Resolving Water Conflicts Workbook

Lynette de Silva, Chris Maser, Lynette de Silva, Chris Maser

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Umweltrecht

This book works to build trust, consensus, and capacity to enhance understanding through a water conflict management framework designed to bolster collaborative skills. Built on case-studies analysis and hands-on real-life applications, it addresses issues of water insecurity of marginalized systems and communities, global water viability, institutional resilience, and the inclusion of faith-based traditions for climate action. The authors assess the complexities of climate challenges and explain how to create sustainable, effective, and efficient water approaches for an improved ecological and socioeconomic future within the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

1

The Consequence of a Decision and the Case of the Aswan High Dam

Chris Maser

DOI: 10.1201/9781003032533-2

CONTENTS

The Inviolable Rules of Decision Making

Rule 1—Everything Is a Relationship

Intra-personal

Inter-personal

Between People and the Environment

Between People in the Present and Those of the Future

Rule 2—All Relationships Are All Inclusive and Productive of an Outcome

Rule 3—The Only True Investment Is Energy from Sunlight

Rule 4—All Relationships Involve a Transfer of Energy

Rule 5—All Systems Are Based on Composition, Structure, and Function

Rule 6—All Relationships Have One or More Trade-offs

Rule 7—All Systems Have Cumulative Effects, Lag Periods, and Thresholds

Rule 8—Change Is an Irreversible Process of Eternal Becoming

Rule 9—Systemic Change Is Based on Self-Organized Criticality

Rule 10—Dynamic Disequilibrium Rules All Systems

Rule 11—Success or Failure Lies in the Interpretation of an Event

Rule 12—People Must Be Equally Informed If They Are to Function as a Truly Democratic Society

Rule 13—We Must Consciously Limit Our “Wants”

Rule 14—Simplicity Is the Key to Contentment, Adaptability, and Survival

Rule 15—Nature, Environmental/Cultural Wisdom, and Human Well-Being Are Paramount

Rule 16—Every Legal Citizen Deserves the Right to Vote

Rule 17—This Present Moment, the Here and Now, Is All We Ever Have

The Aswan High Dam—A Case Study Illustrating the Irreversible Consequences of a Single Decision

Conclusion

Questions

Notes

No person, institution, or nation has the right to… contribute to irreversible changes of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles or undermine the integrity… of the Earth’s ecologies—the consequences of which… [pass to] succeeding generations as an irrevocable form of remote tyranny.

—David Orr ¹

Are we deluding ourselves about the availability of clean water? Our earthly survival, and that of our children, their children, and all generations, ultimately depends on clean water. Water is an interactive thread connecting air, soil, biodiversity, human population density, sunlight, and climate. (Biodiversity refers to the variety of living species and their biophysical functions and processes.) Think of this interconnectedness as the “waterbed principle,” which simply demonstrates that you cannot touch any part of a filled waterbed without simultaneously affecting the whole of it.

In other words, the magnitude of a decision’s outcome is based either on the relative sustainability of its biophysical consequences or on the contrived political/economic promises. Either way, it is the compounding effect of a decision’s multifaceted outcome that we bestow on all generations—present and future.

Yet, with our myriad data points and statistics, economists and politicians are subjected to accessing the complexities of air, soil, water, sunlight, biodiversity, and climate through economic equations and models and, to a large extent, through planning models.² Often, lost in this process are intangibles and ecological variables—including air, soil, water, sunlight, biodiversity, and climate, which are more challenging to convert into economic externalities. Their omission results in unforeseen biophysical consequences. Unless required by law, biodiversity is discounted when its consideration interferes with monetary profits.³

THE INVIOLABLE RULES OF DECISION MAKING

With the foregoing in mind, it is critical to understand that just as there are inviolable biophysical principles that govern nature and the universe, so there are inviolable rules of decision making; for example, change is a constant, irreversible process with ever-novel outcomes. Here the term inviolable means that, if one circumvents the biophysical principles and rules of decision making, all future life forms will bear the irreversible consequences. To put it plainly, there are no problems in the world or the universe outside our own thinking, which prompted Winston Churchill to say:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story.… It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.⁴

This quotation is part of Winston Churchill’s speech to the British Parliament in 1935, as he saw with clear foreboding the onrushing threat of Nazi Germany.

RULE 1—EVERYTHING IS A RELATIONSHIP

From a decision-making perspective, there are four basic relationships that must be consciously accounted for because they are interactive in space through time: (1) intra-personal, (2) inter-personal, (3) between people and the environment, and (4) between people in the present and those of the future.

Intra-personal

An intra-personal relationship is an individual’s inner sense of self-worth, personal growth, authenticity, and so on. In short, it is the degree of psychological maturity that makes a person conscious of and accountable for his or her own behavior and its consequences. The more conscious we are, the more other-centered we are, the more self-controlled our behavior, and the greater our willingness to be personally accountable for the outcomes of our behavior with respect to the welfare of fellow citizens, present and future, and Earth as a whole.

Each decision is a fork in the road of life; each presents at least two choices—right-hand fork or left-hand fork. Whichever fork we choose determines what we get, whereas everything encompassed in the fork not taken is foregone. In this sense, the direction of our lives is determined by cumulative results of many little decisions. Some are remembered, but most are not because they were made unconsciously. We tend to remember the “big decisions,” while seldom realizing that a single, big decision is merely the sum of the many little decisions made along the way. We give just a little here and again a little there, and eventually we have pointed ourselves in a new direction.

Therefore, taking personal responsibility for our thoughts, words, and deeds reflects both our self-respect and the quality of care we give ourselves, becoming a critical first step toward social-environmental sustainability. Extending this to others provides a heightened level of sustainability within a community, as measured by how people treat one another and protect nature and the global commons—such as clean water, clean air, and fertile soil—as everyone’s birthright.⁵

Inter-personal

Not enough can be said for civility, respect, and hospitality toward other people. If we use these basic human behaviors to frame our decision making, we can focus more on the mutual values that bind us and less on the dividing tensions between our beliefs and attitudes.

While we always have a choice, we must choose—in that we have no choice. We are not, therefore, the victim of our circumstances but rather the consequential product of our choices and decisions. And the more we are able to choose love and peace over fear and violence, the more we gain in wisdom and the more we live in harmony and social-environmental sustainability. This is true because what we choose to think about determines how we choose to act, and our thoughts and actions set up self-reinforcing feedback loops—or self-fulfilling prophecies, as it were—that become our individual and collective material realities.

It is just such self-reinforcing-behavioral feedback loops based on competition for money through the exploitation of resources—often including one another—that are destroying our environment and thus our society. As long as competition is the overriding principle of our social-economic system, we can only destroy our supportive environment because it has become the commercial battlefield in which the material war is fought. Our overemphasis on rivalry in nearly everything fosters insecurity that manifests as greed, which is just the fear of not having enough to feel personally secure—and thus is the cause of conflicts.

Our obsession with having to be “right” at the expense of someone else having to be “wrong” brings forth another human tendency—defending a point of view when faced with a perceived threat to our sense of material survival. There are, however, as many points of view as there are people, and each person is indeed right from his or her vantage point. Therefore, no resolution is possible when people are committed only to winning agreement with their respective intellectual positions.

Setting aside egos and accepting points of view as negotiable differences, while striving for the common good over the longer term, are necessary for teamwork. Unyielding self-centeredness represents a narrowness of thinking that prevents cooperation, coordination, collaboration, possibility thinking, and the resolution of issues. Teamwork demands the utmost personal discipline of a true democracy, which is the common ...