Drought in Australia

After seven years of scant rainfall – the worst drought on record – have left vast swathes of the country parched and barren, Australians need all the help they can get. Last month, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the country faced an "unprecedentedly dangerous" drought.

Without significant rain in the next few weeks, farmers in the nation's breadbasket states of New South Wales and Victoria will be denied water for irrigation, consigning millions of acres of crops to wither and die. Tim Flannery, one of Australia's best-known environmentalists, has warned that Australia confronts "the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now."

For a warmer future, Australia employs Aboriginal wisdom

Here in S.E. Queensland the dams are at 19% and we are currently under Level 5 water restrictions.

Australia, already the driest inhabited continent on the planet, is in the grip of its worst-ever drought.

The water crisis is no longer about desperate farmers in the Outback watching their sheep and cattle perish. Over the past six years, it has extended its grip to the cities and is changing the way Australians regard a resource they once took for granted.

Climate scientists agree that Australia's drought is linked to global warming.

"There is very strong consensus," says Blair Nancarrow, director of the Australian Research Centre for Water in Society. "There's a lot of climate-model evidence that says that the drought is, at least in part, human-induced."

'Water police' crack down in an ever-drier Australia

You don't read articles like this in Australia, however. These are from a US-based news source, the Christian Science Monitor. Here there is a real lack of discussion of the wider issues, and a lot of poking of heads into sand, because people have no frame of reference for the issues, and no way of coming to grips with the situation. Why is there no rain? What can be done, beyond trying to conserve the ever shrinking water? Who can say...?

Adi Radhika devi dasi in Hungary, where they are also experiencing drought, recently shared the following:

I dont know how I slept… but as I woke up in morning, I turned to my husband and said, “we have to do something.” Water means life. So, how does this water come? From where it comes and gives life?

There is a verse from Bhagavad-gita in my mind;

annad bhavanti bhutani
parjanyad anna-sambhavaha
yajnad bhavati parjanyo
yajnah karma-samudbhavaha
BG 3.14

“All living bodies subsist on food grains, which are produced from rains. Rains are produced by performance of yajna [sacrifice], and yajna is born of prescribed duties.”

Purport by Srila Prabhupada:

Food grains or vegetables are factually eatables. The human being eats different kinds of food grains, vegetables, fruits, etc., and the animals eat the refuse of the food grains and vegetables, grass, plants, etc. Human beings who are accustomed to eating meat and flesh must also depend on the production of vegetation in order to eat the animals. Therefore, ultimately, we have to depend on the production of the field and not on the production of big factories. The field production is due to sufficient rain from the sky, and such rains are controlled by demigods like Indra, sun, moon, etc., and they are all servants of the Lord. The Lord can be satisfied by sacrifices; therefore, one who cannot perform them will find himself in scarcity—that is the law of nature. Yajna, specifically the sankirtana-yajna prescribed for this age, must therefore be performed to save us at least from scarcity of food supply.

And in Bhagavad-gita 9.19, Krishna says; “O Arjuna, I give heat, and I withhold and send forth the rain.”

I am thoughtful… surely, we deserved this situation and we deserved even much more. We exploited the nature recklessly and we never even questioned, how, why and who is giving us this opulence? Have we ever become grateful to the rain, fruit and the earth? We are eating what we sow.

In such extreme conditions, some of us blame God, telling He is bad, or even He does not exist. However, the first step of spiritual life is humbleness. It continuously fills our hearts with joy however hard the conditions are. In Vaisnava culture this is described as being lower then a blade of grass.

I am happy, Krishna is giving us this big opportunity. Now it is time to really be conscious every moment, to be heartily grateful and to develop our humbleness. Let's do sankirtana; let's remember Him, let's gather together and chant His holy names.