The Water Knife

The Water Knife is a work of fiction depicting a, scarily tangible, world stretched thin by a crippling lack of resources, populated with people driven completely by the need for basic resources, getting just enough to make it to the next day or to horde as much of it for themselves as possible, living in an environment where it is impossible for  the basic needs of every single person to be met. This fact drives the characters in the book to increasingly egregious means to ends, and while the narrative that the characters engage with really is horrifying, what truly made the book unsettling for me was the realistic nature of the world it took place in. It is easy to imagine a situation where limited resources force people to act in extreme, morally reprehensible ways just to secure a means of survival, and that is exactly the world that The Water Knife depicts, organizations that are today seen as powerful and malevolent such as state government are now relicts of a society that relished in it’s excesses, now forced to resort to desperate tactics to hold onto a semblance of what society was like before it had to face the consequences of its own

gluttony. What made this book resonate with me was how accurate this depiction was, Paolo Bacigalupi truly realizes the predicament our society is facing and this book is in essence a warning to us as to what the world might look like if we don’t take action now. He depicts a world where life as we know it has ended, and people find themselves in a savage, unforgiving world that is no longer keeping their coddled comfort a priority. He is warning us what our lives might become if we don’t take action, and honestly, I think we should take his warning to heart.

Generational Differences

Climate change. To most Boomers and Gen Xers, it seems these words aren’t much more than a myth, a kind of media boogeyman that to them represents the ever so present threat of degenerates and yuppies trying to adulterate and ruin the precious American Dream they fought so hard to preserve. It seems, however, that the younger people get, the more climate change morphs from a fallacy of scientists trying to meddle with something they shouldn’t, to an existential threat that literally threatens every aspect of the every institution that cradles modern civilization in its hands. Still a boogeyman, but one of our own making. A terrifying one that has tangible power, seemingly capable of destroying civilization itself. That is, I hope, where my generation stands. The reason why it captures so much fear in me, and hopefully my generation, is because we are actually seeing it’s effects. All of the 10 hottest years on record occuring in the last 20? The city of Cape Town, South Africa being on track to running out of water? These facts are scary enough, and with the prospect that it’s only going to get worse it’s easy to see why our youngest people are the most scared of these 2 words. Not the oldest generation, though. Why? So

many natural disasters caused such great strife in their time. I recently read The Grapes of Wrath, and while the book took place a few years before the time of the boomers, the results of this disaster would still have been fresh in their minds. The images the book depicts, fields so dry that they just blow away, lines of starved farmers clogging the highways, the human tragedy of their struggles in a new place, these will be repeated with greater intensity and repercussions due to climate change. Why won’t they realize that climate change will cause more of these disasters that they lived through? Why can’t they see that this is the world that my generation will inherit from them?