Every year, I read through a bunch of predictions for what this year is going to be like, in general, for the planet.  This year was no exception.  Uniformly this year, the predictions have been pretty bad.  They run the gamut from economic collapse, oil embargo and tanker wars, to starvation and mass illness.  The reasons for these predictions are many and varied.  Usually, I’ve been able to find somebody who says that the can will get kicked down the road another year and the problems won’t be faced until next year.  Not this year.

This year, even the major think tanks are predicting population decline in the next ten years.  That’s interesting.  They usually don’t give reasons for their predictions.  If you’ve been watching, it isn’t that hard to fill in the blanks.  Start with something innocuous, like people are excessively rude to each other on social media.  Then extrapolate out from there.  People who live a long time do so because they’ve got a social support network that enfolds them and reduces the risk of ruin in their lives.  It’s not the diet.  Well, sometimes it is the diet, but you know, people eat what their friends are eating, which brings us back to the social support networks.

When you feel attacked, this changes your neurotransmitter levels, which causes cascading effects in your biology.  When you feel like you don’t measure up to your friends who are visiting island paradises in their vacation photos or doing awesome in comparison to you, when your parents are narcissistic assholes, when your “worth” is based on extrinsic factors instead of intrinsic ones, when you can’t win no matter what, then your health will decline.  Does this culture of hustle sound familiar?

People need food and water that isn’t poison in order to expand their numbers.  They need their babies to survive birth and childhood.  Throw in climate change, the loss of oil per capita, some diseases, a bunch of heavy metal poisoning from various vectors, a growing lack of trust in government, in scientists, in the medical profession in general (third highest cause of death), and an economy that brings a lot more uncertainty, and maybe you can see how all of these things come together to produce death.

Yet, at the same time, there’s trouble wrapping my head around the numbers.  Even the Holodomor did not bring the crash in population numbers on the scale predicted by various large think tanks.  How could this be?  The short answer is that it has to do with water.  Too little water, and everybody dies.  Too much water, and everybody dies.  Contaminate and poison the water, and lots of people die.  Clean the water too much, and death also results.  Control the water, and you control the world.  Except of course, for the problem that water is not something you can control.  Water is not a thing that can be centralized.  Attempts to centralize water always result in death, like lead poisoning from the lead pipes in the Roman aquaduct system.  Are the benefits worth the risks?