Chapter 1
1. Report from Reuters, November 29, 2014.
2. Adriana Brasileiro, “São Paulo Running Out of Water as Rain-Making Amazon Vanishes,” Reuters, October 24, 2014.
3. Quoted by Thomas Friedman, New York Times, November 4, 2014.
4. These quotes are from Peter H. Gleick and Meena Palaniappan, “Peak Water Limits to Freshwater Withdrawal and Use,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 25 (June 22, 2010): 11155–62.
5. Taikan Oki and Shinjiro Kanae, “Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources,” Science 313, no. 1068 (2006), doi: 10.1126/science.1128845.
6. From a 2003 IRN paper, “A Crisis of Mismanagement: Real Solutions to the World’s Water Problems.”
7. These numbers from Oki and Kanae, “Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources.”
Chapter 2
1. For more detail, see “Groundwater Use for Irrigation — A Global Inventory,” by a shopping list of authors from three institutions, the Institute for Crop Science at the University of Bonn, the FAO in Rome, and the Institute of Physical Geography, University of Frankfurt/Main: S. Siebert, J. Burke, J.M. Faures, K. Frenken, J. Hoogeveen, P. Döll, and F.T. Portmann, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions 7, 3977–4021 (2010), doi: 10.5194/hessd-7-3977-2010.
2. nature.com/news/reservoir-deep-under-ontario-holds-billion-year-old-water-1.12995.
3. The world’s largest aquifers, in no hierarchy of size, are these: 1. Nubian aquifer system (NAS); 2. Northwest Sahara aquifer system (NWSAS); 3. Murzuk-Djado basin; 4. Taoudeni-Tanezrouft basin; 5. Senegalo-Mauritanian basin; 6. Iullemeden-Irhazer aquifer system; 7. Chad basin; 8. Sudd basin (Umm Ruwaba aquifer); 9. Ogaden-Juba basin; 10. Congo Intracratonic basin; 11. Northern Kalahari basin; 12. Southeast Kalahari basin; 13. Karoo basin; 14. Northern Great Plains/Interior Plains aquifer; 15. Cambro-Ordovician aquifer system; 16. California Central Valley aquifer system; 17. High Plains-Ogallala aquifer; 18. Gulf Coastal Plains aquifer system; 19. Amazonas basin; 20. Maranhao basin; 21. Guarani aquifer system; 22. Arabian aquifer system; 23. Indus basin; 24. Ganges-Brahmaputra basin; 25. West Siberian artesian basin; 26. Tunguss basin; 27. Angara-Lena artesian basin; 28. Yakut basin; 29. North China Plain aquifer system; 30. Songliao basin; 31. Tarim basin; 32. Parisian basin; 33. East European aquifer system; 34. North Caucasus basin; 35. Pechora basin; 36. Great artesian basin; 37. Canning basin.
4. See http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/evaluation/reports/2013/11142 for how to find this data.
5. Report by Matt McGrath, April 20, 2012, “‘Huge’ Water Resource Exists under Africa.”
6. The report, “Quantitative Maps of Groundwater Resources in Africa,” was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters 7 no. 2 and is available on the British Geological Survey website, http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/groundwater/international/africanGroundwater/maps.html; Bonsor was quoted by the BBC.
7. See Jim Yardley, “Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up,” New York Times, September 28, 2007.
8. From scientists from Fliders University, Adelaide: Vincent E.A. Post, Jacobus Groen, Henk Kooi, Mark Person, Shemin Ge, and W. Mike Edmunds, “Offshore Fresh Groundwater Reserves as a Global Phenomenon,” Nature 504 (December 5, 2013), doi: 10.1038/nature12858.
9. Quoted by Neena Satija, “What’s the Magic Number on Texas Water Needs?” Texas Tribune, May 8, 2014.
10. See the interesting piece, “Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust,” by Michael Wines in New York Times, May 19, 2013.
11. Blog by Annabel Symington, “The Guarani Aquifer: A Little Known Water Resource in South America Gets a Voice,” April 13, 2010, htttp://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/04/13/.
12. Global Water Forum, The Agreement on the Guarani Aquifer: Cooperation without Conflict, September 2, 2013, http://www.globalwaterforum.org/2013/09/02/the-agreement-on-the-guarani-aquifer-cooperation-without-conflict.
