I think the days of big water are gone.
—Laurie Arthur, Australian rice farmer
LAURIE ARTHUR jounces around his farm in a white 2006 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser that is dusted with grit to the windowsills, equally dirty inside and outside, the way only farm vehicles get dirty. Across the front end is bolted a grille to reduce the danger from hitting kangaroos. Arthur killed one the previous night, with his wife, Deb, in the passenger seat, on the way to a Mother’s Day dinner. During the workday, three dogs keep Arthur company from the rear cargo compartment. Three antennas wang from the front bumper—he’s got radios and a dash-mounted cell phone, to be able to stay in touch across a lot of distance. A box of rifle cartridges is jammed in a crevice of the front seat (the guns are locked up in the house); a lot of tools are in easy reach across the backseat.
Arthur is a rice farmer in the basin of Australia’s Murray River, with 10,450 acres of fields in the wide-open rangeland called the Riverina. At the extremes, he has fields 40 kilometers (25 miles) from each other; his nearest neighbor, who also happens to be his best friend, is fellow farmer Nick Lowing, 20 kilometers down the road; the Thai restaurant where he, Deb, and their daughter Lauren had Mother’s Day dinner is 70 kilometers from home; the nearest movie theater is 160 kilometers away.
Arthur’s farm neighborhood is crisscrossed with well-maintained dirt roads, and Arthur cruises at 100 kilometers per hour (just over 60 mph), often flanked by squads of kangaroos, who move with the ease of dolphins alongside a boat.
Arthur points out a wedge-tailed eagle, gliding low above the scrub. Native to Australia, the black-feathered raptors are as big as bald eagles, the largest birds of prey in Australia, and are often seen feasting on road-killed kangaroo. Farmers in the Murray basin grumble about them, because they have a reputation for taking young lambs. Arthur is more tolerant.
“I think they just get the lambs that are dead already,” says Arthur. “Sure, they do kill the occasional lamb that’s not dead. But they do it with such style.”
Although the little town of Moulamein, near Arthur’s farm, is about 150 miles from the edge of the true Australian outback, and all this land has been ranched and farmed for 150 years, this is the Australian bush. The land is arid, flat, and empty; it is no place to underestimate nature.
No one knows that better than Laurie Arthur.
Normally, he’s a rice farmer on land that is fertile but dry. His water comes from irrigation canals, supplied by the Murray River.
Now he’s trying to be a rice farmer in the Big Dry. The irrigation canals are dry, the Murray River itself is dry.
We wheel into an empty brown field called Jurassic Park—Australian farmers call their fields “paddocks,” and Arthur names all his paddocks. “The previous farmer wasn’t that attentive,” he says. “His excavator broke down here, and when we bought this, it was a jungle rather than a well-tended field. So we called it Jurassic Park.”
We climb out, and we’re looking out across 150 acres of dirt—a wide space that stretches halfway to the horizon, a single field that has a border two miles around. It is 1 percent of Arthur’s farmland. The ground is rough and uneven—you wouldn’t drive anything but a piece of farm equipment into Jurassic Park. The soil is claylike; when you lift a chunk, it has a surprising heft.
Even empty, the tilled field makes you want to draw in a deep breath. Arthur, who lives in the modern farming world of digital specificity— his fields laser-leveled, his tractors GPS-guided, his crop yields computer-mapped—loves simply being outside. His eyes take in the sweep of Jurassic Park. “It’s beautiful country, eh?” He smiles.
“I sure would like to be pulling six hundred tons of rice off this field right now,” Arthur says. Looking at the empty, sandpaper-dry field underneath a cloudless sky is like looking at an idle factory: bad news. “Normally, you’d never catch me at this time of year. I’d be on a combine. For the second year in a row, I’m growing basically nothing.”
Farmers grow cotton here, and oranges, almonds, apples, wheat, and miles and miles of grapevines to supply the worldwide taste for Australian wine. The Murray River basin is dairyland too; to grow grass for milk cows, farmers routinely flood their paddocks.
Arthur, like all the farmers for hundreds of miles around, is an irrigator—rain is essential, but the rain needs to fall to fill the Murray River. Water comes into the river from reservoirs five hundred miles away, and then to Arthur’s fields in irrigation channels designed to rely on gravity flow to get the water delivered.
Standing at the edge of Jurassic Park, the obvious question is, What are they thinking? Who in the world would imagine a quilt of emerald-green rice paddies here, in this semi-desert?
