| Dear John —
As Mexico City, one of the world’s largest urban centers, faces a severe water crisis, I think of the pressures on lives, communities, and social structures. In Tehuacán, southwest of Mexico’s capital, Circle of Blue was among the first to document links between water scarcity and human migration. "There is a nagging sense of a losing battle that is being waged. The human exodus shows no signs of slowing any time soon: more than 100 residents of Santa Ana have voted with their feet in recent years, and three of Valentín Carrillo’s nephews have started new lives in New York," wrote Joe Contreras in 2006 as we chronicled the effects of water stress for the Circle of Blue groundbreaking multimedia series, Tehuacán: Divining Destiny. In her austere one-room home, Francisca Rosas Valencia dabbed away tears as she prayed for her son, Florentine, who left home to work in Los Angeles (see above photograph). I was with photojournalist Brent Stirtonin the town of San Marcos Tlacoyalco tucked in the hills above Tehuacán. Wells were going dry and crops were failing, upending life in the agrarian community.
“It is not easy to be outside of one’s homeland,” she said, “That is what makes me sad. I fear that in the future my children and grandchildren and the families of my neighbors will be forced to leave.” Is water scarcity our destiny? Or can we learn from the past to design water's future? Prescient and still relevant today, see Brent Stirton's remarkable images and read Joe Contreras's compelling front-line journalism, Divining Destiny, produced with support from the Ford Foundation and in collaboration with the Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security Program.
— J. Carl Ganter
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