Once while visiting remote Rivers Inlet I took shelter an old logging cabin that was apparently undergoing renovation. The inner walls had been stripped bare to reveal newspapers that had once formed the cabin's insulation. They were old copies of the Vancouver Sun from the 30's. As I waited for the weather to break so a seaplane could get in to fly me home I went through some of those papers.
There was a tension in the news back then that remained palpable six decades later. News stories reported the latest advances in the brutal Japanese war on China. They chronicled the rise of Hitler, the end of Weimar, and the first signs of German rearmament and territorial expansion. With the benefit of hindsight, these news reports were eerie, scary but I wondered if the people reading them at the time felt the same way or whether they simply took it all in stride and dismissed it as too remote to worry about.
Thinking back on those old papers I get a sense of deja vu in how effectively we're ignoring so many major conflicts that are slowly but steadily building today. These are the tell-tales for a world that could easily descend into wide-scale warfare within a decade or two and yet we're doing nothing to stop it.
Take just one burning fuze - water. Ten nations are competing for and endangering Egypt's critical access to the freshwaters of the Nile. Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq are disputing just who can take how much out of the Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers on which modern civilization itself was built. In southeast Asia, China and Laos are constructing dams on the mighty Mekong, imperiling downstream nations.
But perhaps nowhere on Earth are water tensions more serious than in South Asia where three nuclear powers - Pakistan, India and China - vie for control of rivers vital to their very survival.
A U.S. intelligence report in February warned fresh water supplies are unlikely to keep up with global demand by 2040, increasing political instability, hobbling economic growth and endangering world food markets.
A "water war" is unlikely in the next decade, it said, but beyond that rising demand and scarcities due to climate change and poor management will increase the risk of conflict.
That threat is possibly nowhere more apparent than in South Asia, home to a fifth of humanity and rife with historical tensions, mistrust and regional rivalries.
The region's three major river systems - the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra - sustain India and Pakistan's breadbasket states and many of their major cities including New Delhi and Islamabad, as well as Bangladesh.
"South Asia is symbolic of what we are seeing in terms of water stress and tensions across the world," says B.G. Verghese, author and analyst at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research.
The region is one of the world's most water-stressed, yet the population is adding an extra 25 million people a year - South Asia's per capita water availability has dropped by 70 percent since 1950, says the Asian Development Bank.
India wields the whip hand as the rivers on which Pakistan depends first pass through India. China, however, holds the whip hand on the Himalayan headwaters thanks to its conquest of Tibet.
There's a reason China and India have army formations massed along the northern border of the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, a border that China is unwilling to recognize. Every now and then the People's Liberation Army sends in a unit of soldiers to set up camp in India's backyard just as a provocation. And these tensions have been going on for years.
And, as all this unfolds, we're sitting on the sidelines just as we were throughout the 30's. Suddenly I'm feeling decidedly isolationist.
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