The Australians, of course, weren’t thinking any differently than the farmers of California’s Imperial Valley, which is part of the Sonoran Desert and gets just three inches of rain a year. But with water piped eighty miles from the Colorado River, it is the eleventh most productive agricultural county in the United States. The Australians weren’t thinking any differently than the 2 million people of Las Vegas, they weren’t thinking any differently, in fact, than the rice growers of Egypt or the operators of the two hundred golf courses in Phoenix, Arizona.1
If Arthur’s Jurassic Park doesn’t seem like a spot where an ordinary person would ever imagine growing rice, both the land and the farmers know better. The soil loves growing rice. “Our yields are the best in the world,” says Arthur, “just ahead of the Egyptians.” Arthur averages four tons of rice per acre—20 percent more than U.S. rice farmers. Indeed, despite the drought, in 2010, with the overall rice crop at just 20 percent of normal, Murray basin rice farmers set a world record for productivity—growing 4.9 tons per acre, three times the world average.2 One reason Arthur and his colleagues grow rice is, “It’s very profitable.”
But to grow rice, Arthur needs to turn Jurassic Park into a shallow pond, flooding it with four inches of water and keeping the rice plants diked in with four inches of water for fourteen weeks. Keeping that pond of water on Jurassic Park right through the Australian summer ultimately requires flowing in enough water to have filled the field four feet deep. Every dinner-plate serving of the medium-grain Japonica rice Arthur grows requires 14.4 gallons of water in the field.3
When it comes to water, Arthur, who is fifty-six years old, is all-in in a way most people never have to be in their whole lives—about anything, let alone simply water. He has A$3 million in farm equipment, and land that cost nearly A$2 million. Without rain, without water, it’s all dust.
“Water is 90 percent of the value of my assets,” he says. “I’ve been farming for twenty-eight years. I like what I do. Ultimately, if I get it wrong, I’ll go broke.”
In the Big Dry, Laurie Arthur is both a water baron and a water prisoner.
Arthur owns six thousand megaliters of water a year, and when he can, he uses it all. That is, Arthur, a lone Australian, owns and uses enough water to supply the entire city of Toowoomba for half a year. When he gets all six thousand megaliters, he can grow enough food in a year to feed 100,000 people, which means that with half the water the city of Toowoomba uses in a year, Arthur can raise enough food to feed the whole city for a year.4
Six gigaliters of water is an amount hard to imagine. A single liter of water is what one of those shapely, slightly chubby Evian bottles holds: one liter.
Six gigaliters of water is 6 billion one-liter bottles: Arthur uses enough water each year to allow him to hand almost every person on Earth a liter of Evian.
Six gigaliters of water is really a lake of water. If you had a valley, for instance, half a mile wide and 1.5 miles long, six gigaliters of water would fill it ten feet deep.
It seems like a colossal slug of water, six gigaliters.
But for Arthur, it’s the right amount, and really not that much. For the land he owns—10,450 acres—it comes to just 5.5 inches of water on average across every square foot of dirt, over nine or ten months of good growing season, underneath Australia’s blazing sun. Which is to say, in order to feed 100,000 people for a year, Arthur needs just 5.5 inches of water, his land, and his labor.
But Arthur only gets to buy the water he’s entitled to if there’s enough water in the Murray River—each year, he gets some allocation of the six thousand megaliters, based on the water available in the dams and the river. From 1991 to 1999, for nine years in a row, he got 100 percent.
Over the three years from 2007 to 2009, Arthur received enough of his water allocation to put 5.5 inches on just 950 acres. During a time when he should have planted, watered, and harvested 31,350 acres of crops—his land, three times over—he’s had enough water to irrigate just 3 percent of it. It comes to one-tenth of an inch of water per acre per month. A kangaroo peeing in the right place could have changed the productivity of his fields—if there had been any reason to plant them in the first place.
“The last three years have been among the worst for water in this area in recorded history,” says Arthur. “And I’ve written this next year off as well. But I find it hard to believe that the extremes are going to become the norm.”
Even in years when he gets all six thousand megaliters, managing water is as much a part of Arthur’s work as the planting or the harvesting. Arthur thinks the rain is coming back; he thinks the water is coming back. But after eight years of drought, he is too much in touch with the daily rhythm of weather, sunshine, and dry dirt not to have an almost elegiac view of the future. “I do think the halcyon days are gone,” he says. “I think the days of big water are gone.”
