NY Times Review: When There Really Is Not a Drop to Drink.
‘Last Call at the Oasis,’ A Documentary About Water Supplies.
By A. O. Scott.
Jay Famiglietti, one of a handful of expert witnesses in Jessica Yu’s “Last Call at the Oasis,” is a thoughtful scientist with an engaging manner who specializes in water. In particular, he studies — and tries to raise public awareness about — the rapid depletion of water supplies caused by agricultural overuse, rampant development and global climate change.
Last Call Clip 1: GRACE
Last Call Clip 2: Fresno Meeting
Last Call Clip 3: Water Cycle Change
Last Call Clip 4: We Can Take Steps
2014 Last Call Update
Depletion is a symptom, not a cause. It is deeply troubling; in my mind it portends a risk to the survival of life on Earth as we have known it. The cause of depletion and many other ills plaguing life on Earth is overpopulation. Our media are rife with stories of individual presentations of overpopulation stress results but the word overpopulation never appears.
Examples of a few ills driven by overpopulation that are widely discussed in many different media:
• Resources – Inadequate supplies of clean, potable water.
• Illness – Driven by poor sanitation, crowded living and filth accumulation.
• Overcrowding – Gross shortages of affordable housing and congested travel.
• Off gassing – Chemical pollution of environment; plastic saturation of oceans.
• Dead oceans – Algae blooms driven by runoff of fertilizer use driven by food demands.
• Global Warming driven by habitat destruction – Rain forests in Brazil and tung oil palm farms.
• Coral reef death driven by Global Warming – Loss of critical regeneration of ocean food stocks.
• Violent conflict – Contest for arable lands and depleting resources.
• Species loss – Crowded out by human expansion.
• Cross species infection – Driven by human predation for food, HIV arising from SIV one example.
The list is very brief and very briefly stated in the interest of opening perception so that the reader will start with a sense of the big picture, a worldwide picture. Items cited are examples of a wide spectrum of events damaging our planet. The stresses of overpopulation are exacerbating all of them.