Lessons from a Past Future. Cape Town's Day Zero

Julio F. Campos

Throughout human history, the careless use of natural resources has proven to result in catastrophic shifts to many civilizations.

Overuse of natural resources is known to have played the major role in the collapse of ancient civilizations.

Easter Island, being the most famous of them, presents the ultimate example of how the mindless use of local, limited, resources could drive the end of an entire civilization.

The Mayans overpopulation and deforesting and overexploitation of local land, with a resulting drought, are another example of how the belief in the resources infinitude can lead a pungent civilization to disaster.

Angkor Wat, one of the most advanced Asian ancient civilizations, with is marvelous water control systems, upon which the entire civilization relied, collapsed due to external climate events leading to floods and droughts, resulting in the end of this entire civilization.

Even the great Roman empire was at the end subject to its soil over exploration, when the exhaustion of the North Africa soil resulted in food shortage at Italy, helping to push the empire to its end.

How many lost civilizations collapsed due to environmental disturbances are unknown.

What do we know, today, is the presence of some common factors amongst all the cases.

1. Poor understanding of how their survival was dependent on stable natural systems.
2. Overpopulation.
3. Overuse of natural resource.
4. The most important one: Environmental changes too slow to be perceived.  

Although it is obvious that they had no knowledge to allow them to understand what was going on with the natural system that they relied on, the inherent human capacity to adapt to small changes without noticing them (item 4) can be pinpointed as the ultimate cause of their collapse.

A systemic collapse as the experienced don't happen as a sudden catastrophic shift, neither their civilizations collapsed overnight, but rather as a buildup of cumulative impacts that at the end will lead to a new civilization, adapted to the new natural system, as if that was a natural change, from which the glorious civilization from their ancestors will be an echo from the past.

Today, one of the most important cities in the world, Cape Town, is facing the same problems, but with a twist. This time they know when their system collapsed and when the bill to pay will come.

Decades of uncontrolled growth, constant water overuse, bad environmental management, disregard to natural systems constraints and the potential of climate change impact, has made Cape Town jump into the abyss after three years of intense droughts.

Desperately adopting measures to reduce the water consumption, it is today estimated that my may/2018 there will be no more water available for its 400.000 people population.

Although looking at the past, this could have been predicted years ago giving time to fix the causes that leade to the current drought, thanks to our ability to adapt to subtle shifts, they didn't saw it coming.

Now on the verge of the city collapse, solutions are being proposed, as massive desalination plants.

Such technocracy solution, which is no more than a parachute now, not only will only delay the inevitable to some point into de future but will as well put stress in another system, such as marine system, from which we can't know the future consequences. As previous civilizations couldn't.

With the countdown started to day zero, when the water supplies will be shut down and the population will face an unprecedented resource rationing in modern cities history, the world follows closely on how the situation will unfold.

However, instead of looking for the past and learning what put them into this catastrophic situation and adopting preventive measures to avoid it, we are looking for a possible positive outcome so, instead of avoiding the problem, we can know how to deal with it when our taps are closed too.

But Cape Town is a distant place on a distant continent and there's no reason to believe that their problems will occur here also.

After all never before in human history, we had such capability to solve problems and cope with eventual changes that, with our growing technological development,  will be easily dealt with.

Let's look for the brilliant future, after all the ancient past has nothing to teach us.

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