The anger and emotion in Toowoomba about how to secure the city’s water supply were deeply felt and personal—and yet, while the gardens may have withered, while people may have felt like they were living in a Third World country because they had to bucket water to their outside plants, the water never for an hour stopped flowing in Toowoomba’s mains. While the water shortage felt intensely personal, even urgent, it was for almost everyone a purely political conversation, even a theoretical one. No one in Toowoomba risked having his life endangered, or even substantially altered, by recycled water, or by Toowoomba’s steadily emptying reservoirs.
In the Riverina region where Arthur farms, water scarcity is now the dominant fact of life, driving farmers to sell their water rights, or their land, or both, causing some to commit suicide, closing businesses that depend on farmers, slowly drying and emptying the farm towns, changing everyday life in ways big and small.
This is what happens when you do not have enough water to do your work.
Laurie Arthur’s situation is not just caused by water scarcity, it is quite literally the very same water scarcity that caused Toowoomba’s reservoirs to go dry, the scarcity that caused the water conflict there.
But the water problems of a big rice farmer in a vitally productive agricultural area, and how his water connects to the water needs and the economy of a huge slice of Australia, pose a much different, equally important set of questions.
Should Laurie Arthur and his colleagues be farming in an area that can’t grow anything without irrigation water?
Should they be growing rice, a particularly water-intensive crop, in an arid region—and does it matter that, when watered, the soil loves to grow rice so much that Arthur and his fellow rice growers have the most productive rice fields in the whole world?
The city of Adelaide relies on the same Murray River water as Laurie Arthur. When water runs short, do cities, with their density of people and their intensity of economic activity, always trump farmers, who are small in number but use water in quantities that are hard to grasp?
The farms, of course, are no less vulnerable to economic destruction from lack of water than the cities, and the farms are no easier to restore, or replace, when the water itself returns.
But how do you weigh a single farmer, and the food he raises that can feed 100,000 people in the city, against the water needs of those very same 100,000 people?
And perhaps hardest of all, who decides?
How do you make choices that are fair when those needs are competing directly against each other for the very same water, in a very short time?
Because one of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity.
Arthur is struggling against running out of water. If he does, it won’t kill him, but it will surely kill his way of life.
“I do have moments when I think, Nuts, I’m doing the wrong thing.” Doing the wrong thing as in, insisting on continuing to be a farmer, and a rice farmer at that.
The two chief weapons Arthur deploys against the drought are an absolutely unrelenting work ethic—he works the farm until sundown, he has three demanding organizational roles that routinely take him from the farm to Australia’s cities a couple days a week, and he sits at the computer in his office until 2 a.m. five days a week—and an equally unquenchable good cheer, a kind of wide-open Aussie optimism.
“Do I believe in my heart the rain is coming back? Yes. And I believe it in my mind too.”
Arthur looks like Paul Newman, especially when he smiles. He’s a big man, but he moves lightly. He has a quick, dry sense of humor, and a restless curiosity, equally at home talking about “return on capital,” or how to raise the occasional orphan kangaroo as a pet, or the safety rules he has for himself while flying his helicopter. On the shelf in his farm office are books on French (he speaks it), land surveying (he does his own), and rice growing.
Despite having no recent farm income, Arthur has two expensive projects in the works to blunt the damage from the lack of rain. After a five-year break, he’s gone back to raising sheep—“just to make some money”— which is why he’s building a sturdy woolshed the size of a three-bedroom house, to handle the two thousand sheep that need to be sheared. He’s also laying a new pipeline to handle some of his irrigation water, replacing an open channel—a ditch, really—that is leaky and sloppy with water, and is fifty years old. Even though he’s doing most of the work himself, with the help of one of his sons and a farmhand or two, the new woolshed is costing A$49,000. The new pipeline is costing A$450,000. At a time when he doesn’t have the water to make his existing A$5 million farm investment pay, Arthur is spending a fresh half-million dollars to make himself a better farmer when the water returns.
Arthur loves his seven-year-old helicopter. The cockpit is a tiny red bubble, slightly less roomy than a Smart Car, from which Arthur can get a view of his farm’s condition unlike any from ground level. But he has stopped paying the insurance on the copter—nearly A$1,000 a month— “and I’ve put it on the market. Everything is expendable.” Arthur used to take fuel deliveries at the farm five thousand gallons at a time, filling an on-site storage tank. Now he takes five hundred gallons at a time, and gases up his SUV in town. “I just don’t like to have all that money tied up in gasoline.”
