Shallow thinking about water imperils the planet
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean. By Olive Heffernan.
Greystone; 352 pages; $32.95. Profile; £22 The Coming Storm: Why Water Will Write the 21st Century. By Liam Fox.
Biteback; 368 pages; £25. To be published in America in October; $29.95 What would summer be without water: without frolicking on a beach, fishing in a lake or savouring a novel poolside? And yet, for anyone who cares about the health of the world’s oceans, 2024 has been a bleak year. Mass fish deaths, driven by drought and heat, have been reported on opposite sides of the world, in Vietnam and Mexico.
Most of the world’s coral reefs have bleached, a process in which unusually warm water temperature makes coral brittle, bone-white and susceptible to disease and possibly death. Nor is the news much better for people. In March the UN reported that around half the world’s population experiences “severe water scarcity" annually.
Drought has caused one of Mexico City’s main reservoir systems to run dry, and population growth has led the city to overtax its water table, leading it to gradually sink—a similar fate to Jakarta, which is subsiding so quickly that Indonesia is building a new capital on a different island. Humanity, a species nurtured on a watery planet, is struggling to manage its most abundant resource, as two new books highlight. Olive Heffernan’s “The High Seas" is the more compelling and better reported of the pair.
It focuses on the 64% of the world’s oceans that are outside the control of any country and cover around half of the Earth’s surface. She argues that the world is witnessing a saline tragedy of the commons on a vast scale. Oceans are Earth’s greatest carbon sink,
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