Complicit in disaster

THE news pages, electronic and print, have been filled with the water crisis now upon us.

Every one of our public representatives – national, provincial and local – are complicit in the disaster facing us.

All have had the preventive solution within their reach, but chose to ignore it, be it for venality or incompetence, or both.

The latest excuse is that nobody could have known.

Three years ago I heard a presentation given by Israeli scientists and water authorities about the dangers that lie ahead.

One of the points they made is that there was no time to lose if we were to avoid a catastrophe.

Everything they warned about has now come to pass, but none of the measures to combat the crisis have been looked at until now. Now it might be too late.

In desperation the City has turned on the ratepayers.

Nobody seemed to realise that when you have more and more people in a defined area, you amplify the impact that each single person can have on resources. If left unrestrained, untempered by any kind of conservation and planning ethic, it will become a destructive force. And that is what has been happening.

The population of Cape Town has increased fourfold in the past 20 years.

We have seen a reshaping of the biosphere and ecological system to a point where Mother Nature is altering the physical and climatic conditions of the Western Cape, our home.

And our councillors do nothing but fight each other. Rodney Mazinter Camps Bay