Chapter 3
1. Africa: the Congo, Niger, and Nile, with a combined annual runoff of 1,982 cubic kilometres. South America: the Amazon, Paraná, Orinoco, and Magdalena, with a combined runoff of 8,829 cubic kilometres, much of it due to the mighty Amazon. Asia: the Ganges, Yangtze, Yenisei, Lena, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Ob, Chutsyan, Amur, Indus, and Salween/Nu, with a flow of 5,722 cubic kilometres. North America: the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Mackenzie (Canada’s longest at 4,241 kilometres), Columbia, and Yukon, with a combined flow of 1,843 cubic kilometres. Europe: the Danube and Volga, with a combined flow of 468 cubic kilometres.
2. News item in Science, October 17, 2014, reporting a study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
3. This from a report, “China’s Water Shortage Could Shake World Food Security” by Lester Brown and Brian Halweil in WorldWatch magazine, as early as 1998.
4. Tao Tao and Kunlun Xin, “A Sustainable Plan for China’s Drinking Water,” Nature 511 (31 July 2014): 527–528; doi:10.1038/511527a.
5. Stephen Luby, “Water Quality in South Asia” Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition, June 2008, 26, no. 2: 123–24. Luby is, among other academic appointments, head of the Program on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.
6. Wijarn Simachaya, “MRC-Water Quality Monitoring Network (WQMN),” October 2013.
7. Canadian Press report by Dene Moore, August 2014.
8. Quoted in Gordon Hoekstra, “Residents Affected by Mount Polley Dam Failure Hope Panel Report Prompts Charges,” Vancouver Sun, November 15, 2014.
9. Halifax Chronicle Herald, August 6, 2014.
10. Dirk Meissner, “Victoria Sewer Dispute Hits the Fan as Washington State Urges B.C. Intervene,” Canadian Press, June 11, 2014.
11. Kurt Hollander, “Mexico City: Water Torture on a Grand and Ludicrous Scale,” Guardian, February 5, 2014.
12. Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, Brussels, 4.10.2013 COM (2013) 683 final.
13. ILEC/Lake Biwa Research Institute, eds., 1988–1993 Survey of the State of the World’s Lakes, vols. 1–4 (Nairobi: International Lake Environment Committee, Otsu, and United Nations Environment Programme).
14. David W. Schindler, R.E. Hecky, D.L. Findlay, M.P. Stainton, B.R. Parker, M.J. Paterson, K.G. Beaty, M. Lyng, and S.E.M. Kasian, “Eutrophication of Lakes Cannot Be Controlled by Reducing Nitrogen Input: Results of a 37-Year Whole-Ecosystem Experiment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, 32 (2008): 11254–58; doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805108105.
15. This from Michael Wines’s excellent survey of the lake, “Behind Toledo’s Water Crisis, a Long-Troubled Lake Erie,” New York Times, August 4, 2014.
16. Two good works on eutrophication are David Schindler and John R. Vallentyne, Overfertilization of the World’s Freshwaters and Estuaries (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008), and M. Nasir Khan and F. Mohammad, “Eutrophication: Challenges and Solutions,” Eutrophication: Causes, Consequences and Control, ed. A.A. Ansari (Dordrecht: S.S. Gill Springer Science+Business Media, 2014); doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7814-6_5.
17. Lindsay Crouse, “River Grime? Triathletes Are Swimming in It,” New York Times, August 3, 2014.
18. Environmental Science & Technology, September 2014. See also Pesticide National Synthesis Project, http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp.
19. Quoted by Willemien Groot on Radio Nederland, August 21, 2006, “Cleaning Up the Filthy River Rhine.”
20. I.P. Zaretskaya, “Water Availability and Use in the Danube Basin,” and “State of the Art: Expected Water Availability and Water Use in the Danube Basin,” paper delivered to a UNESCO water conference, Paris, 2006.
21. Some of this through personal correspondence with Philip Weller.
22. Science 347, no. 6219 (16 January 2015), doi:10.1126/science.1255641, and Carl Zimmer, “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says,” New York Times, January 15, 2015.
23. C. Nellemann and E. Corcoran, eds., Our Precious Coasts — Marine Pollution, Climate Change and the Resilience of Coastal Ecosystems, United Nations Environment Programme, 2006.
24. http://www.riverfoundation.org.au/.
25. ILEC, Managing Lakes and Their Basins for Sustainable Use: A Report for Lake Basin Managers and Stakeholders, International Lake Environment Committee Foundation, 2005, http://www.worldlakes.org/uploads/LBMI_Main_Report.pdf.
Chapter 4
1. Catherine Brölmann, “International Law as Tool for Global Water Governance,” http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Authors/Broelmann-Catherine.
