I saw "Quantum Of Solace" yesterday. But this post is not going to be a review about the godawesome movie that it is. The movie definitely gets a 10/10 from me, and anyone who has watched Casino Royale would know that Daniel Craig brings the real n gritty James Bond of Ian Fleming back to life with his superb acting. [Warning : Spoiler Ahead !!] But I'm going to talk about a very important issue that is at the heart of the film : Water politics. In the film, Dominic Greene, a member of a secret organization that is [revealed in Casino Royale] is a businessman heading a company called "Greene Planet". But Greene is anything but "Green". He plots to overthrow the Bolivian government in order to control it's water resources. Mathieu Amalric who plays Greene in the film modeled his role as a wily & pitiful figure, more a politician than the crazed villains of earlier bond films. Amalric based Greene on "the smile of Tony Blair and the craziness of Sarkozy". Buying huge tracts of land in the Amazon rain forest for "reforestation" purposes, Greene reminds one of the many supposedly "green" capitalists who seek to make their billions from the current global focus on anything "environmental". The first effects of such businessmen is already being felt the world over with the current food crisis [overshadowed by the economic one] being worsened by the push [especially in the US thanks to Bush] for bio-fuels made from sugar cane & corn. The hungry in Somalia & Darfur have to compete with the biofuel industry to survive and in the end it is not the biofuel companies that are losing. But Dominic Greene's plan for controlling water resources makes the whole biofuel fiasco look like child's play. According to him : "This is the world's most precious resource; we need to control as much of it as we can." And the man has a point.
"Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water."
- Isamil Serageldin, World Bank Vice President
According to many critics, the Iraq war was nothing but one of America's ways of ensuring a smooth supply of oil from one of the largest oil fields in the world. Around the world, we see a lot of scrambling around for natural resources with significant consequences like China's support of corrupt African regimes. India fares no better with ONGC partnering with repressive regimes like that of Sudan and Burma for developing oil & natural gas fields. Russia flexes it's muscle with a helpless European Union with it's energy company Gazprom providing a significant amount of Europe's gas supply. Energy security is one of the more significant issues in the global security scenario with Obama promising an energy technology revolution once he comes to power. Hopefully his administration will be able to do so. But the current energy crisis will pale in comparison to the coming scuffle for natural resources, the most significant being water. A steady water supply is one of the pre-requisites of any civilization, as historical records show. One can see that almost all of the world's major cities sprung around rivers, coasts & lakes. A city that loses it's water supply simply fades away. The disappearance (or redirection) of the Saraswati river is speculated to be one of the reasons for the gradual fading away of the Indus valley civilization. Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery warned that unless measures are taken the city of Perth could become the first ghost metropolis, with no water to sustain it's population. Los Angeles and it's surrounding ever expanding suburbia is practically on a desert and struggles to find adequate water supply. The same is with Las Vegas and Beijing. The situation is made even worse by global warming as snow fall lessen & glaciers that feed the world's biggest rivers recede. Our very own Ganga is living on borrowed time. The Gangotri glacier which contributes to 70% of Ganga's water is receding at an ever accelerating pace and according to a UN climate report, it could vanish entirely by 2030. From then on, the holiest of holy Hindu rivers will be a seasonal occasion coming and going with the monsoons. About half of India's population [and the entire Bangladeshi population] is dependent on it and the future spells a catastrophe of epic proportions. The same holds for all the rivers originating in the Himalayas like the Indus, the Yangtze, the Mekong & the Brahmaputra. This does not bode well for old treaties like the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan that barely survived many of our wars. The future may see that India & Pakistan fight not for Kashmir but for the rivers that they share. And yeah, Bond goes after Greene motivated by duty and not after revenge for Vesper's death.
