Nor Climate or Land: how water changes can wrap up what is going on
May you tired to read news about catastrophic climate change while you have seen your city changing rapidly in its waters, pollution, and violence that burst into every corner of it. It seems that all come at once and make you feel discouraged, so you put that aside to think about how volatiles become the stability of your work.
That is understandable, but is there any chance to synthesize all these changes and transformations without them turning into declarable crises with painful remedies and high costs?
I think it is possible. The most credible indicator that reflects planet and human transformation is water. Since ancient times, change in it has represented the guidance of the planet and society's path towards a dynamic balance. When things started to derail from a certain equilibrium, both the planet and human societies began to destabilize. Again, in ancient times, the lack of balance was felt locally in the concentrated phenomenon in an area such as Mesopotamia's land crisis by the over-exploitation of water to grow grains.
The lack of resilience has now become global and affects climate variables, but it is not excluded by any measure of the processes that erode resilience structures locally. In fact, the global go local, and vice versa, depends on local resilience. In other words, the global scale is felt at the local scale, depending on the local interactions and resilience function of tamponing local climate and meteorological variables. This global-local climate game became recognizable and appeared in new research on the Anthropocene.
Down to the ground, climate change has been used as a maneuver to take out the responsibility of the disheveling process of local resilience. However, the situation is slightly more complicated. This is an interesting aspect of environmental perception. Depending on the level of climate change, the threshold of resilience change and the capacity to tampon to the local environment decrease, but first of all decreases comes the arc of possibilities of human societies to use these environments. Thus, society must adapt.
This conversation may become too technical and interdisciplinary, but it is written down to be read in terms of the behavior of waters. However, this behavior is crossed by different scales of time and space. When we scrutinized these water changes through these different dimensions, we came to understand their resilience. In short, say to me what the state of your waters is, then I will tell you if you are well equipped to navigate the future.
As historical meteorological data lose stationarity over time, the art of reading water and the main indicator of nexus security in the future. The ancient Arab sage Avicena used to say that one knows a territory to pay attention to the smell, color, and quantity of water that pours out through the veins and arteries of the water body in the same way that a doctor asks for blood, urine, and saliva tests to investigate the health of his patient.
Therefore, we arrived at the pivotal question of what water tests are necessary to assess the health of the environment. There are three types of tests: quantitative, qualitative, and perceptual. Below is a list of these.
1. Tests that draw from nature indicate how the main meteorological features of the water domain are in the short, medium, and long range.
2. Tests that investigate how people and city structures demand water in short, medium, and long ranges.
3. Tests that draw from people´s perceptions of water problems from a historical perspective; 5. Tests that draw from imagination and people's future thinking about how water would be representative of the environment's health,
4. Then, ask people how the future of water seems in the short, medium, and long term in terms of actions, projects, and programs,
5. Ask people how these actions, projects, and programs fit the historical performance of normative systems, socioeconomic systems, and environmental disturbances.
6. Finally, ask people how much would they spend to implement some of these projects to generate a higher resilience of the territory.
Even though what happens on the planet is too far to be reached by laypeople, what happens in their river basin is under their will to prepare a better relationship with the planet's influence. Not all actions can be implemented, but some are feasible for use as mobilization tools to awaken consciousness about the state of our common house, Planet Earth.
