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The Revenge of Water

Water is H₂O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what it is.

—D. H. Lawrence, “The Third Thing”

AT T MINUS 16 SECONDS in the launch sequence of NASA’s space shuttle, the launch control computers would trigger the release of water from a 290-foot-high water tank that stands next to the launchpad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The two pipes that delivered the water to the pad are each seven feet in diameter. Just before the shuttle’s rocket motors ignited, 300,000 gallons of water would cascade across the base of the pad, eventually flowing at a rate of nearly a million gallons a minute. As the shuttle roared off the pad, the blast from its five engines poured down into the 2.5-million-pound cushion of water. The water was flowing so furiously it ran out nine seconds into liftoff.

The water actually had nothing to do with damping the heat or fire from the shuttle’s motors. It was a sound suppressant. The space shuttle’s rockets were so loud that without the sound-absorbing cushion of water, the roar from the engines would bounce off the metal and concrete base of the pad and ricochet back up. The sound waves would have torn the spacecraft apart before it was clear of the launch tower.¹

We use water to baptize our children, and we use it to launch the most advanced spacecraft ever created. Water creates both the hypnotic majesty of Niagara Falls and the miniature, untouchable filigree of each snowflake. Solid water tore open the steel hull of the Titanic; liquid water sank her. You need great water to brew great coffee, you need great water to make great beer, you need pretty darn good water to make good concrete. Water adds the fun to water balloons, to a Slip ’N Slide, to a shower for two.

Water is both mythic and real. It manages to be at once part of the mystery of life and part of the routine of life. We can use water to wash our dishes and our dogs and our cars without giving it a second thought, but few of us can resist simply standing and watching breakers crash on the beach. Water has all kinds of associations and connections, implications and suggestiveness. It also has an indispensable practicality.

Water is the most familiar substance in our lives. It is also unquestionably the most important substance in our lives. Water vapor is the insulation in our atmosphere that makes Earth a comfortable place for us to live. Water drives our weather and shapes our geography. Water is the lubricant that allows the continents themselves to move. Water is the secret ingredient of our fuel-hungry society. The electricity you use at home each day requires 250 gallons of water per person, not just more than the actual water you use at home in the kitchen and the bathroom but two-and-a-half times more. That new flat-screen TV, it turns out, needs not just a wall outlet and a cable connection but also its own water supply to get going. Who would have guessed?²

Water is also the secret ingredient in the computer chips that make possible everything from MRI machines to Twitter accounts. Indeed, from blue jeans to iPhones, from Kleenex to basmati rice to the steel in your Toyota Prius, every product of modern life is awash in water. The two-liter bottle of Coke in your refrigerator required five liters of water to produce.³

Water is how we amuse ourselves—in the pool, at the beach, in a sauna, or on a sailboat. Water is a source of excitement on a white-water rafting trip, and an instinctive source of comfort in a steaming shower at the end of a long day.

Water is, quite literally, everywhere. When you take a carton of milk from the refrigerator and set it on the table, within a minute or two the outside is covered in a film of condensation—water that has migrated almost instantly from the air of the kitchen to the cold surface of the milk carton. Water infuses our language the way it does the air around us, the water references so common we don’t even notice them: “go with the flow,” “blow off steam,” “wet behind the ears.” The mortgage crisis that triggered the Great Recession was caused, in part, by all those homes that ended up “underwater.”

And, of course, water is the most important substance in our lives because we ourselves are made mostly of water—men are typically 60 percent water, women are typically 55 percent water. A 150-pound man is 90 pounds of water (11 gallons).⁴

Everything human beings do is, quite literally, a function of water, because every cell in our bodies is plumped full of it, and every cell is bathed in watery fluid. Blood is 83 percent water. Every heartbeat is mediated by chemicals in water; when we gaze at a starry night sky, the cells in our eyes execute all their seeing functions in water; thinking about water requires neurons filled with water.

Given that water is both the most familiar substance in our lives, and the most important substance in our lives, the really astonishing thing is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as having a relationship to water. It’s perfectly natural to talk about our relationship to our car or our relationship to food, our relationship to alcohol, or money, or to God.

But water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is only more remarkable given how central it is. Water used to be part of the rhythm and motivation of daily life, and there are plenty of places, including farms and whole swaths of the developing world, where it still is.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap. The twentieth century was really the first time when all three of those things were true. It has created a kind of golden age of water, when we could use as much as we wanted, whenever we wanted, for almost no cost.

Water service is so reliable that it has become completely inconspicuous. It is possible for a typical American to go a whole lifetime and never turn on the kitchen faucet and have no water come out. Indeed, water faucets that don’t work are so rare, they’re a little spooky. We don’t even have an expression for the water equivalent of a power failure, whereas power failures are common enough that our microwave ovens are programmed to display “PF” when the electricity has gone out.

We live very wet lives, but we have no idea just how wet. The effortless way we have come to manage water is a testament to both water’s moment-to-moment utility and to our own ingenuity. But unlike the time we spend at the gas pump—where we can see the gallons as they are pumped, and the instant impact on our credit card bill—the way we handle water use insulates us not just from the wonders of water, but from any sense of how much water daily life requires, or the work and expense required to deliver that water.

The good news is that most of what we know about water isn’t really wrong, because we don’t know that much. The bad news is that the invisibility of water in our lives isn’t good for us, and it isn’t good for water. You can’t appreciate what you don’t understand. You don’t value and protect what you don’t know is there.

