Water Wars in the Anthropocene: A South African Perspective

Anthony Turton is a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. His personal website is http://www.anthonyturton.com/.

The water wars literature is now very robust after almost three decades of intense intellectual development and scrutiny. After such a period of time, we can now ask whether water wars are a myth or reality. Will water scarcity indeed drive countries to war, or does the mere fact that all biological life depends on water make it so important that scarcity might even drive co-operation? This paper will present a case study of acute conflict over water in the goldfields of South Africa, once the richest in the world and now the epicentre of a bitter struggle that speaks to the very core of the sustainability issue. It will be argued that the most appropriate way to frame this discussion is within the context of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene as this provides the conceptual clarity necessary to unpack such a complex issue. The Anthropocene denotes the epoch in which human activity began to have a significant impact on the earth’s ecosystems and climate.

The Anthropocene as Background

For many individuals, the concept of the Anthropocene remains somewhat vague, so let us begin by examining it in more detail. As the species Homo sapiens, we tend to believe that life as we know it is the norm. Yet, from a geological perspective, this is not true. The earth is the product of an incredible journey through time and space, with an evolutionary history in a geological sense spanning 4.6 billion years. Of that long time-frame, Homo sapiens emerged only around two hundred thousand years before the present. If we compare the evolution of Earth as a geological entity to a twenty-four-hour clock, with the present time being midnight, then the arrival of Man happened only thirty seconds ago. In fact, if we view the evolution of all known hominid species from the southern African region as shown in Figure 1, the most startling fact is that Homo sapiens is the shortest lived so far of all, even if we have the greatest environmental impact.

FIGURE 1
Hominid Evolution over the Last Seven Million Years

Source: Anthony Turton, Shaking Hands with Billy: The Private Memoirs of Anthony Richard Turton (Durban: Just Done Publications, 2010), p. 402, interpretation of Terence S. McCarthy and Bruce Rubidge, The Story of Earth and Life: A Southern African Perspective on a 4.6 Billion Year Journey (Cape Town: Struik, 2005), p. 294.

By thinking in geological time-frames, we are able to identify one key characteristic of us as a species: our propensity to modify the environment to suit our own needs. Having noted the extremely long time over which Earth evolved, there are two aspects relevant to our current discussion.

First, the majority of time during which planet Earth has existed has in environmental terms been extremely hostile to life; only a very short period of the recent past has had climatic conditions benign enough to sustain intelligent life as we know it today. This period of time is known in the geological literature as the Holocene Epoch. The Holocene covers roughly the last ten thousand years. Temperatures were relatively stable during this epoch, part of an interglacial era in which Homo sapiens came to dominate the planetary biosphere and in which the world’s great civilisations developed. The Holocene, in turn, is a sub-set of the Tertiary period that arose around sixty-three million years ago, when the dinosaur mass-extinction event occurred.

Second, the transition from one geological epoch to another, at least in the known evolutionary history of planet Earth, has typically been characterised by traceable evidence in the rocks. The best known of these transitions is the dinosaur mass-extinction event, which occurred when the Cretaceous period ended and the Tertiary period began. Abbreviated as the “KT Boundary”, this is etched in the rocks as a thin layer containing a highly specific radioactive substance known as iridium, closely associated with meteors.

But how is this relevant to a discussion on water war?

The relevance lies in the recent discovery of a very significant new transition. While there is not yet total consensus among scientists that this specific event merits classification in the same category as the KT Boundary, there is a growing body of mainstream scientists, active in the field of water-resource management and aquatic ecosystems, who collectively believe that such a classification is in fact justified.¹ Let us consequently turn our attention to the argument being presented by these scientists in order to contextualise it in the water wars framework.

The Anthropocene and Water Conflict

In 2011, a group of water researchers met in Stockholm at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in order to honour the lifetime achievement of Malin Falkenmark, a renowned Swedish scholar. The significance of this event is that all of the invited scientists, without knowing it, had been working on different aspects of the same problem, whose identity became evident only after they engaged collectively. In essence, each of these scholars had been observing, and meticulously recording, evidence that something extraordinary was taking place in the aquatic ecosystems of the world. Stated simply, their collective observations suggest that, as with the KT Boundary, we are now capable of detecting a similar layer in the sedimentary rocks currently being formed at planetary level. The most compelling evidence for this arises from the measurable existence of a thin layer of sediment in rivers, with a highly specific geochemical signature. That signature is distinct enough to act as an identifier for the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. The exact nature of this signature relates to irrefutable evidence of humankind’s impact on planet Earth in the form of radioactivity and heavy metal existence at elevated levels when compared to background natural conditions.²

These observations match those being