Droughts and Water Shortages
All life has fallen silent. The 40 degrees have gagged the bocage. Only a brushcutter droning in the distance recalls that humanity is the only species that does not know how to save its energy.
— We can't even drink coffee anymore.
— Above all, we can't water the animals anymore! It's time this nonsense stopped. I can't afford a borehole, myself. The ewes go to the stream. And when there's no stream anymore, like for the past month, what do I do? I draw on the mains!
— If you had backed me up against Jobard we wouldn't be here! He pumped out all our reserves with his drinking troughs and his maize.
Hanging on the walls of the room, the tourist posters for Norman Switzerland, extolling its green pastures and meandering watercourses, cruelly recall a sweetness of life gone by. How can one not be seized with regret at having neglected those easy pleasures? What was there to complain about in those days, when the herds grazed perpetually fresh grass and one picnicked on the banks of eternal rivers? Who would think of tourism now, when we are fighting to survive? It is no longer Norman Switzerland; it is the Norman Sahara.
On the fourth day, they drew as much as they could, opening all the taps in the houses full blast, from garden to cellar. After a quarter of an hour, it was over. Salim is on the verge of doubting one of collapsology's most popular theories, according to which collapse would generate spontaneous and exceptional phenomena of solidarity. The collapsist networks teem with stories of devotion and mutual aid when the structures of the central State no longer respond — during a hurricane, a landslide or a military invasion. Contrary to received wisdom, one reads in the posts of anarchist activists, human beings do not fall into the war of all against all; they rediscover the sense of community, come down from our tribal past. This is not at all what Salim observes at Saint-Firmin, where the tribal past seems definitively forgotten.
The inhabitants of the rue des Sources tried to bring an old private well back into service. They all fell ill — confirmation that the septic tanks now communicate with the old communal water tables.
On Weibo, the reactions are increasingly exasperated. Let them die of thirst! It would be better to give that money to our own beggars. I propose replacing the French mayors with artificial intelligences. When do we invade these clowns?
The 6th planetary boundary has been crossed. Freshwater reserves have collapsed — both the green water contained in the soils, which travels through plants and trees, and the blue water naturally stored in aquifers and lakes. More than 5 billion people could therefore face difficulties accessing drinking water by 2050. As for France, it could within 20 years experience the climate of Spain, which would itself become a semi-arid steppe, if not a desert.
The truth no one dares to say is that water is not expensive enough.
Hydrogeological equilibria form over tens, hundreds of millions of years. Two little millennia are not going to change the path of the water or the nature of the soil.
Old Jobard pitilessly drained his fields, upsetting a very ancient equilibrium to line up dreary expanses of rapeseed, wheat or maize, depending on the year. Wetlands offer a refuge for biodiversity, eliminate pollution through phytopurification and regulate the water cycle thanks to their storage capacity. Anyone can understand that a farmer does not want to sacrifice land for a few amphibians; anyone can also understand that a society does not want to sacrifice the land for a few farmers.
In Martin's team, "Careful, wetland" had become a common expression to flag a booby-trapped meeting or an inextricable dossier. He does not need Valérie to understand that the marsh must have ensured a more stable and regular supply to the spring by functioning as a gigantic reservoir, absorbing the high waters during floods and recharging the water tables during droughts. Enough to gain a few weeks on the whims of the sky.
_It was neither chance nor miracle: the ancients had chosen for their spring a naturally propitious spot. They were steeped in a vague science — empirical, instinctive, but nonetheless accurate. They could not have said which scrap of sentence, overheard in which conversation, or which trifling gesture, glimpsed during which collective chore, had taught them what they in turn put into practice. They needed neither explanation nor expertise. The experience of the hundreds of generations that had preceded them, made of thousands of trials, errors and corrections, sufficed.
They did not know how they knew, but they knew that they knew. The complete opposite of the engineers of the 20th century, puffed up with an abstract and devastating knowledge. Never give power to the top of the class._
She remembers the trips back and forth to the well in her childhood. Clearly nothing has changed.