Back in 1999, a team of researchers recorded 289,000 toilet flushes of Americans in twelve cities, from Seattle to Tampa. In fact, the researchers used electronic water-flow sensors to record not just toilet flushes but every “water event” in each of 1,188 homes for four weeks.

Although the study cost less than $1 million, it is considered so detailed and so pioneering that it hasn’t been duplicated in the decade since; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continues to cite it as the definitive look at how Americans use water at home.

The researchers measured everything we do with water at home— how many gallons a bath takes, how often the clothes washer runs, how much water the dishwasher uses, who has low-flow showerheads and who has regular, how many times we flush the toilet each day, and how many gallons of water each flush uses.

The study’s overall conclusion can be summed up in four words: We like to flush.

For Americans, flushing the toilet is the main way we use water. We use more water flushing toilets than bathing or cooking or washing our hands, our dishes, or our clothes.

The typical American flushes the toilet five times a day at home, and uses 18.5 gallons (70 liters) of water, just for that.⁵

What that means is that every day, as a nation, just to flush our toilets, Americans use 5,700,000,000 gallons of water—5.7 billion gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet.

And that’s just at home.

It’s impossible to get your brain around that number, of course—5.7 billion gallons of water a day. But here’s a way of thinking about it. It’s more water than all the homes in the United Kingdom and Canada use each day for all their needs—we flush more water down the toilet than 95 million Brits and Canadians use.⁶

Of course, we are a big country, and we do need to flush our toilets. Or, at least, we like to.

When we think about the big ways we use water, flushing the toilet doesn’t typically leap to mind. It’s one of those unnoticed parts of our daily water use—our daily water-mark—that turn out to be both startling and significant.

The largest single consumer of water in the United States, in fact, is virtually invisible. Every day, the nation’s power plants use 201 billion gallons of water in the course of generating electricity. That isn’t water used by hydroelectric plants—it’s the water used by coal, gas, and nuclear power plants for cooling and to make steam. U.S. electric utilities require seven times more water than all U.S. homes. They use 1.5 times the amount of water used by all the farms in the country. In fact, 49 percent of all water use in the United States is for power plants.

Toilets and electric outlets may be stealthy consumers of water, but they at least serve vital functions. One of the largest daily consumers of water isn’t a use at all. One of every six gallons of water pumped into water mains by U.S. utilities simply leaks away, back into the ground. Sixteen percent of the water disappears from the pipes before it makes it to a home or business or factory. Every six days, U.S. water utilities lose an entire day’s water.⁷ And that 16 percent U.S. loss rate isn’t too bad— British utilities lose 19 percent of the water they pump; the French lose 26 percent.⁸

There is perhaps no better symbol of the golden age of water, of the carefree, almost cavalier, attitude that our abundance has fostered. We go to the trouble and expense to find city-size quantities of water, build dams, reservoirs, and tanks to store it and plants to treat it, then we pump it out to customers, only to let it dribble away before anyone can use it.

One of the hallmarks of the twentieth century, at least in the developed world, is that we have gradually been able to stop thinking about water. We use more of it than ever, we rely on it for purposes we not only never see but can hardly imagine, and we think about it not at all.

It is a striking achievement. We used to build monuments—even temples—to water. The aqueducts of the Roman Empire are marvels of engineering and soaringly elegant design. They were plumbing presented as civic achievement and as a tribute to the water itself. Today, water has drifted so far from civic celebration that many people visit the Roman aqueducts without any sense at all that they moved water, or how.

In Poland Spring, Maine, there is an actual marble and granite temple enclosing the burbling spring that gives one of the nation’s most popular bottled waters its name. The temple was built in 1906 to celebrate a source of water that was then so pure and so highly regarded that people as far away as Boston, New York, and Chicago could arrange to have it delivered for household use.

Many cities in the world are located where they are because of their proximity to water. For most of human history, in most settings, getting water was part of the daily routine; it was a constant part of our mental landscape. At the same time, humanity’s relationship to its water supply was wary, because water often made people sick. That’s why Poland Spring water was so popular in Boston and New York a century ago—it was safe.

One hundred years ago, with the dawn of bacteriology, two things happened. Cities started aggressively separating their freshwater supplies from their sewage disposal, something they had been surprisingly slow to do. (Philadelphia is just one of many cities whose sewage system, a hundred years ago, emptied into a river upstream of the city water supply intakes from the same river.) And water utilities discovered that basic sand filters and chlorination could clean and disinfect water supplies, all but assuring their safety.

In the decade from 1905 to 1915, as dozens of water systems around the country installed filters and chlorination systems, we went through a water revolution that profoundly improved human life forever. Between 1900 and 1940, mortality rates in the United States fell 40 percent.

How much did clean water matter? Harvard economist David Cutler and Stanford professor of medicine Grant Miller conducted a remarkable analysis, published in 2005, teasing out the impact of the new water treatment methods on the most dramatic reduction in death rates in U.S. history.⁹

By 1936, they conclude, simple filtration and chlorination of city water supplies reduced overall mortality in U.S. cities by 13 percent. Clean water cut child mortality in half.¹⁰

From 1900 to 1940, U.S. life expectancy at birth went from forty-seven years to sixty-three years.¹¹ In just forty years, the life span of the average American was extended sixteen years. A child born in 1900 could expect to live only until 1947, not even to mid-century. A child born in 1940 quite likely lived to hear the news in 2003 that the human genome had been completely mapped.

