Death without a cause

IIPM PUBLICATION

The world’s greatest rivers are dying. The very rivers that withstood innumerable centuries and civilisations. As integral as elements most basic to human existence, these rivers are fundamental to balancing the aquatic ecosystems of the planet lest we choose to relinquish our very own lives. Though the globe that appears mostly blue, leaving aside salty oceans, it is these fresh water ecosystems that clean and store water vital to human and wildlife existence alike. With a huge spurt in human population at the turn of the last millennium, there have been excessive pressures on natural fresh water ecosystems leaving more than a billion without access to clean and safe drinking water. Perhaps a prequel to the water wars of the future.

But the ones that suffer most from man’s erratic misadventures are local wildlife species, both above and underwater, that find it difficult to survive either altered river flows or artificial blockages in form of dams and canals. Like the Colorado River in the United States that suffers an absolute change in its flow pattern, thanks to the many dams constructed on it affecting local temperatures and endangering many fish varieties that had evolved in the swift -flowing, silt-laden water.

The Ganga, considered the holiest by Indians, a river on whose loamy banks lives one in every twelve of the human species, figures amongst the top ten dying rivers due to mindless water extraction and pollution. However it is China’s Yangtze River and its tributaries that face a major threat with over 600 kilometres of the river in critical conditions. “The river's annual harvest of aquatic products dropped from 427,000 tonnes in 1950s to about 100,000 tonnes in 1990s,” reports China Daily, China’s leading English newspaper.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative