'Last Call at the Oasis' starts out somewhat as an extension of another great book and movie, Cadillac Desert, that nearly 20 years ago focused on our culture's abusive and unconscious waste of this most precious and irreplaceable resource. Unfortunately in those intervening years our culture's actual abuse has been far greater than even the depressing projections of that earlier movie foretold, far worse.
'Last Call' predicts that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water then goes on to teach us how and why through excellent cinematography, interviews and examples from the lives of everyday folks in every corner of the world. To comment on it in depth would take a library full of Mud Reports, but here's a few of the points i wrote down after it ended:
1. Only 1% of the world's vast water supplies are freshwater.
2. There are already 140,000 desalinization plants operating globally, each of them consumes vast amounts of energy and in total they barely put a dent in our usage.
3. Between 80% and 90% of our water usage is agricultural, most of which is wasted.
4. Aquifers, the source of almost all of our agricultural water take thousands of years to replenish. We are depleting them in a few decades. The water that does seep through down into our ground water has been so polluted by agricultural chemicals that it's now considered toxic.
5. Not only do agricultural chemicals and other wastes contaminate our groundwater but recently we've started blasting in an even more toxic brew of chemicals through fracking, a brew that because of the Halliburtom Loophole, we're not even allowed to know the contents of.
6. There is no new water, we drink the same water the dinosaurs did.
'Last Call at the Oasis' covered many other interconnected dystopian topics too. The Earth is one biosphere, we're all in this together. The air, water, weather, climate touch us all equally. Our combined demands for MORE than we need have been and are still being supplied by an extractive capitalist system that is destroying the very world that sustains us faster and faster everyday. It's a cop-out to simply blame the rich, or the corporations or the banks owned by the rich who finance this ecocide without looking in the mirror and realizing that everything we WANT, everything we consume has the destruction of clean water, air and polluting energy in it. Human greed, laziness and our culture's endless quest for another free lunch took, to paraphrase Janis Joplin, 'another little piece of my heart' last night watching Last Call at the Oasis, it will yours too.