Clean municipal water encouraged cities to grow, and it also encouraged the expansion of “mains water” during the twentieth century as the way most Americans got their water. (By 2005, only 14 percent of Americans still relied on wells or some other “self-supplied” water.)¹²

That first water revolution ushered in an era—the one we think we still live in—in which water was unlimited, free, and safe. And once it was unlimited, free, and safe, we could stop thinking about it. The fact that it was unfailingly available “on demand” meant that we would use it more, even as we thought about it less.

The figures are dramatic. In 1955, the U.S. Geological Survey’s water-use analysis said that rural Americans without running water in their homes used ten gallons a day per person. (That same year, each cow used twenty gallons per day.) For newly “electrified” farm families, with pumps, and for city families that number was already sixty gallons per person.¹³

Today, it’s a hundred gallons per person at home, and to say that we take water for granted is, in some ways, to give us too much credit. We don’t take water for granted, because we don’t notice it enough to take it for granted. It’s like gravity except that, in some ways, water is actually more important than gravity. We do, in fact, have people living round-the-clock without gravity, and have for a decade, in the International Space Station.

Most people have no idea where the water they brush their teeth with comes from, or how it gets to them. The pipes are hidden; the sources of the water put into those pipes are remote.

Our home water bills, which are less than half our monthly cable TV or cell phone bills, provide almost no insight into how much water we use, or how we use it—even if we study them.¹⁴

The pricing of water has a kind of invisibility—or opaqueness, at least—all its own. Ten gallons of tap water, at home, costs on average 3 pennies.¹⁵ That’s the equivalent of getting seventy-four of those $1.29 half-liter bottles of water we love so much for less than a nickel. We happily pay three thousand times that price at the convenience store—one bottle for $1.29. But when the water bill goes from $30 to $34 a month, customers react as if they’ll have to choose between their prescription drugs and their water service. We gladly pay perfectly silly prices for productized water because of the aura that’s been created around it. But we have so little appreciation of the effort required to get water into our homes that any price increase inspires outrage.

The way water infuses the products we use every day, and the volumes those products require, is invisible to us.

The ownership and control of water is invisible—in some places, for instance, you don’t actually own the water that falls on your roof or in your yard. (If someone has rights to the rivershed runoff, he owns it.)

The problems of water are, for the moment, mostly invisible. When we’re done with the water we use every day, it simply disappears. What becomes of it is invisible to us.

The new class of micropollutants we are beginning to hear about— infinitesimal, almost molecular, traces of plastics, birth control pills, antidepressants—have literally been invisible even to chemists until very recently; you certainly can’t tell if they’re in your water by looking at it or drinking it. The impact of those micropollutants on our health, if any, may remain invisible for years—and may be almost impossible to predict or trace.

Even our emotional connections to water have become submerged and camouflaged—the ease with which water enters and leaves our lives allows us an indifference to our water supply. We are utterly ignorant of our own water-mark, of the amount of water required to float us through the day, and we are utterly indifferent to the mark our daily life leaves on the water supply.

Our very success with water has allowed us to become water illiterate.

But the golden age of water is rapidly coming to an end. The last century has conditioned us to think that water is naturally abundant, safe, and cheap—that it should be, that it will be. We’re in for a rude shock.

We are in the middle of a water crisis already, in the United States and around the world. The experts realize it (the Weather Channel already has a dedicated burning-orange logo for its drought reports), but even in areas with serious water problems, most people don’t seem to understand.

We are entering a new era of water scarcity—not just in traditionally dry or hard-pressed places like the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, but in places we think of as water-wealthy, like Atlanta and Melbourne. The three things that we have taken to be the natural state of our water supply—abundant, cheap, and safe—will not be present together in the decades ahead. We may have water that is abundant and cheap, but it will be “reuse water,” for things like lawn watering or car washing, not for drinking; we will certainly have drinking water that is safe, and it may be abundant, but it will not be thoughtlessly inexpensive.

We are on the verge of a second modern water revolution—and it is likely to change our attitudes at least as much as the one a hundred years ago.

The new water scarcity will reshape how we live, how we work, how we relax. It will reshape how we value water, and how we understand it.

We have ignored water—neglected our water supplies and our water systems, taken for granted the economic value of abundant water, and become blasé about the day-to-day convenience of easy water. We may well go directly from the golden age of water to the revenge of water.

IN THE SPRING OF 2008, the water situation in Barcelona, Spain, had become quite desperate. A drought across Catalonia had extended to eighteen months and become the worst in sixty years. Barcelona, Catalonia’s capital, is a metro area with a population of 5 million, famous for its beaches, its wide boulevards, its Seussian architecture, its fountains, and its food. The city was looking at reservoirs that were 80 percent empty, and it ordered the fountains and the beachside showers turned off. The government negotiated the rights to water from a nearby river, and had begun work on a thirty-seven-mile emergency water pipeline, down the center of a main highway, that would deliver the water at a cost of $280 million.

A new desalination plant was also under construction, big enough to supply a quarter of the city’s needs, but it was a year from being finished.¹⁶

And so the nervous leaders of Barcelona’s water company did something unprecedented. They decided to bring in water, by ship, from the Spanish city of Tarragona, down the coast from Barcelona, and from the French city of Marseille, up the coast.

