Outstanding Documentaries: The Fight for Water (2022)

"Once politics is dictated by the fight for water, then God help us." --- Thorsten Glauber, Bavarian Environment Minister

This ominous opener kicks off The Fight for Water, Part 1 of a three-part series by the always-gripping DW Documentaries (a German public broadcasting company). This doc has stuck with me more than anything I've watched in a long time. Its sober, fact-based tone tackles this giant topic in a way that makes it both easily digestible and a mobilizing call to action. By collecting a variety of viewpoints & statistics from around the world, DW manages to do what no American media outlet has yet managed to pull off: illustrate how climate change is already causing isolated crises around the world that will soon turn into a major catastrophe for the human race if something drastic isn't done. And probably a lot sooner than we'd anticipated.

Beginning in Mendocino, we're treated to a scene so disturbing you'll wonder why you haven't heard about it yet. Restaurant owners in this quaint beach town describe such a severe water shortage that they've had to have freshwater trucked in since the beginning of 2020. It's so bad that toilets won't flush, which has forced business owners to set up Port-A-Johns & "Bathrooms Closed" signs across a huge swathe of tourist spots like gift shoppes and bars. (I was slightly skeptical so I did some Googling and, yep, at a recent Mendocino Board of Supervisors meeting one member raised the question: "How many books will you be checking out from the library if your neighborhood’s on fire and you can’t flush your toilet?”) 

Mendocino official describes the shituation 

From there we travel around the world to Bavaria to check out the depleted rural wells that (used to) supply entire cities before heading to Phoenix, AZ to assess the crisis at the Colorado River which is at its lowest level in history. Having personally spent time at both of the river's reservoirs (Lake Powell and Lake Mead), I can confirm it's every bit as bad as they're reporting. We visit Las Vegas next, where Lake Mead & the Hoover Dam are at all-time lows from being sucked dry by an ever-growing population of thirsty desert dwellers.

But it's California--home to 40 million people & many water-hogging industries like Silicon Valley--that is faring worst of all. The wildfire crisis requires tons of extra water to contain, and with climate change bearing down, wildfire season is now year-round which makes prescribed burns difficult to carry out safely. A recent study found that the wood smoke pollution from these fires has reversed decades of policy-driven air quality gains in just a few years' time. The West Coast's lack of water has been referred to as a "drought" or "megadrought" for years, but it's become clear to climatologists that the problem is a lot more serious than that. So what's going on here?

Aridification--the long-term transformation of a region to a permanently more arid state--is the new normal for much of the world including the U.S. West Coast. And that's the overarching theme of this documentary, which poses the unavoidable question: What happens when the human race runs out of drinkable water?

The film attempts to answer this daunting question by interviewing a variety of experts including Jay Famiglietti of the Global Institute for Water Security; entrepreneur & engineer of California's de-salination plant Gary Kremen and a number of government leaders & citizens living on the frontlines of this crisis. Their answers aren't reassuring. Eventually we end up at our final and most depressing destination: Afghanistan, a desert region that's dealt with arid conditions longer than perhaps anywhere on Earth. We quickly learn this is different. I won't spoil the climax of the movie but let's just say what they're dealing with now is not sustainable for the maintenance of human life. The sight of children standing around a dry tap with empty water buckets is heartbreaking.

Water report from Afghani on the poor side of town

These thirsty climate refugees will have to go somewhere to survive, a point the film makes near the end. An estimated 3 billion (with a B) people are at risk of losing access to potable water by 2070 (or much sooner according to this counter) & will have to move to more favorable regions. It's already happening as Guatemalans face massive crop loss due to aridification & move northward to the U.S. But of course the mainstream media isn't referring to them as climate refugees. This silence combined with the government's inaction, corporate-funded disinformation about climate change & public apathy could prove fatal to homo sapiens as a species, particularly when combined with the "Four Horsemen of Climate Change" described here.

This is a depressing, doom-inducing topic that nobody likes to think about. But if you watch no other piece on the subject of climate change, let it be this. The Fight for Water highlights the urgency of the issue without injecting a bunch of partisan, emotional editorializing. I haven't gotten around to watching Parts 2 and 3 yet but I'm sure they're excellent companions to Part 1 which stands on its own just fine. DW is what Frontline PBS used to be before they became a glorified mouthpiece for the State Department sometime after 9/11. The fact that a foreign media outlet can come to the U.S. & release a film about our own country that better informs us about the situation here than our own reporters says a lot about the corruption of our corporate-owned media.