Oil, we are often told, is the lifeblood of late modern, industrialized civilization (here, here, and here) and certainly there is plenty of evidence that we behave as if we believe it.  But as the photograph of Iceland’s Kolgrima River shot from somewhere in the heavens suggests, the real lifeblood of any civilization on earth is water. I say shot from the “heavens” because it is less realistic than what might be the most recognizable photograph shot from outer space, William Ander’s iconic Earthrise, a clearly mechanically produced image that implicitly foregrounds the technology that enabled it.  Here the image has something of an abstract expressionistic quality to it that nevertheless underscores the naturalistic blending of land and waterways, a surface manifestation  of an underlying essence accented by the soft contrast of the muted pastels.  One can almost imagine the earth as a living entity, the blue veins throbbing in unison as they work to carry the nutrients necessary to bolster and sustain the ground.  It is a beautiful and compelling—almost utopian—God’s eye view.

70% of the earth is covered by water, but 97% of that is found in oceans and seas, with another 2.4% in glaciers and polar ice caps.  That leaves very little fresh water for all of its various needs, including most importantly consumption, sanitation, and agricultural production. This has not yet proven to be a disasterous situation in the United States—despite some scares as the recent drought in the southeast—where the average resident consumes 100 gallons of water a day.  But to put it in context we need to note that in some places in the world the most indigent people subsist on 5 gallons of water a day—when they can get it.  Nearly 50% of the people on earth do not have water piped into their homes, and in some developing countries women walk an average of 3.7 miles a day to get what they need.  And the most sobering fact of all is reported by the Water Resources Group (sponsored by the World Bank Group and a number of global financial, industrial, and agribusiness concerns), which notes that by 2030 water demand will exceed supply by over 50% in some developing regions of the world effecting over 1.5 billion people.

And so, to return to earth from the heavens there is this image of a reservoir in China’s Yunnan Province:

The contrast between the two images could not be more stark.  Here the earth is dried and cracked, its parts broken and fragmented rather than blended.  There is nothing that approximates movement in the photograph; indeed, there are no signs of vitality at all.  One of the often claimed effects of such desertification is a dangerous reduction in biodiversity, but here it is hard to imagine any biology at all.   Of course, even the slightest accumulation of moisture might change that, resulting in a dessert oasis, but the extreme close-up of the photograph locates the image in the here and now.  It is a human’s eye view,  and it underscores the immediacy and palpable effects of the threat.

Water, not oil, it would seem, is what is most essential to life on earth.  One can only imagine what the world will be like in 2030 if we don’t come to terms with that sooner rather than later.

Photo Credits: Hans Strand/National Geographic; Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg.  March 22, 2010 was World Water Day.  The April issue of National Geographic features the importance of water to life on earth.  We thank The Big Picture for calling our attention to the topic.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The trope of “youthful innocence” is a common photojournalistic convention, often marked by photographic representations of children playing as if they were adults.  Such images can range from the somewhat ordinary and everyday—a young girl selling lemonade to passersby for 10¢ a cup—to the extraordinary—a young boy saluting the passing caisson of his assassinated father.  But in almost every instance what we are being invited to see is a glimpse into a generational future animated by a nostalgia for the purity and  innocence of youth unencumbered by the world of experience.  And even when the world of experience insinuates itself, as with the John-John salute, the point of the photograph seems to be that what these children will become is forecast by how they manage the tension between innocence and experience.  In recent time we have been inundated with images of Middle Eastern children “playing” with guns and other weapons of war, and in this context the trope has become a harbinger of a threatening and dystopian world.

I emphasize the word “playing” in the last sentence because, as with the photograph above, the romance of youthful inexperience is transformed into a tragic mythos in which all sense of the child as behaving “as if” an adult has been obliterated, and with it, all hope that the next generation can see its way to a better or more peaceful future. The above image is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement,” marching at a rally in Gaza City to show “solidarity with the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” The toy guns and uniforms are clearly pronounced and thus underscore the potential militancy of the image, but they are not the key signifiers of the shift from romance to tragedy.  To take the full measure of force of the symbolic transformation you have to look at their facial expressions, and more specifically their eyes, which teeter between being altogether vacant and deadly serious, and in either case are wholly dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.

What clearly marks this and other such photographs from the Middle East is the presumption of their sheer otherness.  These simply could not be “our” children for they lack any and all sense of the purity or carefree joy of childhood that presumes to define the western world.  Their experience is not ours.  The conclusion is wrong, or perhaps more accurately, wrong headed, but what is important to  remember is that the idealized, romantic mythos of the relationship between worldly experience and youthful innocence is every bit as much a fiction as its tragic transformation, and that indeed, the former is ever at risk of morphing into the other.

Photo Credit: Ali Ali/EPA/WSJ

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Credit: Nate Beeler, Washington Examiner

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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