It was an effort that was simultaneously heroic and silly. The first ship to tie up at Barcelona’s docks was the nondescript red freighter Sichem Defender, which arrived from Tarragona. Barcelona’s port had been specially adapted to accommodate the water-bearing ships, at a cost of $32 million, and the water flowed straight from the freighter’s tanks into Barcelona’s water mains. A couple days later a second ship arrived—the Contester Defender, from Marseille.

Barcelona was scheduled to receive several shiploads of water a week throughout the summer, at a cost to the city of $30 million.

The first two ships hauled in what seemed to be miniature reservoirs: It was a water version of the Berlin airlift, just keep the tankers coming.

The Sichem Defender put 5 million gallons of water into Barcelona’s municipal system, and its sister ship brought in 9.5 million gallons. But given Barcelona’s scale, the first ship’s water lasted thirty-two minutes. The larger ship provided sixty-two minutes of water. In fact, even supertankers don’t carry city-size quantities of water.¹⁷

And not everyone was supportive. Miguel Angel Fraile, secretary general of the Catalan Federation of Commerce, said, “The arrival of a boat full of water is the image of the absolute failure of government administration which neither Barcelona nor Catalonia deserves. You can understand a boat bringing water to an island, but not to a continent.”¹⁸

The water-bearing ships were a symbolic gesture—an expensive one—but it’s not quite clear what the symbolism was. Perhaps, “We’re doing everything we can to make sure Barcelona has water.” Or, “Wake up! Even if we had two of these ships coming a day, every day, Barcelona could still end up thirsty.”

As Barcelona’s drought problems were becoming acute, a small city in Tennessee completely succumbed to the drought that was then in its seventh year across the southeastern United States.

The city of Orme, Tennessee, is located forty miles into the hills west of Chattanooga, a hamlet just two miles from Alabama, right where Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia come together. Once a flourishing mining town, Orme has for a hundred years gotten its municipal water from Spout Springs, a mountain stream that ends in a dramatic two-hundred-foot cascade at the base of Orme Mountain.

The drought slowly dried out the whole area—60 percent of the streams in Tennessee were at historic low flows. And Orme was just 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, which was itself the epicenter of a water crisis much like Barcelona’s. On August 1, 2007, Orme’s spring dried up, and Orme’s 17,500-gallon water tank quickly dried up as well. Orme was out of water.

The then-mayor, Tony Reames, organized his own version of Barcelona’s virtual water main. Volunteer firefighters drove the town’s 1961 fire truck down the road two and a half miles to Bridgeport, Alabama, tanked up the fire truck’s 1,500-gallon capacity from a fire hydrant there, then drove back to pump the water into Orme’s water tank. Sometimes the firefighters got help from a second truck, loaned by another nearby city. Bridgeport, which gets its water from the robust Tennessee River, running along its eastern side, didn’t charge Orme for filling its fire truck.

Every few days, the fire truck would make ten round-trips to Bridgeport’s fire hydrant to fill up the town’s water tank. And every night at 6 p.m., for months, Mayor Reames would go to the tank and open a valve that turned on water service to the town. Orme residents got three hours of water each night—three hours to shower, do the laundry, cook, and fill whatever containers of water they needed for getting ready for work and school the next morning. Mayor Reames turned the supply valve off every night at 9 p.m. and the town’s taps and toilets went dry for another 21 hours.

Orme is tiny—forty families, 142 people—and remote; cell phones have no reception in the valley where the town sits. Still, on a typical day before the drought, the town would empty its water tank and refill it from Spout Springs. Oddly, although “the town that ran dry” in the drought briefly became one of those novelty stories that the national news networks like CNN and Fox News love, no one came to the rescue of Orme.

It is almost unheard-of for a U.S. town of any size or scale to simply run out of water. It’s equally exotic for the residents of a U.S. town to be limited to three hours of water a day—twenty-four-hour-a-day water is the unquestioned standard. On Thanksgiving—three months after the spring ran dry—Orme was still on the three-hour-a-day water ration.¹⁹

Barcelona was rescued by several weeks of drenching rain. Within a month of the arrival of the first water ship, the city’s reservoirs were back to 54 percent full. The emergency water pipeline that would have cost $7 million per mile was canceled. Ships quietly continued to deliver water through the summer, because they had been contracted to.

Orme was rescued by replacing the virtual fire-truck pipeline to Bridgeport, Alabama—the fire truck ultimately hauled in 1 million gallons of drinking water, one 1,500-gallon trip at a time—with a real pipeline. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had, years earlier, provided a $378,000 grant to lay a pipe from Bridgeport to Orme, which was never built because bids came in too high. During the fall, utility crews finally laid that water main, and on Friday, December 7, 2007, 128 days after the creek stopped flowing, twenty-four-hour-a-day water service was restored.

“If it can happen in Orme, where we have a waterfall,” said Mayor Reames, “it can happen anywhere.”²⁰

The availability of water is the symbol of a civilized society—can you give your child a glass of clean, safe water when she’s thirsty?

By that standard—as the 5 million folks in cosmopolitan Barcelona can tell you, and the 142 folks in rural Orme can tell you—water is in trouble, and we’re in trouble.

