are buying us time. The fertilizer used in industrial agriculture is derived from oil. When we inevitable use up this nonrenewable resource, we won’t be able to ask any more of our dead and desiccated soil – it will have blown away for good. We’ve only looked at food in the last couple paragraphs, but different examples yield similar results. The basic organization and priorities of our society as it exists are fundamentally dissociated from the reality of how life works on this planet. If we want to live, it all has to stop, and soon.
To put it simply, circumstances are a lot more dire than I previously realized. When two conflicting ideas coexist in the same brain, the result is cognitive dissonance. She who experiences the conflict can choose to preserve her existing framework by ignoring or rationalizing one idea at the expense of the other. Alternatively, she can choose to critically examine both in light of the available evidence and hopefully construct a more realistic and effective framework for action. The framework of industrial civilization is not redeemable, because it conflict on the most basic levels with the continuation of life on the planet.
When the first bit of doubt lodged itself between the lines of the familiar story, I ignored it. When it grew, distorting the consistency of the only plot I could follow, I rationalized it. I’m not going to do either one anymore. Some things are obvious – we need food, water, and air, and we need them without poison, thank you very much. The fundamental illogic and insanity of our current system, the need to dismantle it without delay – when food, water, and air are our priorities, these facts become obvious too.
At lunch with my friend, I finish the last sentence of this argument, and we’re both silent for a moment. I gulp some water, and she picks at the remnants of her food and bites her lip contemplatively. For a moment, perhaps a longer moment than I’d like to admit, I hope that she can talk me out of this. If any of what I’ve just said is true, then the future will look very different than what I’ve expected. If it’s true, my very existence within this system is predicated on the exploitation of other life, including other humans. If it’s true, then my actions need to reflect the urgency of the situation, and we’re out of time for vacillation.
“You make some good points,” she says. “Well, if it’s true, what do we do about it?” Now it’s my turn to contemplate silently, because the truth is that I’m not sure. These problems span the planet, and even if my answer wasn’t stunted by the lies that insulate my privileges, it can’t be universally true. Resistance needs to look different in different places, act different according to context, and I definitely don’t have very much of that answer yet. Luckily, I’m not asking the question in a vacuum. There are others, here and across the world, asking the same questions right now and throughout history. Resistance to hierarchy and the abuse that comes with it has a story as long and diverse as the story of humans themselves. Knowing the story is the only way to change the ending in a meaningful way, and I have a lot of work to do toward both those ends.
A specific analysis has lately been guiding my actions and explorations, called Deep Green Resistance. The book by that name was written by Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen (authors whose work informed much of this article), and since its release last year, actions groups have sprung up across the country and internationally in accordance with the strategy the book lays out. A detailed description of the group’s basic premises, organization, and methods will have to be saved for a later article, but we are hardly the first to point out the depravity of the current arrangement of power. The soil, air, and water are running out, and so is our time. Whatever happens next, we cannot afford the luxury of relying on symbolic action alone. Whatever happens next, the death knell for real change is compromise with a system that “creates value” from death, destruction, and misery. Whatever happens next, I’m siding with the real world. How about you?
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 13, 2012 | Agriculture, Climate Change
By Environment News Service
“If we fail today to make water an instrument of peace, it might become tomorrow a major source of conflict,” warns UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova in her foreword to the UN World Water Development Report released today at the opening of the World Water Forum in Marseilles. “Freshwater is a core issue for sustainable development – and it is slipping through the cracks.”
An “unprecedented” rise in the demand for food as the population grows, rapid urbanization and climate change are the drivers of increasing global water stress, finds the report, “Managing Water Under Uncertainty and Risk.”
Issued every three years since 2003 at the triennial World Water Forum, the UN World Water Development Report offers an overview of the state of the world’s freshwater resources and aims to provide decision makers with the tools to make sustainable use of water a reality.
“No water users, anywhere in the world, can be guaranteed they will have uninterrupted access to the water supplies they need or want or to the water-derived benefits from key developmental sectors such as agriculture, energy and health,” the report warns.
While UNICEF and the World Health Organization issued a separate report last week showing that the world has achieved the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water in advance of the 2015 deadline, water scarcity is still a big problem for millions of people.
The new World Water Development Report shows that despite projected increases in demand for water, there are still nearly one billion people without such access, and this number is growing in cities.
The world’s urban population is forecast to grow to 6.3 billion people in 2050, from 3.4 billion in 2009, increasing problems of adequate water supply, sanitation and drainage, especially in urban slums already faced with a backlog of unserved populations.
Sanitation infrastructure is not keeping pace with the world’s urban population, and more than 80 percent of the world’s wastewater is neither collected nor treated, according to the report.
“We have much to do before all people have the access to the water and sanitation they need to lead lives of dignity and well-being,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a video message to the World Water Forum.
Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all water withdrawn by the agricultural, municipal, industrial and energy sectors, according to the report, which says, “Responsible agricultural water management will make a major contribution to future global water security.”
The report projects a 70 percent increase in demand for food by the year 2050 when the world population is forecast to be nine billion and warns that this level of demand will lead to a 19 percent surge in agricultural water use.
In response to growing demand, countries have tapped into underground water sources, with water extraction tripling over the past 50 years. In some underground basins, water cannot be replenished and is now at critically low levels.
Climate change will have a growing impact on water resources as it alters rainfall patterns and soil humidity, melts glaciers and causes water-related disasters such as floods and droughts, which impact food production.
Read more from Environment News Service:
