Here’s one from the Sign from God Department: The very same week it’s revealed that Canada is suffering its worst drought in its history, the United Nations-sponsored Stockholm Water Symposium announces an international water crisis.

By 2025, researchers predict, one in three people will not have access to sufficient water. If we needed any more convincing that we need to alter our ways quickly and radically if we want to save the planet, this ought to do it.

This is Canada, after all, the most freshwater rich nation in the world. This year, however, lakes and rivers are diminishing coast to coast and farms across the country are turning into dustbowls.

In June, the Alberta government declared a drought disaster, promising $93-million in relief to farmers and ranchers, while the crop forecast in Saskatchewan suggests an 18 per cent drop in production below the ten-year average, despite a record amount of seeding.

In Ontario, there are 132 fires blazing in tinder-dry forests in the northeastern and central parts of the province.

Water shortages due to pollution, global warming and wasteful practices currently affect 450-million people worldwide. More than 1-billion people still do not have access to safe drinking water and, in twenty-five years, there will not be enough water to sustain traditional agricultural practices. Violence over water scarcity has already broken out in nations like China.

Our relative abundance of freshwater has international trade-happy types fretting about whether Canada will become more powerful or more vulnerable. I only hope it makes us wiser and more prudent. I’m not opposed to Canada sharing its resources if that should prove to be environmentally viable and necessary. I am opposed to seeing something as basic and life sustaining as water only available to the wealthiest and greediest of nations who will continue to squander it, while refusing to adhere to any environmental standards.

At the same time, we’re being screwed by the U.S. on softwood lumber exports, the U.S. rejects any and all international treaties, President George W. Bush is already eyeing our water resources, as massive underground aquifers in America’s Midwest and Southwest are rapidly depleting.

Though Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has repeatedly promised that he will not allow for bulk water exports, the government’s Web site has already announced a call for tenders to place a dollar value on our water assets. And what’s the point of figuring out how much something should cost unless you eventually plan to sell it? Well, Environment Minister Dave Anderson claims, “It’s to get indicators … to get a better handle on how we price some of the resources, that at the moment, we simply take for granted.”

At least, the taking for granted part is true. To encourage cheap food production, government policies keep water prices artificially low – they don’t account for the costs involved in managing and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to provide clean freshwater, or the costs of managing watersheds.

Because water is so cheap, it’s easily wasted.

Some examples:

  • in the summer, about half of all treated water is sprayed onto lawns and gardens;
  • toilets, while consuming nearly one-quarter of our municipal water supply, use more than 40 per cent more water than needed;
  • more than half of the water used to irrigate farmland – about 70 per cent of our total freshwater usage – gets lost to evaporation and leaks before it even gets to crops.

It’s no longer of a question of whether we have to change, but how. Pulling our heads out of the sand would be a start. Environmental scientists say it will take at least a 10 per cent reduction in global water usage to protect our water systems. That means sacrifices on a personal level, hardly an easy task in a culture that views mindless consumption and the acquisition of wealth as virtuous pursuits.

An even tougher battle will be to convince corporations, farmers, ranchers, workers and unions to make the radical changes necessary to save the planet’s water supply. For starters, that means more efficient manufacturing of products like paper and steel, which use extraordinary amounts of water, more efficient crop farming, far less livestock farming, and fewer pesticides that poison underground water supplies.

It means finally accepting – despite the short-term fallout of such changes – that freshwater is not a limitless resource and that some sectors of our economy are just too environmentally damaging to maintain. As the green slogan goes, there are no jobs (and no Big Macs and no manicured lawns) on a dead planet.