2. Some of this was recounted in my earlier book, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003).
3. Joanna L. Robinson, Contested Water: The Struggle against Water Privatization in the United States and Canada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
4. Maggie Black and Jannet King, The Atlas of Water: Mapping the World’s Most Critical Resource, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 92.
5. Terry Anderson and Pamela Snyder, Water Markets (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1997), 54.
6. Peter Gleick, “Whose Water Is It? Water Rights in the Age of Scarcity,” SFGate, August 2, 2009. http://blog.sfgate.com/gleick/2009/08/02/whose-water-is-it-water-rights-in-the-age-of-scarcity/. Reprinted by permission of the author.
7. Neena Satija, “Texas Groundwater Districts Face Bevy of Challenges,” Texas Tribune, August 29, 2013.
8. There’s an interesting discussion of this issue in Anderson and Snyder, Water Markets, 185.
9. Ramona Giwargis, “Merced Supervisors to Consider First Draft of Groundwater Ordinance,” Modesto Bee, October 19, 2014.
10. Felicity Barringer, “Desperately Dry California Tries to Curb Private Drilling for Water,” New York Times, August 31, 2014.
Chapter 5
1. Blue Covenant, repeated (slightly reworded) in a piece for American Prospect, June 2008, https://prospect.org/article/where-has-all-water-gone.
2. Fredrik Segerfeldt, Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the World’s Water Crisis (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2005), 106, 6.
3. Paul Farrell, “Water Is the New Gold, a Big Commodity Bet,” MarketWatch, July 24, 2012.
4. Emily Achtenberg, Rebel Currents, June 6, 2013, nacla.org/column/7334, originally published in ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America 12, no. 2 (Winter 2013).
5. Shultz was writing in Yes! Magazine. His piece was called “The Cochabamba Water Revolt, Ten Years Later,” April 10, 2010. He was also co-editor of Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press), and was in Cochabamba throughout the turmoil.
6. Broadcast January 26, 2009. His commentary was later repeated in the Guardian and on the Latin American news website Upside Down World.
7. Quoted in Anderson and Snyder, Water Markets, 50.
8. In conversation with the author, 2014.
9. Quoted in McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 2014), 118.
10. Paul B. Farrell, “Water is the New Gold, a Big Commodity Bet.”
11. “Ebb and Flow: Competition Is Being Drip-Fed into the Water Industry,” Economist, November 22, 2014.
12. Dickerson’s story is well told in McKenzie Funk’s entertaining book Windfall.
13. Peter H. Gleick et al., The World’s Water, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012), 25.
14. This last example from Charles Fishman’s The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 267.
15. A good survey of this issue is by Neena Satija of the Texas Tribute arm of the New York Times, “Aquifer Is No Quick Fix for Central Texas Thirst,” September 11, 2014.
16. Mike Esterl, “U.S. Water Privatization Fails to Pan Out,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006.
17. “Value Diluted: Water Is a Growing Business Problem: Many Companies Haven’t Noticed,” Economist, November 8, 2014.
18. Martin Pigeon, “From Fiasco to DAWASCO: Remunicipalisation Problems in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” in Remunicipalisation: Putting Water Back into Public Hands, ed. Martin Pigeon, David A. McDonald, Olivier Hoedeman, and Satoko Kishimoto (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2012). Full text available online at http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/publication/remunicipalisation-putting-water-back-public-hands.
19. Funk, Windfall, 132.
20. David Lewis Feldman, “Australia’s Drought: Lessons for California,” Science 343, no. 6178 (March 28, 2014): 1430.
21. Gleick, The World’s Water, vol. 7, 96.
22. Much of this, as well as some of the other examples cited, is from the Remunicipalization Tracker.
23. Victoria Collier, “Deep Questions Arise over Portland’s Corporate Water Takeover,” Truthout website, January 7, 2015.
24. http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/.
25. “Puerto Rico’s Debt-Ridden Water Authority Cuts off Non-Payers,” Latin American Herald Tribune, www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=774453&CategoryId=14092.
26. John Eligon, “Detroit Threatens to Cut Water Service to Delinquent Customers,” New York Times, March 25, 2014.
27. Gleick, The World’s Water, vol. 7, 36.
28. Briscoe said this to me but had earlier made the same point in his Water Policy interview. See Chapter Six, note 2.
29. Many of these very sensible conclusions are from Andrew Nickson and Claudia Vargas, “The Limitations of Water Regulation: The Failure of the Cochabamba Concession in Bolivia,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 21, no. 1 (2002): 99–120.