Water scarcity always creates water consciousness, especially for those of us who, unlike Arthur, typically don’t think about water at all. When water is suddenly in short supply, we not only pay much closer attention to how we use it, and how much we use, we’re suddenly alert to how other people use water, and how much they use. Rather than broaden understanding—Oh, that’s how much water it takes to raise rice—the result is often resentment, even conflict.
“I recently went to a dinner—it was a school event for my daughter,” says Arthur. “I’m sitting there with the other parents, we’re going around, each of us saying what we do.
“I said, ‘I’m a rice farmer.’
“One of the other parents said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a water waster, then.’”
He pauses to savor the presumption of the parent. Arthur has the ease of someone who can repair a A$400,000 John Deere combine or draw his own blueprints, but who would never mention either skill.
“This fellow thought he was making a profound observation about what I do,” says Arthur. “As if I might not have thought about it.”
AUSTRALIA IS EXPERIENCING the first wave of water envy. No one thinks he personally overindulges in water, but everyone can see the water gluttony of the farms upstream or the cities downstream or the next-door neighbor whose automatic lawn sprinklers run even when it’s been raining. Water envy seems like an all-new phenomenon.
In the developed world, water service has typically been so robust that even in places like Arizona, Nevada, and California, where much of the essential day-to-day water is imported from hundreds of miles away, there has still been such an abundance that you never had to scowl over the fence at how your neighbor was using water, except in times of extreme drought. But outbreaks of water envy, of water resentment, are going to become as common as water scarcity itself.
In a sense, water envy is like class envy, or even racial enmity. It’s often the result of ignorance, of our inability to imagine how the world looks from the perspective of the poorer person, or the Hispanic person, or the person using water completely differently than the way we do.
In fact, farmers have been growing rice in southeastern Australia as long as settlers have been trying to farm the land. During the early Australian gold rush in 1860, rice was grown to help feed the laborers. A well-known Australian character named Jack Brady went to California in 1920 to see how farmers there were growing Japonica, and by 1928 Australia was self-sufficient in rice production.5
Two things made the rice—not to mention oranges, grapes, and dairy cows—seem reasonable. The first was the presence of the farmers in the first place. During the first half of the twentieth century Australia was eager to populate, cultivate, and green its interior. To spark settlement, Australia gave soldiers returning from the first and second world wars six-hundred-acre blocks of land free if they agreed to farm them, and to stay for at least five years.
The other thing that made growing rice seem reasonable was the ready availability of water. As disastrously dry as the last nine years have been across Australia, and for the Murray River in particular, there hasn’t been a period this dry, for this long, in Australia since the start of European settlement. The Murray River and its main tributary, the Darling River, have for a century been a steady source of water for all the things Australians use water for—transportation, recreation, drinking water, and growing almost half of the country’s food production.
To smooth out the season-to-season and year-to-year variations, Australians built dams and reservoirs, and much of the Murray River’s flow is now controlled by Hume Dam, finished in 1936, specifically to store enough water in wet years to make certain those who relied on the river would have water even through the dry times. Hume was joined in 1970 by an even bigger reservoir, Dartmouth.
The Murray basin feels not just wide open, but lightly settled—the main roads often cut through completely empty landscape, not even accompanied by power lines—but the free-land settlement project begun ninety years ago has been hugely successful. The Murray-Darling Basin is home to almost 10 percent of Australians, 40 percent of Australian farmers, and it produces 40 percent of the nation’s agricultural products by value— A$15 billion a year in produce. The water smoothing system has been so successful that what is called “consumptive water use”—farms, factories, cities, and towns—almost tripled along the Murray between 1950 and 2000.
Why not grow rice?
Irrigation water powers the economy of the whole region, which is the size of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas combined.6 The irrigation system is a huge, permanent institution. It’s the area’s water circulation system, just like an interstate highway system or a power grid, with thousands of miles of canals, hundreds of employees, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year. Although it only has 10 percent of Australia’s people, the Murray-Darling Basin uses 52 percent of the country’s annual water consumption, and most of that water goes to farming.7
If Laurie Arthur runs out of water, he will not be alone. The irrigation system on which he and thousands of other farmers depend is running out of water, the Murray River on which the irrigation system depends is running out of water, the dams on which the Murray depends are running out of water. Ultimately, the very sky over one-seventh of Australia seems to be running dry.