The big numbers are so big, and so scary, as to have become cliché. They’ve lost their ability to shock us, or to move us. The world has 6.9 billion people. At least 1.1 billion of us don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water—that’s one out of six people in the world. Of those, 700 million (twice the population of the United States) live on less than $2 a day. So it’s not as if they could afford a bottle of Evian if we could just get a case to their neighborhood.²¹

Another 1.8 billion people don’t have access to water in their home or yard, but do have access within a kilometer.²²

So at least 40 percent of the world either doesn’t have good access to water, or has to walk to get it. Forty percent—look to your left and your right, that’s four out of ten people. In the developed world, we don’t know anybody who has to walk to get her water. Walking to get your water, by the way, is no fun. The basic minimum requirement for a family of five is 100 liters (26 gallons)—that’s 220 pounds of water that needs to be toted every day.

Of course, even the 1.1 billion people without access to clean, safe water do drink water every day—everyone on Earth finds water every day. They have no choice. Those 1.1 billion people use about 5 liters a day each.²³ In the United States, on average, each one of us uses 70 liters (18.5 gallons) just to flush our toilets. And to just goose the stunning contrast between water wealth and water poverty one more notch, the 1.1 billion people who subsist on 5 liters of water a day are drinking water we wouldn’t wash our dishes in; whereas we are peeing into pristine drinking water, and flushing it away. (In fact, just a single flush of a low-flush toilet in the United States—1.6 gallons—uses 6 liters of drinking water.)

Every year, according to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million children die either from lack of water or from diseases they got from tainted drinking water.²⁴ That number, too, is hard to absorb. It’s 5,000 children a day. A typical U.S. elementary school has about 500 kids—so every day, the equivalent of ten entire elementary schools of children are dying, just because they lack clean water. Put another way—a somewhat unsettling way, but vivid nonetheless—the number of children who die every year just for lack of a daily glass of clean water is equal to the number of elementary school children in Florida. It’s like losing every kid in Florida between the ages of five and twelve—every year, year after year.²⁵

Hardly the symbol of a civilized society.

Even if those were our only problems with water, and if those problems were static, we’d have a water crisis.

But that’s where we find ourselves at the end of what we will come to regard as the golden age of water. We don’t have things quite in hand now, and in the next fifteen years, by 2025, the world will add 1.2 billion people. By 2050, we will add 2.4 billion people. So between now and forty years from now, more new people will join the total population than were alive worldwide in 1900. They will be thirsty.²⁶

In fact, during the golden age of water, during the last hundred years, the population of the world has gone up by a factor of four; our total water consumption has gone up by a factor of seven.²⁷

And then there is the unpredictability of climate change. Water availability is intensely weather- and climate-dependent, in both the developed world and the developing world. At one point in 2008, during the years-long drought across the southeastern United States, 80 percent of the residents of North Carolina were living under water-use restrictions. Lake Mead is the largest man-made reservoir in North America, created by Hoover Dam, sprawling an apparently endless 110 miles through the desert of Nevada and Arizona. Lake Mead is the source of water for 20 million people, and it is half empty. It is also the source for almost all of Las Vegas’s water—for homes, golf courses, swimming pools, and those spectacular Vegas Strip fountains. The Las Vegas area has 2 million residents and 36 million visitors a year, and its water source in January 2010 was lower than it had been in any January going back to 1965. At that time, Las Vegas had about 200,000 residents; today, on a typical day, there are twice that many tourists in town.

The climate-change models show that India as a whole may well get more rain if global warming proceeds as predicted, but that new rain will come in a band across the north, the parts of India already inundated during the monsoon season. The rainfall-change map shows that two-thirds of India’s land area will actually receive less rain, an area where half the country’s people live, tens of millions of whom are already trapped in water poverty.

Australia has had its climate completely transformed in the last twenty-five years. A nation that looks and feels much like the United States, including its water consumption and its per capita GDP, Australia is struggling to quickly adapt its economy and lifestyle, one that assumed a certain amount of water, to a completely new, and much reduced, water budget.

Water problems now literally circle the globe.

Chinese soldiers were dispatched in early 2010 to help deliver water in southwest China, where drought had left 11 million people without adequate water for themselves or for 8 million head of livestock.

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez declared an electricity emergency in early 2010 and imposed daily electricity blackouts across the country, because lack of rainfall had so drained the country’s hydropower reservoirs.

Drought across the Caribbean Sea forced several island nations to impose routine water rationing. Antigua was providing water only a few hours a day to homes, on a rolling schedule, after its main reservoir fell to just a two-week supply in mid-February 2010. In St. Lucia, the government declared a water emergency in late February 2010, temporarily outlawing not only such activities as filling swimming pools and outdoor watering but also water-intensive commercial activities like making concrete. In Jamaica, the national water utility said the island’s two main reservoirs stood at only half full, and some areas of the country would receive water only every other day for eight hours; some would receive water just one day a week.

And the Syrian government reported that during 2008 and 2009, a quarter-million Syrians abandoned farming because drought conditions made it impractical.

There has never been a moment when drought did not plague the world. Mayan civilization may have been undone by climate change and water shortages; a thousand years later, the Dust Bowl in America drove 2.5 million people to leave the Great Plains states.

But three things have come together to make this moment different from the last hundred years, and perhaps different from any previous moment.