30. Joseph Berger, “Desalination Plan Draws Ire in Rockland County,” New York Times, November 13, 2014.
31. Ellen Dannin, “If It Sounds Too Good . . . What You Need to Know, but Don’t, about Privatizing Infrastructure,” Truthout website, October 31, 2013.
32. Marq de Villiers, Our Way Out: First Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 274.
Chapter 6
1. John McPhee, “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century,” New Yorker, September 27, 1999.
2. The Briscoe material in this chapter comes partly from “Overreach and Response: The Politics of the WCD and Its Aftermath,” Water Alternatives 3, no. 2: 399–415; partly from an interview he gave to the editor of Water Policy, Jerome Delli Priscoli, published in Water Policy 13 (2011): 146–60; and partly from a conversation with the author from his Harvard office (July 2014).
3. The McCully quotations in the following paragraphs are from Patrick McCully, “The Use of a Trilateral Network: An Activist’s Perspective on the Formation of the World Commission on Dams,” American University International Law Review 16, no. 6 (2001): article 3.
4. Quoted by Briscoe, “Overreach and Response: The Politics of the ICD and Its Aftermath,” Water Alternatives 3, no. 2 (2010): 399.
5. Letter to Foreign Policy, September 2004.
6. Times of India, June 13, 2014, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/.
7. Ibid.
8. “Large Dams Just Aren’t Worth the Cost,” New York Times, August 24, 2014.
9. A. Ansar et al., “Should We Build More Large Dams? The Actual Costs of Hydropower Megaproject Development,” Energy Policy (2014), http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513010926.
10. Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker (New York: Penguin, 2006), 7.
11. World Energy Council, http://www.worldenergy.org/data/resources/resource/hydropower/.
12. This from a good piece by Andrew Revkin, “Can Bhutan Achieve Hydropowered Happiness?” New York Times, December 10, 2013.
13. Amelia Urry, Lisa Hymas, and Sara Bernard, “‘Night Moves’ Is Why People Hate Environmentalists,” Grist website, September 5, 2014.
14. Rachel Smolker and Almuth Ernsting, “Abundant Clean Renewables? Think Again!” Truthout website, November 16, 2014.
15. “World Bank Acknowledges Shortcomings in Resettlement Projects, Announces Action Plan to Fix Problems,” World Bank press release, March 4, 2015.
16. This paragraph is from Marq de Villiers, Dangerous World (New York: Penguin, 2008).
17. Ivan B.T. Lima, Fernando M. Ramos, Luis A.W. Bambace, Reinaldo R. Rosa, “Methane Emissions from Large Dams as Renewable Energy Resources: A Developing Nation Perspective,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 13, no. 2 (February 2008).
18. Quoted in Keith Schneider’s “Uttarakhand’s Furious Himalayan Flood Could Bury India’s Hydropower Program,” April 2, 2014. Schneider is senior editor for the Circle of Blue website.
19. Andrew Jacobs, “Plans to Harness Chinese River’s Power Threaten a Region,” New York Times, May 4, 2013.
20. Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, Into Africa: A Journey through the Ancient Empires (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1999).
21. International Rivers press release, June 19, 2012.
Chapter 7
1. Cherry’s quotes, as well as Russell Gold’s, are from a fracking conference held in Toronto, May 29, 2014, at the Munk School of Global Affairs, part of its Program on Water Issues.
2. Tillerson’s notorious quote has been widely reported by the New Yorker, the New York Times, American Scientist, and many other publications and websites. See, for example, Ian Urbana’s piece in the New York Times, August 3, 2011, titled “A Tainted Water Well, and Concern There May Be More.”
3. Globe and Mail, May 1, 2014.
4. Louis Sahagun, “U.S. Officials Cut Estimate of Recoverable Monterey Shale Oil by 96%,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2014.
5. http://articles.philly.com/2013-05-14/news/39231025_1_marcellus-shale-terry-engelder-natural-gas.
6. Asjylyn Loder and Isaar Arnsdorf, “Majority of U.S. Companies Inflating Shale Reserves,” Bloomberg News, October 10, 2014.
7. These numbers from CERES, a consulting firm that pushes for sustainable business practices.
8. For more on this, see Jim Malewitz and Neena Satija, “In Oil and Gas Country, Water Recycling Can Be an Extremely Hard Sell,” New York Times, November 21, 2013.
