What do we really need? In a future where extreme weather is more common and fossil fuels are no longer plentiful, what are the top five things we take for granted which are truly necessities? Which shortages would threaten life as we know it?
Whether idly over a beer, or more seriously as part of GIS sustainability modelling, it’s a question I’ve been mulling over. It’s also something I’ve been discussing with my daughters, aged 10 and 7. What are the most important things for a safe and comfortable life? “TV!” they laugh, knowing it will wind me up. “Zhu Zhu Pets!” (I know, I didn’t know either, but sadly I do now).
Then the other night, the water company had to fix a leaking main up our street. By chance I was outdoors and heard their muffled attempt at letting us know via a loudhailer. Five minutes’ notice, they said, and the water would be off for two hours. At least I think that’s what they said.
And the whole mood changed: a sunny spring evening was suddenly full of people coming out looking perplexed, knocking on each others’ doors, and running up to where the water people were busy digging. They had turned on taps. Nothing had come out. Civilisation had come to a shuddering halt.
We’d filled a few jugs and the kettle, but my seven year old started crying. “You can die without water!” she sobbed. “I saw it on TV!”
We calmed her down, but it was a useful opportunity to have a good discussion about what a privilege it is to have safe, clean water on demand, and not to have to walk for hours to collect it, like many young girls around the world. Whole regions can be threatened if their water supplies are diverted by dams, and wars over water are far from unthinkable. Even here, the lack of water can have some extreme impacts.
Up the road in Gloucestershire, the floods in 2007 put out a pumping station for three weeks. On the one hand, as Anna in Gloucestershire commented on the BBC website, the street corner water bowsers built the sense of community – “I will miss the social activity that it became, seeing children collecting it, the elderly man walking with his walking stick and his saucepan, taking just enough, the comments that we were the lucky ones, and the feeling as I collected it that it was a precious commodity which we usually take for granted.”
On the other, vandals urinated in a bowser for the old people’s home where my mother works, and police had to be called to supermarkets to stop fist fights over dwindling supplies of bottled water in Cheltenham.
These two extremes of response highlight clean water’s undoubted position as No. 1 on the list of survival needs even in our “civilised” country. An online survival specialist puts it in black and white: “When faced with a survival situation, clean drinkable water is often the most important consideration. People have survived without food for weeks or even months, but go without water for even just one day and the survivor will be in desperate straights indeed.”
They also highlight the central position of community in responding to a shortage. Clean water, food, shelter, warmth… and good people around you to share them with. Maybe it’s not my final list of Top 5 necessities, but it’s not a bad start.
Mark Thurstain-Goodwin