The number of people we’ve got, and the pace at which we’re adding people, is unprecedented. Las Vegas’s source of water may be disappearing, but sixty thousand new residents have been arriving there every year, requiring 100 million gallons of additional water a week from Lake Mead. India is staring down dramatic shifts in water availability, even as it grows by nearly 20 million people a year.

Beyond population and climate change, the other huge and growing pressure on water supplies is economic development. China and India are modernizing at a whirling pace, and together those two countries account for one out of three people in the world. Economic development requires rivers full of water, not just because people want more secure and more abundant water as their incomes improve but because modern factories and businesses use such huge volumes of water. In an ironic twist, that “modern” economic development doesn’t just consume huge new volumes of water, it damages the very sources of water the development is depending on with new sources of unregulated pollution.

India’s economy has grown between 5 and 9 percent per year in the last five years, a stunning rate of modernization. And yet, not one of India’s major cities provides twenty-four-hour-a-day water. In fact, the cities most associated with India’s modernization—including Bangalore, Mumbai, and the capital, Delhi—provide just one or two hours of water a day to their tens of millions of residents. The global economy allows Americans to receive tech support from customer service representatives in Bangalore, but the person on the other side of the world helping us with our computer headaches goes home each day to less routine water access than the people of Orme, Tennessee, had after that town officially ran out of water.

WATER HAS A ROBUSTNESS, a durability, even a strength of character that we rarely appreciate, even as we rely on it.

Although we think of the Earth as getting crowded, and it is, the 7 billion people alive now represent a tiny slice of the history of human beings. Demographers estimate that over the course of the last fifty thousand years, about 100 billion people have lived on Earth.²⁸ A typical person needs a minimum of 3 liters of drinking water a day. If we imagine that, stretching way back into prehistory, the average life span of those 100 billion people was a conservative thirty years, that means that all the people who have ever lived on Earth have drunk 3,300 trillion liters of water.²⁹

And that’s just the people.

The animals outnumber the people 1,000:1.³⁰ And they stretch back in time hundreds of millions of years. An elephant drinks 150 liters of water a day. How much water did a Tyrannosaurus rex drink each day? It may not be known for sure, but scientists have found a spot where a dinosaur paused one day in the Mesozoic era to pee on a sandy patch of ground. The resulting trench, from just a single squat, is at least the size of a modern bathtub, 40 to 50 gallons.³¹

More important, people have been around for just 50,000 years. Tens of millions of dinosaurs lived on Earth for 165 million years. Drinking water every day, and peeing. The total water consumption of all the animals who’ve ever lived is hard to even conceive, but at the low end, it is certainly 10 million times the total human water consumption (and that doesn’t include the plants).

Together, the creatures that have lived on Earth have easily required a thousand times the amount of liquid fresh water available on the planet.³²

And we only have that one allotment of water—it was delivered here 4.4 billion years ago. No water is being created or destroyed on Earth. So every drop of water that’s here has seen the inside of a cloud, and the inside of a volcano, the inside of a maple leaf, and the inside of a dinosaur kidney, probably many times.³³

Every glass of water you pour—whether it’s coming from an Evian bottle, a filtered refrigerator spigot, or the kitchen tap—has a rich history. Americans like to debate the palatability of what’s called “toilet to tap”— taking a city’s wastewater, purifying it to drinking water cleanliness, and putting it back into the water mains. Almost no municipalities have the fortitude to do that. But in the larger context, whatever place you find least appealing to imagine your water, well, your water has been there. More than once.

That’s not gross. In fact, it points up two central facts about water, and our relationship to water.

The first is, water can be cleaned, always. The spinning weather machine that is Earth’s climate, in which water is a full partner, does a great job of turning swamps and oceans into rushing, crystalline mountain streams. And almost no matter how dirty we humans make water—and we’ve gotten much more sophisticated in making water dirty in the last hundred years—we can clean it back to the point that it’s drinkable again, history notwithstanding.

The second point is, you can’t use up water. It has become fashionable to talk about the “water footprint” of this or that product—the amount of water required to raise the beef in a Burger King Whopper, the amount of water required to produce the five pounds of paper in the Sunday New York Times, the amount of water required to raise the cotton and manufacture the denim that goes into a pair of Levi’s stonewashed 501 blue jeans. This is often called “virtual water”—the water embodied in the products, if not actually contained in them.

But it’s a fundamentally misleading concept—completely different from the idea, for instance, of a “carbon footprint.” It requires both water and diesel fuel to grow rice—but the consequences are completely different. The diesel fuel is, in fact, consumed in the process. The tractor and the harvester burn the diesel, and it no longer exists as fuel.

The water used to raise the rice, on the other hand, isn’t lost at all, except to the person downriver from the rice farm, or the competing irrigator across the road, or the underground aquifer from which the rice farmer’s wells draw. The water goes into the rice-growing process—and it is completely recovered, back into the ground, or the atmosphere, or back into the river into which the farm runoff flows. With a bit of water into the rice itself.

That’s not to minimize or trivialize water shortages, which are urgent, often catastrophic. Nor is it to minimize the importance of smart, careful water use and water management. How much water the rice farmer uses is critically important, as are how he uses it and what happens to the runoff. We get all the water back, but where it reappears, and on what timescale, is often not well controlled. Water scarcity is often the direct result of bad water management by people.