9. “Clean That Up: Environmental Technology; A Combination of Two Desalination Techniques Provides a New Way to Purify the Water Used in Fracking,” Economist, November 30, 2013.
10. “Study of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources: Progress Report,” http://www2.epa.gov/hfstudy.
11. Roger Drouin, “Fracking Unfocus: How the EPA’s Long-Awaited Hydraulic Fracturing Study Could Miss the Mark,” Truthout website, November 18, 2013.
12. Bill McKibben, “Bad News for Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal,” Mother Jones, September 8, 2014, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/methane-fracking-obama-climate-change-bill-mckibben.
13. Dana R. Caulton et al., “Toward a Better Understanding and Quantification of Methane Emissions from Shale Gas Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 17: 6237–42, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1316546111.
14. “Oklahoma Earthquakes Induced by Wastewater Injection by Disposal Wells, Study Finds,” Science 345, no. 6192 (July 4, 2014): 13, 14.
15. Susan Hough, quoted in a news report by Alexandra Witze, “Man-Made Quakes Shake the Ground Less than Natural Ones: Seismic Danger from Oil and Gas Operations May Be Overestimated,” Nature, August 2014, doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15742. Hough’s original study was published in Journal of the Seismological Society of America.
16. Erin Kelly et al., “Oil Sands Development Contributes Elements Toxic at Low Concentrations to the Athabasca River and Its Tributaries,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 37 (July 2, 2010): 16178–83, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008754107.
17. Keith Schneider and Sam Kean, “Tar Sands Oil Production, an Industrial Bonanza, Poses Major Water Use Challenges,” Circle of Blue website, August 10, 2010.
18. The thirteen member companies of COSIA are Canadian Natural Resources, Nexen, Syncrude, BP, Cenovus, Teck, Devon, Statoil, Imperial, Total, Shell, ConocoPhilips, and Suncor.
Chapter 8
1. Steven Erie, quoted in “A Hundred Years of Soggy Tubes: California’s Largest City Salutes the Source of Its Growth,” Economist, November 9, 2013.
2. Peter H. Gleick et al., The World’s Water, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014): 123ff.
3. Some of this from a survey in the Economist, October 12, 2013, titled “Rivers Are Disappearing in China; Building Canals Is Not the Solution.”
4. Zhijun Ma et al., “Rethinking China’s New Great Wall,” Science, November 21, 2014.
5. Indian project via an editorial in Science, July 11, 2014.
6. Gonce material in correspondence with the author.
7. Rocky Casale and Reyhan Harmanci, “The Cold Rush,” Modern Farmer, January 7, 2014.
8. Cran material in correspondence with the author.
9. This quote from Mulroy is from Fishman, The Big Thirst, 85.
10. Quoted by Eliza Barclay, “Alaska Town Eyes Shipping Water Abroad,” National Geographic News, June 25, 2010.
Chapter 9
1. David Molden, ed., Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (London: Earthscan and Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management, 2007).
2. In Sandra Postal, Water: Adapting to a New Normal (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2010), a Post Carbon Reader Series publication.
3. http://www.ars.usda.gov/Aboutus/docs.htm?docid=10201.
4. Lester Brown, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 2003). Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.
5. Earth Policy Institute, Raising Water Productivity to Increase Food Security, June 22, 2012.
6. “Beyond Drip Irrigation to Water Fields in Dry Land Areas: An Interview with David Bainbridge,” by Janeen Madan, research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project. The interview is on the website WorldEnvironment.tv.
7. Mark Bittman, “A Sustainable Solution for the Corn Belt,” New York Times, November 18, 2014.
8. Research published by the Geological Society of America. See David R. Montgomery, “Is Agriculture Eroding Civilization’s Foundation?” GSA Today 17, no. 10, doi: 10.1130/GSAT01710A.
9. D. Renault and W.W. Wallender, “Nutritional Water Productivity and Diets,” Agricultural Water Management 45, no. 3 (2000).
10. For more on virtual water, see Daniel Renault’s paper for a UNESCO workshop in 2002 titled “Value of Virtual Water in Food: Principles and Virtues.”
11. The Post Carbon Institute published the Post Carbon Reader in 2010. Sandra Postel’s chapter was called “Preparing for a Water-Limited World.”
12. See http://www.csiro.au.
13. Tracy McVeigh, “Humble Spud Poised to Launch a World Food Revolution,” Guardian Weekly, November 7, 2014.
14. de Villiers, Our Way Out, 210.