My husband wanted his own borehole. But really, if everyone did the same, what would become of us?
That's how it starts — everyone with their own water, we pump like donkeys and we all end up dry. Whereas this way, we keep an eye on each other. We take only what we need. In the years without snow, we avoid drawing too much.
Of course, the emigrants down in the valley who build any old how — they don't care. They deafen us with their European Union. Perhaps they think the water comes from Brussels... It will catch up with them.
— Everyone is dry. The entire department is classified as in crisis. The crops are dying on their feet. I already have one water syndicate in total failure: 30 villages where we have sent the tanker trucks.
The piezometers are in the red everywhere, and if the rain does not come next week, I no longer know how we manage. 30 villages, we cope. 300, we weep. I will not have enough tanker trucks and I cannot even see where they would go to fetch their water.
— But the State must do something!
— The State... Forgive me. I no longer sleep. The State — what do you want it to do? The State cannot make it rain! Do you know what I spend my days doing? Preparing riot police and securing evacuation corridors on the departmental roads. That is where the State is at. Preparing the exodus.
— The exodus to where?
— Not to Brittany, which is in roughly the same situation as us. We will have to go towards the Oligocene aquifer, in the Beauce, or towards the chalk aquifer, in the Seine valley. That is where water remains. I have alerted Civil Protection and contacted my colleague in the Île-de-France to catalogue all the emergency accommodation — gymnasiums, schools, etc.
I must keep maintaining the illusion of public order, otherwise my teams will panic. But I am lucid. Without rain, it will be untenable.
Matignon has prepared a state-of-emergency decree to give the prefects exceptional powers to restrict liberties. But it is not by restricting liberties that water will come back into the taps. In truth, the executive is in the thick of preparing the finance bill. No one has their mind on hydrology problems. The media are already jaded. You know how it works. The urgent drives out the essential.
— So, is this the collapse?
Martin feels a chasm opening beneath him. His stories of inter-municipal bodies and transfers of competencies belong to a time that suddenly seems over — that of a stable and prosperous society where one had the luxury of quibbling. If Nathalie is right, all the decrees and orders so carefully drafted will quickly become null and void in the general chaos. Martin is in on the secret a few days before his fellow citizens, who naively carry on, as if nothing were amiss, respecting laws, contracts and red lights. He has the feeling that already nothing makes sense in the middle of this immense salon. The symbols evaporate. There remains only matter, dense and useless, doomed to scattering and disintegration.
We are all alone. All alone in the face of nature.
The prefect will soon be the State's widow. She had devoted her life to it. She had believed it immortal. And now it threatens to be swept away by the weather, overnight.
The Saint-Firminois will not be the first. The Maya, though past masters of hydraulic engineering, had to abandon entire cities after overexploiting the rivers and wells. Their temples and reservoirs are now overrun by the tropical forest. One cannot ask more of the Saint-Firminois than of the Maya. The multi-year droughts announced by every IPCC study will condemn Saint-Firmin to becoming a ruin that, in a thousand years, the descendants of Xiu and Lin will come to visit with specialised guides.
The techniques she promotes, the mounds and the swales — do you endorse them?
— Oh yes, of course, she says in a tone of the obvious. To sum up: in the years and decades to come, we are going to have more precipitation and less available water. So the solution is storage. The more natural it is, the better. It suffices to reconstitute a wetland upstream of the spring. You should try it in your village. You will gain a month of water, and the trick is done.
Martin watches her take out her wallet, dumbfounded. The solution seems too simple to be true.
— And also, re-meander! Remember what my master Tricart, the pioneer of geomorphology, used to say: it is a dialectic! Everything acts, reacts and interacts — water, air, earth.
Recreating diversified flow patterns, natural banks, mobile alluvial bars, a varied riparian forest, a wooded river corridor, hydraulic annexes, etc.
AQUA - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)