But neither is it trivial that the rice farmer does not “consume” the water—he doesn’t use it up—any more than the steel mill (1 ton of steel, 300 tons of water) or the nuclear power plant (30 million gallons of cooling water an hour).³⁴ None of the 1 million ways we use water each day actually consumes the water, including, of course, drinking it ourselves.

Water is tirelessly resilient. Water participates in a mind-bending array of physical, chemical, biochemical, geological, and human-created processes every minute of the day—water is essential to creating soup and computer servers, it drives both hurricanes and erosion, it is the essential element in human beings maintaining our body temperatures at 98.6 degrees—and yet water emerges from everyone of those processes intact, undamaged, unchanged, ready to make a fresh cloud or a fresh drop of sweat, an iceberg or a jellyfish, as the occasion requires.

Water’s indestructibility, its reusability, will be vital as we confront an era where water scarcity becomes more common. Water itself isn’t becoming more scarce, it’s simply disappearing from places where people have become accustomed to finding it—where they have built communities assuming a certain availability of water—and reappearing somewhere else.

That points up a fundamental problem with water. If all Americans were to swear off bottled water, for instance—if we were to give up the 1 million gallons an hour of Poland Spring and Dasani that we drink—not one person in the world who desperately needed water would get it.³⁵ Likewise, if we were all to switch to low-flow toilets, and save 3 billion gallons a day of the drinking water we flush down the toilet now, that doesn’t help get water to a single village in India or China or Haiti.

All water problems are local.

That allows us a certain shrugging resignation about water problems somewhere else, anywhere else. One billion people don’t have access to water as good as what’s in my toilet tank, and that’s terrible, but there’s not much I can do about it.

In this, water is different than many other things. It does help a broad swath of the world to drive a more fuel-efficient car, for instance, because the impact of using less gasoline isn’t just local. It stretches around the world, across the whole supply and consumption chain of oil, drilling, transportation, and refining, right through the point at which the exhaust comes out the tailpipe of your Ford Escape Hybrid. It does help the world to switch your lightbulbs to efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, because power plants require huge resources to run and their operations have wide environmental impacts.

The supply chain of water is global too, of course—in the sense that the rain falling on Chicago may have gone airborne as water vapor in the South China Sea. But as the people of Barcelona discovered, you can’t move community-size quantities of water around in ships. Within river basins and watersheds and aquifers, water supplies are local. Water we don’t take from the Ogallala Aquifer or Lake Okeechobee or the Colorado River can’t help Atlanta in a drought, let alone the water-impoverished people of Ethiopia.

Our own water problems—as the folks in both Barcelona and Orme know—are insistent, urgent, frantic. But fifty or a hundred or a thousand miles away, those people’s water problems are simply unfortunate—for them.

But the idea that all water problems are local isn’t quite so simple. The problems are local, but the consequences, the damage, and the costs are anything but local. The distance we imagine between ourselves and other people’s water problems is just another case of not seeing water, and our relationship to water, clearly. In Las Vegas, they are building a backup water-supply pipe that is so expensive, it is costing $2.25 for every man, woman, and child—in America. You will never drink from that pipe. Across India, millions of girls are literally trapped by having to walk and fetch water each day; they don’t go to school as a result. India, of course, gives up a huge pool of labor, energy, creativity, and talent by allowing girls to go uneducated just so they can walk to fetch water. That is the true meaning of the phrase “water poverty.” But the consequences of that water problem stretch far beyond India—it’s in no one’s interest to leave tens of millions of girls and women uneducated. Poor farming practices around the world squander huge quantities of water. Agriculture uses two-thirds of all the water people use—and especially in developing countries, half that water is wasted. That hurts water management right where it happens, of course, but it also dramatically undermines global food production.

And any community or country that has experienced serious water scarcity knows that when water problems become water conflict, the consequences rarely stay local.

Water is one of those resources, one of those issues, that can only be managed for the long term. But it is a mistake to imagine that small things don’t matter, or that even big water issues are not manageable.

One of the most startling, inspiring, and least well-known examples involves the United States. The United States uses less water today than it did in 1980. Not in per capita terms, in absolute terms. Water use in the United States peaked in 1980, at 440 billion gallons a day for all purposes. Twenty-five years later (the latest USGS survey is from 2005), the country was using just 410 billion gallons a day.³⁶

That performance is amazing in many ways. Since 1980, the U.S. population has grown by 70 million people. It’s as if we’ve annexed a fifty-first state the size of France, for instance (population 63 million)—while actually decreasing the amount of water we use.

Since 1980, the U.S. GDP in real (constant dollar) terms has more than doubled. We use less water to create a $13 trillion economy today than we needed to create a $6 trillion economy then.³⁷

And despite living lives that are literally awash in water, Americans in 2005 used less water per person than they did in 1955.

It has been nothing less than a revolution in water use in the biggest economy in the world, a completely silent revolution. Most of the change has come in water use by power plants and farms. U.S. farmers today use 15 percent less water than they did in 1980, and produce a 70 percent larger harvest.³⁸

And the water-use revolution is just getting under way in most of the economy. Companies from Coca-Cola to MGM Resorts casinos, from Intel to Royal Caribbean Cruises, are starting to track their water use, report it publicly, and reimagine it. GE and IBM are not only learning how to reduce their own water use, both companies have created new water divisions to teach other companies, and communities, how to better manage their water use.