15. Joel K. Bourne, “The Global Food Crisis — The End of Plenty,” National Geographic, June 2009, https://standeyo.com/NEWS/09_Food_Water/090526.end.of.plenty.html.
16. Krishna N. Das and Mayank Bhardwaj, “Modi Bets on GM Crops,” Reuters, February 23, 2015.
17. Brown, Plan B. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.
Chapter 10
1. I have a clipping pinned to my office wall from one of these only-in-America contrarians, asserting that it was his God-given right to install however many and whatever showers he wanted in his house even if they used up as much water as a fire hydrant, and be damned to interfering bureaucrats who wanted to stop him. “It’s my water and I’ll use as much as I want to,” he declared. The letter was sent to the editors of Fine Homebuilding magazine, which had recently been arguing for greener housing.
2. Justin Sheffield, Eric F. Wood, and Michael L. Roderick, “Little Change in Global Drought over the Past 60 Years,” Nature 491: 435–38, doi:10.1038/nature11575; Aiguo Dai, “Increasing Drought under Global Warming in Observations Ad Models,” Nature Climate Change 3 (2013): 52–58, doi:10.1038/nclimate1633.
3. Justin Gillis “Science Linking Drought to Global Warming Remains Matter of Dispute,” New York Times, February 16, 2014.
4. Andrew Revkin, “A Climate Analyst Clarifies the Science behind California’s Water Woes,” New York Times, March 6, 2014.
5. “Insurers’ Disaster Files Suggest Climate Is Culprit,” Nature 441 (June 8, 2006): 674–75, doi: 10.1038/441674a8.
6. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from “Water and Climate Change: Understanding the Risks and Making Climate-Smart Investment Decisions,” World Bank position paper #52911, November 2009.
7. Richard G. Taylor, Martin C. Todd, Lister Kongola, Louise Maurice, Emmanuel Nahozya, Hosea Sanga, and Alan M. MacDonald, “Evidence of the Dependence of Groundwater Resources on Extreme Rainfall in East Africa,” Nature Climate Change 3 (2012): 374–78, doi: 10.1038/nclimate1731.
8. News report in Nature, November 13, 2014.
9. Some of this is discussed in my earlier book, Windswept, published in 2006 by Walker and Company in the United States and by McClelland and Stewart in Canada.
10. “In Spain, Water Is a New Battleground,” New York Times, June 3, 2008.
11. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/video/2013/02/05/melting-glaciers-slow-disaster-andes.
12. Ibid.
13. “Highest-Elevation Glaciers Keep Their Cool: A Case Study from the Nepal Himalaya,” Cires.colorado.edu/science/spheres/snow-ice/glaciers.html.
14. This, and certain other facts in this section, are from the comprehensive survey and assessment of glaciers “Glacier Retreat: Reviewing the Limits of Human Adaptation to Climate Change,” by Ben Orlove in Environment magazine, May–June 2009.
15. Porter Fox, “The End of Snow?” New York Times, February 7, 2014.
16. See survey by Michael Wines, “Climate Change Threatened to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park,” New York Times, November 22, 2014.
17. March 28, 2009.
18. Carling C. Hay, Eric Morrow, Robert E. Kopp, and Jerry X. Mitrovica, “Probabilistic Reanalysis of Twentieth-Century Sea-Level Rise,” Nature 517 (January 22, 2015): 481–84, doi:10.1038/nature14093.
19. Robert William Sandford and Kerry Freek have produced a first-rate booklet on these floods called Flood Forecast, published by Rocky Mountain Books.
Chapter 11
1. September 29, 2014: On the path past 9 billion . . .
2. de Villiers, Our Way Out.
3. Mark Tran, “Global Overpopulation Would ‘Withstand War, Disasters and Disease,’” Guardian Weekly, November 7, 2014.
Chapter 12
1. For a good catalogue of water conflicts, see Peter H. Gleick, The World’s Water, vol. 8, 162.
2. Mark Zeitoun and Jerome Warner, “Hydro-Hegemony — A Framework for Analysis of Trans-Boundary Water Conflicts,” Water Policy 8 (2006): 435–60. My emphasis. Reprinted by permission.
3. Sandra Postel and Aaron Wolf, “Dehydrating Conflict,” Foreign Policy, September 18, 2001.
4. ICA (Intelligence Community Assessment) ICA 2012-08, February 2, 2012, p. 1.
5. OECD, “Water and Violent Conflict,” May 26, 2005.
6. I have borrowed the term “flashpoints” from the Circle of Blue website, which has a thorough and reliable database of potential conflicts and potential resolutions. Some of my material was sourced from this database.
