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Rejoicing over processed seawater misses the point: We must save water
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IN five years, desalinated water from the Bohai Sea will find its way into Beijing’s daily life, Xinhua reported on Monday.
At first glance, it looks like great news. After all, it bodes well for believers in technology who insist that technological progress will eventually meet all human demands. To them, cutting demand (for water, for example) is not the way out for human prosperity; increasing supply is.
According to Xinhua, parched Beijing will invest around 10 billion yuan in a project in adjacent Hebei Province that will process 100 tons of seawater every day. It’s based in Tangshan City in Caofeidian District. Upon completion in 2019, the project will supply one-third of the water Beijing needs.
It looks like great news because, for the time being, seawater seems to be an inexhaustible source, compared with the many dried up, drying and dying rivers and lakes across the nation.
But hundreds of years ago, Chinese people could not imagine that the Yellow River, China’s Mother River, or Boyang Lake, China’s biggest lake, would nearly dry up because of the insatiable demands of their offspring today.
Nor could they imagine that the Yangtze River — China’s longest river that was once so clear — would become so muddy today due to deforestation, construction and industrialization along its banks. Desalinating seawater, if naively encouraged, might well lead to a drop in the world’s oceans’ sea level, and eventually the dreaded melting of icebergs.
Short-term pleasures
But most human beings live in the short term, think in the short term and enjoy short-term pleasures. They always look “forward” to something new, but never far enough to know that there’s nothing new under the sun. They never know or care to know that the billions and billions of people who exploit the earth for so-called progress will one day consume the world’s last drop of water — desalinated or not.
On April 4, a deep hole opened in Beijing and the road above it suddenly collapsed near the construction site of a subway line. Fortunately, no one was hurt when the ground opened up, revealing a hollow 10 meters wide and 10 meters deep.
Hollow funnel
This cave-in was by no means an isolated incident in Beijing, where the water table has dropped dramatically because of decades of pumping water and building subways — all in the name of urbanization and progress.
There’s less earth and more caverns beneath the roads and collapses have increased in the past couple of years.
More than 20 years ago, Beijing water supply officials told me in an interview that the city’s underground was already like a hollow funnel due to intensive exploration of underground water.
At that time, Beijing’s skyline was much lower and its cars were much fewer, so the overall weight on the road surface was less than it is today.
People should have heeded officials warnings in the first place. But, since most people live “in the moment” rather than “for the future,” Beijing has become taller and taller with high-rises mushrooming one after another over the past two decades or so.
Some time ago, before road collapses had become a part of life in Beijing, I wondered why no one paid attention to the official warnings that I had reported, about the huge hollow funnel.
In retrospect, it might have been because I wrote in English. Now, I see that even if I had written in Chinese, the warning would have fallen upon deaf ears.
In the wake of the April 4 road collapse, as after many other similar cave-ins, we have heard very few “suggestions” that Beijingers should use less water. On the contrary, news like the likely future supply of desalinated water has only reinforced the illusion about a life of plenty.
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