Decaying infrastructure that releases toxins upon coming into contact with salty, alkaline water is one thing. Actually losing that water source to salts and chemicals is entirely another, in the face of a growing water crisis that is bad enough without the destruction of what fresh water sources still exist.
With rising sea levels, we'll have plenty of sea water at hand certainly, which will further contaminate the fresh water. Large-scale desalination operations are incredibly energy intensive, which on its own is enough to compound the problem, but these operations also generate truck loads of salt and mineral waste, which must go somewhere as well.
Part of the general pattern then, is a taking up of what currently exists into human societies, which separate what exist and take up their usable elements, and deposit the newly separated waste elsewhere, which in its concentrated form, causes some things to thrive and is toxic to many others.
Like the movement of fire and water, such patterns are an intrinsic part of all life systems. However, the more mass implicated in the movement, the more that is displaced and the more room is needed for that displaced mass to settle. We are in the midst of a constantly-occurring process of mass movement, and everywhere we are constantly engaged in moving and transforming that mass to keep it from reaching within us.
But the more widespread the activity, the greater the mass, the more it accelerates the process and amplifies its lethality to that which exists. Naturally, the obscure and abstract nature of this problem - which ironically is a problem that is omnipresent - requires more thorough and clarifying treatment in the future.