7. Alon Tal and Yousef Abu-Mayla, “Gaza Need Not Be a Sewer,” New York Times, December 2, 2013.
8. Asserted in letters from Weizmann, then head of the World Zionist Organization, to various British government officials in 1919 and 1920, and in a letter to David Lloyd George. There are multiple citations, including Hussein Amery, “The Litani River of Lebanon,” Geographical Review 83, no. 3 (July 1993).
9. “Lack of Sufficient Services in Gaza Could Get Worse without Urgent Action, UN Warns,” UN News Centre, August 27, 2012, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?News-ID=42751&Cr=Gaza&Cr1=#.VCwaMitdVkE.
10. Rana F. Sweis, “A Parched Jordan Places Hopes in Reservoir,” International Herald Tribune, November 28, 2012.
11. Headline in Economist, March 9, 2013.
12. See Felicity Barringer, “Groundwater Depletion Is Detected from Space,” New York Times, May 30, 2011.
13. See http://www.nasa.gov/grace and http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace.
14. Quoted in “Less fertile crescent,” Economist, March 9, 2013.
15. Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell “The Arab Spring and Climate Change,” Climate and Security Correlations Series, Center for American Progress, February 28, 2013.
16. These quotes and the three in the following paragraph from “Foreign Ministers Try to Quell Tensions over Ethiopia’s Plans to Divert Blue Nile in Controversial Dam Project,” Al Jazeera, June 18, 2013.
17. See Adam Hafez, “How Yemen Chewed Itself Dry,” Foreign Affairs, July 23, 2013.
18. Nasir Jamal, “Sound Bytes: Scrapping the Water Treaty Is No Solution,” Dawn, October 3, 2014.
19. A UPI dispatch, quoted by Palash Ghosh in “What Are India and Pakistan Really Fighting About?” International Business Times, December 27, 2013.
20. Editorial, “Dark Times Ahead: Water Scarcity, Dawn, November 27, 2013. Also quoted by Ghosh, ibid.
21. See timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/hafiz-saeed-blames-india-for-pakistan-floods-calls-it-water-terrorism/articleshow/42116443.cms.
22. For more on Mamata Bannerjee and the Teesta row, see Sougata Mukhpadhyay, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/mamata-row-clouds-pms-bangladesh-visit/181637-37-64.html.
23. This from the former Bangladeshi ambassador to the UN, Harun ur Rashid, in the Bangladeshi newspaper Daily Star: “Teesta Water Sharing: Some Hard Facts,” October 11, 2014.
24. Teresa Rehman, “India’s Brahmaputra River Cruises Come of Age,” Al Jazeera, October 9, 2014.
25. Raushan Nurshayeva, “Uzbek Leader Sounds Warning over Central Asia Water Disputes,” Reuters, September 7, 2012.
26. BBC, July 16, 2009, “Turkmenistan to Create Desert Sea,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8154467.stm.
27. Elizabeth Rosenthal, “In Spain, Water Is a New Battleground,” New York Times, June 3, 2008.
28. “On the Table: Water, Energy and North American Integration,” Munk Centre for International Studies, October 2007.
29. Anderson and Snyder, Water Markets, 196.
Chapter 13
1. Nature 514, no. 7 (October 2, 2014), doi: 10.1038/514007a.
2. Fishman, The Big Thirst, 301–2.
3. Sandford and Freek, Flood Forecast, 65–66.
Chapter 14
1. Peter Gleick, William Burns, Elizabeth Chalecki, Michael Cohen, Katherine Kao Cushing, Amar Mann, Rachel Reyes, Gary Wolff, and Arlene Wong, The World’s Water, 2002-2003 (Oakland, CA: Pacific Institute, 2002).
2. Gary Wolff and Peter H. Gleick, “The Soft Path for Water,” in The World’s Water, 2002-2003, chap. 1.
3. The top ten seawater desalination countries by online capacity are:
| Saudi Arabia | 9,170,391 |
| UAE | 8,381,299 |
| Spain | 3,781,314 |
| Kuwait | 2,586,761 |
| Algeria | 2,364,055 |
| Australia | 1,823,154 |
| Qatar | 1,780,708 |
| Israel | 1,532,723 |
| China | 1,494,198 |
| Libya | 1,048,424 |
The markets which are expected to see the fastest growth in desalination over the next five years are South Africa, Jordan, Mexico, Libya, Chile, India, and China, all of which are expected to more than double their desalination capacity. Source: International Desalination Association.
