We Have Been Here Before, and We Chose Wrongly

The historians who study collapse have a quiet warning for the week's water diplomacy: the ancient societies that failed under drought rarely failed for lack of water first. They failed for lack of an agreement about who got it. The Bronze Age cities that emptied, the river kingdoms that fractured — the archaeological record shows the wells often still held something when the social contract to distribute it broke. That is the pattern worth holding beside a Concordat session that adjourned without an allocation floor while a plus-two-point-eight world dries three continents at once. What is new in 2124 is only the scale: twelve billion people, a migrant population past 108 million, and technologies of desalination and recycling our ancestors could not dream of. What is old is the choice underneath — whether abundance of engineering can substitute for agreement about justice. It never has before. The wells, history suggests, are almost never the first thing to run dry.