We Rationed the Water Before the Ministers Rationed the Talk

The Concordat will convene its water ministers later this month, and the communiqués will speak of allocation formulas and standing emergency tracks. But the real allocation has already happened, household by household, in the vessels stacked by every tap from the Iberian meseta to the American Southwest. Call it panic if you like; I call it a parliament of one nation each, voting with buckets. When storage in the great catchments falls faster than any binder predicted — and this July it has — the citizen does not wait for the formula. This is not a failure of the public; it is a portrait of it. The danger is that our institutions read the early queues as disorder to be calmed rather than intelligence to be heeded. The people rationing today are not ahead of the science. They are ahead of the schedule, and the schedule is the thing we can still fix. Convene early. Then act earlier than that.