Fire, Earth, Water, Air

The ancient elements recognized as integral to life on this planet never cease plaguing humankind. It is as though Nature, by her very unpredictability and neutrality, enjoys playing those occasional pranks of hers on humanity, just to witness in her detached way, how we manage to cope.

Cope we must, for the elements are beyond our capabilities to manipulate in any meaningful way. And when any of those elements become rogue, revert to nature, as it were, or become hysterical with power over us, we cower in ineffective awe, hoping to live out the worst of nature's excesses.

Poor, long-suffering Earth, putting up with the arrogance of humankind, wreaking all manner of indelicate and even brutal operations on her mantel. Occasionally, she becomes truly fed up and instructs her inner core to express her annoyance through volcanic eruptions, through the clashing of her crusts to create earthquakes, and from them tsunamis, treating us to a double whammy we cannot help but notice.

As for the air we breathe, we've managed to contaminate it in some singular places upon this planet, making ourselves ill with the fallout of our efforts, and impacting deleteriously on the well-being of all other living organisms. As fast as our carbon dioxide emissions leap into the atmosphere, the vegetation on this orb does its utmost to live up to its reputation as a reliable carbon sink, aided by the long-suffering oceans.

Somehow, Mother Earth, despite our depredations on her mantle and our wastefulness of the resources she so kindly provides for us, exerts the patience to wait out our juvenile antics, hoping doubtless that these creatures she has created will eventually reach reasonable and responsible adulthood.

Is our trust in her, in her guise as Mother Nature, misplaced? Has she become so utterly fed up with our greed and somnolent disregard and disrespect for her and her provisions that she has initiated a slow withdrawal of these life-giving provisions?

Climate change, of which condition we humans are declared to be a major factor in its onset is promising to confront us with a gradual, but too-imminent set of alterations to the provisions we so take for granted upon this globe. With the changing environment, and our altered atmosphere, the deleterious by-products lead to melting glacial resources.

Auguring the potential for rising sea levels, and at the same time, a dearth of seasonal run-offs to expand natural and life-enhancing water sources like the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze. This phenomenon in shrinking the traditional major water sources in Asia promises to affect agriculture as has never before been experienced.

"Water is not a renewable resource. People have been mining it without restraint..." according to Sir Nicholas Stern, who authored the British government's economic outlook on climate change. Aquifers are declining, those deep-earth water resources that we've always depended upon for irrigation and the provision of potable water.

Farming alone is responsible for 70% of water take-up on this planet. While the consumption of water is steadily increasing as the world's population increases; doubling every 20 years.
It's estimated that by 2025 it is possible that one-third of the population of this globe will not have reasonable access to adequate drinking water. As it is, enough of the world's population hasn't got provisional access to clean water sources.

China alone, with 21% of the world's population has a mere 7% of the world's water supply. And as populations mature and become more economically stable, their eating patterns alter, with more people turning to meat and dairy products, themselves more water-intensive to produce than grains which can feed a lot more people with less water.

We're being warned that much of the world's population is at high risk for both food and water declines. Ironic in the extreme that at the same time that ground-water sources are declining, leading invariably to a crisis in farming, we're also being inundated with severe weather systems, dumping lunatic and destructive amounts of rainfall. Which severe weather events themselves create the ruination of food crops.

We think, naively, that water simply becomes re-cycled and it's a never-ending resource, but that, apparently, is anything but reality. Fresh water used for irrigation is never returned to underground basins to restore aquifers; it becomes lost to evaporation. Usable water, the experts warn, is "running out".

Mirroring that other non-renewable resource; petrochemicals that energize the technology we use to farm with, to transport the food products that feed people. This circuitous puzzle of cause and effect is slowly impacting on those least resistant to scarcity and change as a result of their geographic placement on earth.

But it will eventually impact on even wealthier well-insulated populations eventually.