Shades of things to come

Bracks gloomy on water summit's chances - National - theage.com.au:
"A deal on Canberra's proposed takeover of the Murray-Darling basin has little chance of success at Friday's meeting between the state and federal governments, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks says."

In many parts of the world there is a water supply crisis in the making that will make oil supply issues pale in comparison. This article deals with the difficulty just in one country of dealing with water resources in one river basin.

Here in the US, we have the issue of depletion of the Oglala aquifer which threatens the continuation of irrigated agriculture in much of the Great Plains. There is also an ongoing conflict with Mexico in which Mexico is taking more than its share of water from the Rio Grande while the US is drawing more than the agreed quantity of water from the Colorado.

In the Mideast, one of the factors seldom mentioned in connection with the possibility of Kurdish seperatism is that an independent Kurdistan encompassing the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria would control the mountains which are the source of the Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan and other major rivers.