Meanwhile, we haven’t yet really tried to get Americans to install water-efficient fixtures at home, or to turn off the water when they brush their teeth, or to use their sprinklers more thoughtfully. Fifty percent of the water delivered to homes in Florida is used for lawn watering.³⁹

There’s another, perhaps more powerful way of looking at water use in the United States. If we were using water at the rate we did in 1980, we would be using 578 billion gallons a day instead of 410 billion gallons a day. That’s 168 billion gallons a day of water we’re not using today because of dramatic improvements in water productivity and management. It’s hard to understand what that 168 billion gallons a day would mean, but think of it like this: It would mean every place in the United States would need 40 percent more water than we’re using now.

There are plenty of water problems in the United States, plenty of ways that water is wasted, plenty of places where people are fighting about water, or will be soon. But the real lesson of the transformation in the United States in the last twenty-five years is that it is possible to grow dramatically and use less water. Water will stretch in remarkable ways, if the people handling it are smart enough and demanding enough to insist on it.

WE HAVE A COMPLICATED, conflicted, and mostly unacknowledged relationship to water. Because water has so often made people sick, because natural disasters—hurricanes, flooding, blizzards—are often caused by water, we have an ambivalent attitude about water that has only been softened by the last hundred years. It is an ambivalence with deep cultural roots.

The Quran credits God with creating humanity, and all of life, directly from water. “We made from water every living thing,”⁴⁰ the Quran says, and, “It is He Who created man from water.”⁴¹ The Old Testament considers water so primal a substance, so fundamental a tool of creation, that the Bible does not mention God creating water. Water was already present—“the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters”—just before God says, “Let there be light.”⁴²

But God also uses water to destroy the world, to drown his entire creation except those riding out the forty days and nights of rain with Noah. (The Quran also relates the story of Noah, and the Hindu tradition contains the story of Manu, who saved humanity from a similar devastating flood.)

Having reached his limit of patience with humanity’s inhumanity, God could have destroyed the world in any of a range of imaginative ways, as he would later demonstrate when he unleashed the ten plagues on Egypt. Instead, God used the source of life to destroy it.

The most obvious place to see our slightly sour, subtly resentful, attitude about water’s fearsome power is in the way water shows up in everyday expressions, almost always with a negative tone.

Water expressions infuse our language—drained, watered down, in deep, high and dry, mainstream.⁴³ But we don’t really have much of a language or a framework for talking about water itself. In fact, when we talk about water, it’s a little like when we talk about love. We aren’t really talking about water—we’re talking about our anxieties, our hopes, our sense of our selves, refracted through water. We’re talking about our vision of our community, about our livelihoods. When we talk about water, we’re often talking about power, or about security, or both.

Just as we don’t have a good language for talking about water, we don’t have a politics of water, or an economics of water. In fact, the lack of all three is a function of the golden age of water—you don’t need politics, or economics, or even language to manage something that is unlimited, safe, and free.

Politics, economics, and language are the tools we use to manage conflict and scarcity—and in the new era of scarcity we’re entering we’ll need all three to handle water. When conflict over water arises, typically, it’s not about the water itself, but about the role the water is playing, the use it’s being put to, who gets it and who doesn’t, and what condition the water is in when all is said and done. Water is one of those unusual substances that cause people to tell each other how to behave. It is typically my way of using water that is both right and essential, and your way of using it that is inefficient and probably unnecessary.

Our everyday attitude about water is filled with contradictions.

Water is absolutely indispensable—in most of the ways we use it, from growing rice to washing our clothes to making microchips, there is simply no substitute. But water is also one of the few resources that we typically don’t manage or allocate with price. It is indispensable, but so cheap as to seem free.

Technology is making it easier to solve almost any water problem. But while the water itself might be cheap, the technology to clean it, and the energy to run that technology, are not.

And while technology can solve almost any water problem, technology is also the source of a whole new wave of water problems. The kinds of pollution getting into water supplies now—from the exotic chemicals used to extract natural gas in the drilling process known as fracking, to the Prozac detected in water-supply streams and lakes across the United States—those kinds of pollutants are a consequence of mixing modern technology with water.

Perhaps the most unsettling attitude we’ve begun to develop about water is a kind of disdain for the era we’ve just lived through. The very universal access that has been the core of our water philosophy for the last hundred years—the provision of clean, dependable tap water that created the golden age of water—that very principle has turned on its head. The brilliant invisibility of our water system has become its most significant vulnerability. That invisibility makes it difficult for people to understand the effort and money required to sustain a system that has been in place for decades, but has in fact been quietly corroding from decades of neglect. Why should I pay higher taxes just to replace some old water pipes? I’ll just drink bottled water if I don’t like what comes out of the tap. It is almost as if tap water is regarded not with respect and appreciation but with a hint of condescension, even contempt.

Of course, you can’t call Dasani if your house catches on fire. We are in danger of allowing ourselves to imagine that since we’ve got FedEx, we don’t also need the postal service. When universal, twenty-four-hour-a-day access to water starts to slip away, it becomes very hard to bring back. But sustaining it requires more than paying the monthly water bill.

If we’re going to be ready for a new era of water, we need to reclaim water from our superficial sense of it, we need to reclaim it from the clichés. We need to rediscover its true value, and also the serious commitment required to provide it. It is one of the ironies of our relationship to water that the moment it becomes unavailable, the moment it really disappears— that’s when water becomes most urgently visible.