The Brahmaputra-Ganges river system is bursting. There is now more of Bangladesh under the water than above it, and things are little better upriver in Nepal and Bihar. Hundreds are dead, millions displaced. ‘Tis the season, of course, and the Gangatic plain expects a bit of flooding at this time of year, but there’s no Monsoon in China where the Yangtze river system is drowning even more people, and more homes. This catastrophic water isn’t just coming from the sky.

Life is nothing without water, and life in much of Asia revolves around a few mighty river systems. The Yangtze-Kiang feeds about half of China and (before the Three Gorges Dam) Indochina. “The story of the Ganges,” said India’s first President Jawaharlal Nehru “from her source to the sea, from old times to new, is the story of India’s civilization and culture”; his more religious minded compatriots go even further in worshipping her, though both the religion and the secular republic are named for another river, the Indus, which now rules most of Pakistan.

These three great rivers are sister-goddesses, that we can trace back to a common starting point: Himalaya, the abode of snow. The world’s youngest and tallest mountain range, the story of the Himalayas is the story of Asia. Since they were pushed up from the sea by the advancing Indian subcontinent ten million years ago, they kept the hot, wet monsoon from going too far North and the cold, dry Siberian winds from going too far South. The great Asian deserts are theirs, as are the great Asian rivers for - as their Sanskrit name suggests - cold air and wet air meet up there to make snow, snow which is compacted into great glaciers, glaciers which melt to feed great rivers, rivers which flow to nourish great nations.

India and China are the world’s most populous nations, and both Pakistan and Bangladesh make the top ten. In all, well over half of humanity lives on, and off, the Himalayan river-systems; the home of snow is our home, and we should take any threat to it very seriously indeed.  But if creating this home involved one continent crashing into another, trashing it has involved little more than excessive greenhouse emissions continents away.  The Himalayas are one of the most pristine, unpolluted environments left on earth, but they’re still getting hotter.  The glaciers are melting, and decades’ worth of water is washing over the floodplains in a single year.

The consequences of this are so much worse than mere floods.  Need I spell it out?  The run-off will eventually run out.  The glaciers could be gone as soon as 2035, according to a recent U.N. report, and they will be missed.  Our ecology and our economy - both words, incidentally, which derive, like Himalaya, from home, in this case the Greek oikos - are dependent on fresh water; it is our life, and we are pissing it away.  The specifics differ - glacial melt is a manifestation of climate change, while water-mining is perhaps the best and most brutal example of the tragedy of the commons - but it all adds up to a terrifying picture of thirsty decades to come.

Coverage of this is predictably rare in the corporate media, with one notable exception.  While its political courage has been slipping away before our very eyes lately (are the rumours true, or is it just that market pressures are finally asserting themselves?), but Al Jazeera has been doing its utmost to raise consciousness of the issue.  Today’s leading feature was what finally prompted me to write this article; I’ve been looking into freshwater depletion for a while, and it’s terrified me to the point where I couldn’t think about it without breaking down in a panic.

This, in the end, is climate change in a nutshell.  I’ve never been satisfied with that comfortably nebulous phrase - it’s more than change and it’s more than the climate.  Let’s be done with euphemisms!  We are comitting ecocide, pure and simple, destroying our oikos, our aalaya, our home, and it’s about time we had a bit of a think about where we will live a few decades down the line.