Quantum of Solace

James Bond, 007.
I have to say, this Daniel Craig does an absolutely incredible job, in my opinion. True, most of what he pulls off is utterly and completely unbelievable and obviously done with the help of computers and simulations, but, who cares? It's AMAZING entertainment. This new movie, the Quantum of Solace, had somewhat of an environmental twist. I noticed it especially because I have been noticing environmental things and green causes more and more these days, but this movie really made me think. To give a basic synopsis, the main villain was the CEO of a green corporation focused on the environment...or so we and the world would be led to believe. Bond obviously knows better, and he realizes and uncovers a plot that, under the guise of buying up land to create natural parks and perserves, the company is actually buying up access to fresh water in various countries. Engineering droughts and driving up the price of, of all things, water, our most valuable resource and one of the FEW things we cannot live without. The story centers around Bolivia, and, among other things, the villain's company would buy up forest land. That land would be sold to logging companies, which would then cut down all of the trees. This would lead to the earth being looser and less able to retain water, and so, without the vital root systems of the trees, water was more apt to run off into the oceans or evaporate. Additionally, river beds were strategically dynamited and damns were erected. At one point, one of the country's leaders is quoted as saying that citizens need to spend half of their paychecks just to be able to drink one bottle or bucket. Living in America, such a thing sounds unfathomable, and, I know that this was just a movie, but you can't help but to think of certain other, real world situations that have, did, and do actually occur. Situations that make you really think...just how impossible would this be?

People want cachet, they need power, and, quite frankly, it's tough to get this without having the cash to back it up. Reading a book recently, titled "Eco Barons", I read about Chile and what they do for what seems to be salmon aquaculture. I had heard of this before, but from the perspective of Wal Mart, a huge company that depends on Chile's aquaculture to sell fish cheaply in its grocery stores. The issue was debated from two sides. Fish is healthy, and Wal Mart makes it more accessible to Americans known to have serious issues with cardiovascular disease and cholesterol. By the same token, the cheap fish are coming with an expensive price. Salmon was introduced to an area of the ocean where it had not previously existed. The farmers make sure that it flourishes, and it actually flourishes to such an extent that everything else in that area dies. All the fertilizers and antibiotics and biohazard wastes cause various microbial blooms occuring at various levels of the ocean's thermocline. These blooms consume all available O2 in respiration, leaving behind an ecosystem devoid of life. So, that clean, efficiently sliced pink fish at the end of the isle. True, you can pick it up at an extreme discount. But, what if, embedded in that cost of getting that price so low it was proven that farmers providing that fish had killed a species that would have led to the cure for cancer? When we kill without truly knowing the consequences of our actions, can we really prove that this hasn't happened? Might we be the authors of our own demise? The world's ecosystems are incredibly resilient; there are ways to do things, albeit, in slight more expensive fashion, that will have less of an adverse effect. Are we in immediate danger of corporations scheming to control our world's water supply? Ha, of course not. But there are other resources and species that we should make more of an effort to preserve, especially the ones about which we know the least. They could be the ones to save us when we need it most.