Rose George Quotes
In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.
George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. Metropolitan Books, 2008.
The nest year California Governor Jerry Brown imposed a form of water rationing.
Water has always been in short supply in the Middle East. For thousands of years in the past water rights and possession was the cause of many conflicts. The rapid increase in fertility and population in the Muslim countries of the Middle East has placed even more stress on the water supply while waste is common. Fortunately Israel and Turkey have developed many techniques of using water efficiently. However, the rest of the Middle Eastern nations are slow to adopt these methods of water conservation, water generation and production, and agriculture that requires much less water than in the past. Politics, religion, and culture can be barriers or facilitators.
First Mormon Cabinet Member. The water problem did not come upon us suddenly.
Even before the drought the California (and other Western States’) water distribution system has been unfair, inefficient, wasteful, and irrational. There is only so much to go around and the demand it greater. Farmers sometimes pay only 1 percent of the cost the state incurs for the water they us. And far less than poor city or suburban dwellers. Few California farmers use the efficient drip irrigation system developed in Israel. Some farmers get most of the water they want while others get nothing. The taxpayers in the rest of the country pay for the California cheap water while they themselves pay many times the cost of the water. Ironically, Conservatives who almost always want market based solutions oppose it in the case of water as then the large corporate farms would not have the huge water subsidy that they have now.
Rose George is a British journalist and author. She began writing in 1994, as an intern at The Nation magazine in New York City. Later, she became senior editor and writer at COLORS magazine, the bilingual "global magazine about local cultures" published in eighty countries and based first in Rome, then Paris, then Venice. In 1999, she moved to London and began a freelance career and has since written for the Independent on Sunday, Arena, the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Details, Bad Idea and others. Along the way, she has been war correspondent in Kosovo for Condé Nast Traveler magazine and was twice a guest at Saddam Hussein's birthday party. Until 2010, she was senior editor at large for Tank, a quarterly magazine of fashion, art, reportage, and culture based in London.
