Water and Vodka, World is Thirsty

Climate change has consequences in the form of drought. Temperatures are rising, and the need for drinking water is increasing, while water itself is disappearing: more and more of it evaporates without reaching the ground. Sea levels are rising, and water resources are shrinking.

Desertification of vast areas of Greece, Italy, and Spain continues. In the cradle of the West, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, 57 particularly energy-intensive desalination plants are in operation. The problem does not only affect the Mediterranean. For example, according to a recent report by the US Geological Survey, clean water supplies are threatened in large areas of Long Island. Decades of freshwater wasting (including whirlpools and swimming pools) have contributed to saltwater intrusion into underground aquifers. The problem concerns places like Great Neck, Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau County, which were places of the old, great America of the past. According to the study, nearly half of the tens of thousands of wells surveyed across the USA have the amount of groundwater significantly reduced. Today’s bailing levels seem unsustainable.

It is estimated that in 2020, more than 2 billion people did not have safe drinking water. Today, there are about 4.4 billion of them. Fecal contamination is the main culprit. Thirst unites the planet’s driest climatic zones into a heterogeneous assortment: it involves both the richest nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, and the poorest, such as sub-Saharan Africa. According to an official survey, on a July afternoon at Dubai Airport, the combination of temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius and humidity levels of 80 percent resulted in a perceived temperature of 62 degrees Celsius.

It’s not that water is disappearing; it’s becoming more abnormal, unpredictable, violent: tornadoes, storms, hail showers, tornadoes, floods hit suddenly and devastatingly. Climate shocks follow one another in increasingly paradoxical and frequent ways, setting off spirals of famine and migration. Without ruling out the possibility of another global flood, millions and millions are spent trying to control the sky. With the dynamism and scientific approach that characterize its extraordinary development, China has conducted bold experiments in cloud seeding; in Xinjiang in particular, drones have been successfully used to penetrate clouds and induce precipitation on command in targeted areas. This technology that changes the skies of war can be used to improve the skies of peace.

Once again, an old Western discovery, born in the summer of 1946 in the glorious laboratories of General Electric, has been revived, reworked, and improved in China. As the case (recently back on the news agenda) of the 2008 Olympics teaches us. The Chinese lesson not learned in Paris 2024: back then, in Beijing, to guarantee the celebration without galoshes, raincoats, umbrellas, the wise communists decided to “empty” the clouds before they squandered their moisture on Beijing. No head of state was left wet at the inauguration ceremony. This is an example of a much larger sample: the East has learned from the West.

But the reverse is not true.

In the context of urgency, experimentation, risks, and fears, it is said that the solution would be to get hold of the reserves of Russia, which possesses not only huge deposits of oil, gas, rare and precious minerals. In the vast territory of Russia, the largest country in the world, as has been said and repeated, there is enough fresh water to quench the thirst of two planets: 120,000 rivers, over 2 million lakes, swamps the size of Italy, Spain, and France combined. Development of these resources is practicable through a network of aqueducts similar to that used for hydrocarbon extraction. Energy, water, minerals: Russia is a land of plenty for an increasingly energy-intensive development model (as Riccardo Fallico emphasized in his article on Pluralia). However, in order to rob Russia, it is necessary to destroy its political system, so all means have been used in accordance with a cautious strategy, which, as Jeffrey Sachs testifies, has been in place since 1991.

We don’t just live on water. Vodka is considered a symbol of Russia, already in a formulation related to water due to the common root “vod-” denoting water, with the addition of the diminutive and affectionate suffix “-ka.” Vodka is omnipresent in Russia and is a vertigo of identity, almost philosophical, as evidenced by the saying: “If you don’t drink and you don’t smoke, you’ll be healthy when you croak.” This is not fatalism, but on the one hand, it is a calculation of costs and benefits, and on the other hand, it is a concrete outline of an ontological problem. Along the banks of the mighty Siberian rivers and inside the Northern Lights, the meaning of life does not resemble Disneyland.

The need for consensus, the exchange between consumption and consensus, the overlap between the society of abundance and the democratic society bring to the surface a basic dilemma that has been debated since the birth of the Western vocabulary. One theory says: the creature does not live for consumption or war, it is not meant to serve a blind will for power or destruction, but is materialized in overcoming its own creaturely suffering. Transcendence can begin in this country through work, so it requires prudence, knowledge, and peace. This is one of the many theories embodied in the “living labor” of the world proletariat. Among the alternatives is the transformation of man into a dormant multitude, exhausted by slaughter and deceit, as well as sewage for drinking and pleasure.

In short, the old world fears everything and anything to the contrary: it can go underwater and still suffer from thirst. For pessimists, the West is a civilization in agony, a word derived from the ancient Greek agōn, struggle, and denoting the last battle before the inevitable end, with the gradual weakening of vital functions, beginning with the conscience. Sometimes the agony can last a long time – but this will certainly not end in good health.