And yet, in many important ways, if the dams, the river, the irrigation canals, and Arthur’s livelihood all die of thirst, this, too, will be because of a series of missteps and misjudgments, poor planning and overconfidence. Arthur’s struggle is a warning that in much of the developed world we have built not just flower beds and lawns but a whole lifestyle—the way our food is raised, the way our communities and our economy are organized—around an assumption of water abundance.
Laurie Arthur has created a bar graph on his computer that shows the relationship between how much water he’s gotten and how much grain he’s grown going back two decades. Irrigators have to pay for the water that they own the rights to (when he gets all his water, the water bill is about A$100,000 a year), and the percentage they get is based on rainfall, how much water is stored in the reservoirs, and flows along the river. For twelve straight years, starting in 1990, Arthur got 100 percent of his water every year except one. He hasn’t gotten 100 percent of his water once since 2001, and in four of the last seven years the allocation has been 10 percent, 9 percent, and no water at all, twice.
It’s hard to overstate how dramatic and how sudden the falloff has been. The first year he got zero water, 2006–2007, wasn’t just the first time of no water for him, it was the first time his water supplier, Murray Irrigation, had provided no water in seventy years of operation.8
Humans have short memories in all kinds of ways, but the withering of the Murray River has made what is really a water-based economy look not just wacky or foolish but positively profligate. When it isn’t raining, when the Murray isn’t flowing, the whole lifestyle seems to defy common sense.
“When I go to Adelaide for meetings,” says Arthur, “I hear tales of the evil rice and cotton growers. What we do seems like a crazy thing to those people.”
Partly that’s because Adelaide is in direct competition with the farmers for water, and water scarcity makes it quite easy to see others’ intemperance. But it’s also because there is a huge distance between urban Australia and rural Australia. Just one out of 125 Australians is a farmer, and even well-educated Australians often can’t get their minds around the basics.9
An editorial in the Age, Melbourne’s major broadsheet daily newspaper, said rice and cotton farming in the Murray River’s basin “should never have been encouraged,” and that such water-intensive crops “promise no more than a slow and lingering death” for farmers and farm communities. In support of its argument, the Age said that the rice industry used the astonishing, unsustainable quantity of 1.7 billion liters of water a year.10
“The question,” says Arthur, “was, do we write them and tell them they made a mistake? I mean, they were off by a factor of a thousand.”
Laurie Arthur himself—just one rice farmer—uses far more than 1.7 billion liters of water a year. “We [rice farmers] use 1.7 trillion liters of water. Should I write and tell them how stupid they are? Nah.
“And the Australian”—Australia’s major national daily—“did the same thing,” says Arthur. “They said it takes 22,000 liters of water to grow one kilogram of rice. Well, I use 1,100 liters of water to grow one kilogram of rice. They’re only off by a factor of twenty. But who’s counting?”
In fact, though, the wildly erroneous numbers don’t really matter. Water scarcity causes some people to tell other people how to behave, and the numbers were really decorative, not substantive. They simply illustrate the sense among urban Australians that those Murray Valley farmers— while growing enough food to feed the whole country—simply don’t have any idea how to use water.
“Thirty years ago, we were greening the land,” says Arthur. “Now some people think if the water crisis doesn’t kill rice growing, it has failed.”
Water, of course, is a natural resource, a basic material, a commodity like petroleum or copper, lumber or wheat. But even with something as vital and contentious as oil, we rarely experience oil envy. The reason is price. We let price sort out scarcity—in some roughly satisfactory way, the oil goes to the uses that make economic sense. When the price goes up, people drive less and heat their homes less, the airlines park their less efficient jets, building owners switch to LED lighting. Water envy, though, is aggravated by the fact that water has no real price attached to it that has any market meaning. During periods of water scarcity, we don’t have a good way of sorting out the best uses of water in economic terms, because water isn’t priced according to supply and demand, even in local areas. And we’d all agree that some uses of water that have no immediate economic value are indispensable anyway.
Water envy isn’t a problem when there’s more than enough clean, cheap water. But when there suddenly isn’t enough water to support the lifestyle that has been created, water envy is more than just a matter of resentment or social friction. It stands in the way of making good choices during a pressing crisis, and it can prevent a state or a country from remaking its water rules, its water infrastructure, its water economy, in a way that fairly adjusts to a future of less water, or more expensive water, or both.
In that sense, Australia’s problems are a gift to the rest of the developed world. They are a warning how quickly and perilously water availability can change; they serve notice that the rules we have for giving out abundant water won’t serve us well when there is no water to give out.
