Water, Food, and Energy: The Danger and Potential of the Nexus

It is also being rapidly converted into soybean, palm and sugar plantations, or cleared for cattle ranching, industries that feed upon each other to service a growing, worldwide appetite. 

 The lives of millions of South Americans are changing, for better or worse. Grandma asks Jackson: can we find a balance between things like native and diverse food sources, species conservation, healthy tree canopies and modernized agricultural systems?

But the land and water use footprint of these food powerhouses is causing severe stress on the region's water resources and soil health. Grandma tells how this imbalance is also felt by some people working hidden underneath these roofs.

Grandma tells how half a century ago this lake was the fourth largest in the world, as big as the country of Ireland! But Jackson quickly realizes that it has shrunk tremendously. 

Together, they stare at massive swathes of toxic salt plains, with buried chemical waste, pesticides and fertilizer residue. What on Earth happened here? Grandma tells Jackson that many people around suffer from health problems and are in desperate need of fresh water. 

Ships that once fished the abundant sea are now marooned, reminders of an ecosystem that once thrived here. Jackson wonders what could have possibly driven people to dramatically shrink this once mighty body of water.

But Grandma warns that growing fruits, vegetables and grain in such a harsh environment comes at a price. The plants in the middle of the desert are kept alive with water that is pumped from deep underground.

It had been sitting there since the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago but is now very quickly brought up thanks to large amounts of energy.

Jackson and Grandma look at these engineered plantations from space. Jackson finds them incredibly isolated and fragile. He wonders whether these efforts can be enough to change an entire desert ecosystem. 

But due to severe droughts, huge population growth and widespread, intensive farming practices, this wondrous environment lost much of its biomass and gave way to advancing desert. 

To counter it, thousands of local farmers planted more than 200 million trees in the last three decades. To Jackson’s eyes, it looks like the largest positive transformation of the environment in the whole of Africa.

Jackson watches a farmer water his vegetables near the Niger River in Bamako. Grandma tells him that it was the farmers who made the transformation of the area possible by planting trees in the desert. He feels hopeful before his Grandma takes him back to their future. 

Grandma and Jackson return home to a highly biodiverse London park and ponder the incredible, sometimes scary changes to Earth they witnessed. They will surely have much to talk about.