4. The Felber quotes are from an excellent piece by Julie Pyper: “Israel Is Creating a Water Surplus Using Desalination,” ClimateWire, February 17, 2014.
5. Associated Press dispatch quoting Haaretz, “Israel’s Desalination Program Averts Future Water Crises,” May 31, 2014.
6. The Wald quotes too are from Pyper, “Israel Is Creating a Water Surplus Using Desalination.”
7. Debra Kamin, “India Seeks Water Management Lessons from Israel,” New York Times, June 12, 2013.
8. For his full speech, see the Prime Minister’s website, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/media-release/speech-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loong-official-opening-tuaspring-desalination-plant.
9. Some of this from Edward Wong, “Desalination Plant Said to Be Planned for Thirsty Beijing,” New York Times, April 15, 2014.
10. Ellen Knickmeyer, “Spurred by Drought, California Town Builds Desalination Plant,” Associated Press, January 3, 2015.
11. NPR interview by Steven Cuevas of station KQED, “Southern California Better Prepared for Drought,” February 10, 2014.
12. World Health Organization, “Safe Drinking-Water from Desalination,” WHO/HSE/WSH/11.03.
13. World Health Organization, Nutrients in Drinking Water (Geneva: WHO, 2005), http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientsindw/en/index.html.
14. “Clean the Water: When It Is Muddied by Misinformation,” January, 29, 2013, www.cwqa.com/_faq/misinformation.inc.pdf.
15. See Larry Greenemeir, “A Fine Brine: New Desalination Technique Yields More Drinkable Water,” Scientific American, May 22, 2012.
16. “Desalination: A Useful Application May Have Been Found for Graphene: Improving Access to Fresh Water in the Developing World,” Economist technology quarterly, June 2013.
17. Pyper, “Israel Is Creating a Water Surplus Using Desalination.”
18. This from Guardian Weekly, October 14, 2014, in an article titled “Solar Energy: A Sunflower Solution to Electricity Shortage,” by the Observer’s Robin McKie.
19. See the project’s website, http://saharaforestproject.com/.
20. http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/downloads/SFP%20Science%20mag%20Jan%202011.pdf.
Chapter 15
1. This and other Gleick quotes in this chapter are from the piece he co-wrote with Gary Wolff in Gleick, The World’s Water, 2002-2003, called “The Soft Path for Water.”
2. The report can be found at http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/attached-files/wwf32-crisis_0.pdf.
3. Quoted in Segerfeldt, Water for Sale, 117.
4. Quoted in Dan Fumano, “Outrage Boils over as B.C. Government Plans to Sell Groundwater for $2.25 per Million Litres,” Vancouver Province, March 9, 2015.
5. “Ireland is a good news story, but not quite in the way the EU would like,” Economist, November 8, 2014.
6. Speech by Alan Kelly, November 19, 2014. Full text at http://www.environ.ie/en/Environment/Water/WaterServices/News/MainBody,39549,en.htm.
7. For background, see http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2015-01-08/takadu-helps-israel-be-a-most-efficient-water-manager.
8. Quoted by Katia Moskvitch, then technology reporter for the BBC, Tel Aviv, “Intelligent Water Meters & Water Infrastructure Repair,” December 1, 2011.
9. Ibid.
10. Wolff and Gleick, “The Soft Path for Water.”
11. See www.compostingtoilet.org/faq/index.php.
12. C. Abegglen, M. Ospelt, and H. Siegrist, “Biological nutrient removal in a small-scale MBR treating household wastewater,” Water Resources, January 2008: 338–46.
13. Some of these examples from Randall Archibald, “From sewage, added water for drinking,” New York Times, Nov 27, 2007.
14. Ian Lovett, “Arid Southwest Cities’ Plea: Lose the Lawn,” New York Times, August 11, 2013.
15. Quoted in Samantha Larson, “Nestlé Doesn’t Want You to Know How Much Water It’s Bottling from the California Desert,” Grist website.
16. https://www.nrdc.org/water/conservation/edrain/edrain.pdf.
17. http://water.columbia.edu/research-themes/data-analytics-and-multi-scale-predictions/brazil-allocation/.
18. Nilanjana S. Roy, “Leading a Push for Clean Water,” New York Times, May 21, 2013.
Conclusion
1. Peter Haldeman, “In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires,” New York Times, December 5, 2014.
2. Jacques Leslie, “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment,” New York Times, December 7, 2014.