The Shared Things that are no Longer Shared

There are things that do not belong to any one country. Rivers. Air. Fish in the sea. The climate. The weather.

My uncle fished the same stretch of coast for forty years. He stopped last summer. He said the fish he had known were not there anymore, and the fish that were there were younger and smaller each season, and he did not want to be the last man pulling them out. He did not blame anyone in particular. He said everyone doing the same thing, everywhere, at once, had done it. No-one person could stop, because stopping alone would only mean somebody else caught what you didn’t.

For most of history, these were so abundant that no country had to think about sharing them. There was always more river, always more fish, always more air.

There is not always more now. In a number of places, what used to be abundant has started to run out. Or at any rate, it has started to be taken faster than it can replace itself.

Some of what follows I have had to read to understand. I offer it plainly.

There is a river called the Nile. It runs through several countries. The country at the end is Egypt, which depends on the water more than it depends on almost anything else. The countries upstream have begun to dam the river, for their own development. Each dam is reasonable from the point of view of the country building it. The dams together threaten Egypt in a way Egypt cannot stop, because Egypt is downstream.

The same thing is happening on many rivers. The Tigris, where Turkey controls the headwaters and Iraq and Syria depend on the flow. The Mekong, where China's dams affect Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. The Indus, where India and Pakistan have fought over the water for a lifetime.

The same story about fish in the sea, caught faster than they can grow back, by many countries at once, none of which wants to be the one that stops first.

The same about the minerals in the phones and the batteries — cobalt, lithium, rare earths — from a small number of places, whose governments are not always stable, whose environmental costs are borne far from the people who will use what the minerals become.

The same about the climate itself, which no country wants to pay the full cost of protecting, because any one country that does will find its industries moving to another country that does not.

The old international order was built to prevent countries from invading each other. It was not built to handle countries taking each other's rivers, or each other's fish, or each other's air. We do not have rules for these things. We are making them up as we go. And we are not doing it well.