Title: 7 Billion and Counting
Purpose: To examine the effects of the growing population on our world's water supply, specifically the Tibetan Plateau
Discussion Questions:
How does overpopulation ad the water crisis relate to Tragedy of the Commons?
Is it hopeless? Should population control intervene?
What can change? How can we learn to live with less?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLf2RbxmzE&feature=relmfu
No! It is not hopeless. Change can come in one of two ways. Either there will be a disaster (war, poverty, hunger, disease, etc.) that will decimate the population OR we can learn to live with less. Population control does not need to intervene we just need to learn to live with less. From a water lens, this can be done by eating less meat. As seen in the video above, livestock requires tons of water from the time it is born to the time it arrives on your dinner plate. I'm not asking that everyone becomes vegetarians but the whole American idea that dinner must consist of beef cannot sustain us any longer. We must adapt! Also, we can take shorter showers, turn the sink off when we are not using it, drink tea vs coffee, etc. There are also fundamental changes we can make in our irrigation systems to make sure that not one drop of water is being wasted. Planning irrigation can help tremendously with this. Just imagine how much water we can save if everyone thought more consciously about how much they were using and how to cut down on it.
Picture: major rivers flowing from Tibetan Plateau
http://delhigreens.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/tibetan-plateau-and-its-signifiance-to-India.jpg
Sources:
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2008/world/china-tibet-and-the-strategic-power-of-water/
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/04/tibetan-plateau/larmer-text
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