The city of Adelaide, 1.2 million people at the western edge of the Murray basin, requires 200 gigaliters a year of water; metropolitan Melbourne, 4 million people at the southern edge of the Murray basin, requires 400 gigaliters a year. The 39,680 farmers of the Murray basin use at least 7,000 gigaliters each year—the 39,680 irrigators use ten times the water that 5.2 million city dwellers require.11
No wonder there’s a water shortage.
THE RIVER MURRAY has been flowing across southeast Australia for 40 million years, and it has created landscapes startling for both their beauty and their variety. At the Murray’s mouth, where the river meets the ocean at the town of Goolwa, the coast is estuarine, with barrier islands, the smell of the sea, and white sand dunes reminiscent of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
You can stand on the beach, looking south directly across the mouth of the Murray. The river comes in from the right, the sand dunes part, and the Mighty Murray meets the Indian Ocean. In the opening are huge windswept breakers. Looking south through the gap in the dunes made by the river, there is no land between you and the coast of Antarctica—just 2,500 miles of cold, unruly ocean. You can hear the waves, and it seems like a perfect place for Australia’s greatest river to meet the ocean, wild and beautiful.
In fact, though, the Murray’s water at Goolwa is absolutely still—a flat pond that only Australia’s classic black swans seem to find inviting. The Murray River has been so low because of the Big Dry that it hasn’t actually flowed into the Indian Ocean for four years. There hasn’t been enough water to make a current.
As the river makes that final turn toward the sea, there is a dam across its width, almost half a mile. The dam is low and utilitarian, with a lock in the middle to allow boat traffic. You can walk out across the top of the dam, and here you discover something remarkable that you can’t see from shore. Looking down on the Murray River, you can see that the water on the ocean side of the dam is higher than the water on the river side. If the dam were to suddenly disappear, or even if the navigation lock were to be opened, the Indian Ocean would pour upstream, overwhelming the Murray. The mouth of the Murray isn’t a river mouth these days—it’s an ocean inlet, with the fresh-water river itself protected from the sea by a wall. It is as if the Mississippi—or the Thames or the Yangtze—had run out of water.
You can follow the Murray by car from where it meets the ocean toward Laurie Arthur’s farm—five hundred miles upstream—and about three hours’ drive from the mouth, the Murray’s personality changes dramatically. The river drifts in and out of view on the west side of the road headed north. Then, all of a sudden, the land to the west drops away, and the Murray reappears at the base of curving cliffs that run for miles and soar three hundred feet tall. The cliffs of the Murray River sit on the eastern bank—they face west. In the setting sun, the limestone walls glow terra cotta, salmon, and ivory, as if lit from within. Before it was tamed with dams and reservoirs and irrigation canals, the Murray had enough spirit to carve a stunning half-canyon that looks like something from the red-rock region of Utah. Nothing here betrays to the casual traveler a river in desperation, as is so clear in Goolwa. This stretch of river looks so different than the Murray you find at the ocean that it’s hard to believe it’s the same river.
The Murray River was once both free and wild. Australians tamed it to protect themselves against its occasional dramatic floods, and to harness its water to feed the country. For most of the last eighty years, this domestication has worked brilliantly—the vast productivity of the Murray Valley comes directly from being able to use the Murray itself as one vast, meandering irrigation pond. But as happens in other arenas, water abundance has camouflaged a serious problem. The half-century from the end of World War II to 2000 was uncharacteristically wet for the Murray River. During that time, farmers and cities grew to regard the abundance as typical.
“Every drop of water in the river is owned by someone,” says Robyn McLeod, commissioner for water security for the state of South Australia. “It isn’t a free-flowing river at all, and the environment usually gets what’s left last.” Her job is to be a watchdog of water security for the state—to look at the big-picture policy issues and to lobby state government to make the best long-term decisions so South Australians have the water they need and the Murray River does too.
“Until a few years ago, Adelaide and South Australia thought we had the most secure water supply in all of Australia,” says McLeod. “We didn’t have dams, we had the great, mighty river. And it had been a great, mighty river. Until the last few years.”
It might seem that nothing could more starkly illustrate the state of the river Murray than Laurie Arthur, and hundreds of fellow farmers, receiving literally no water to grow food in two out of the last three years.
But it’s worth stepping back to understand the Murray River’s water intake as a whole, to appreciate how quickly and dramatically change has swept down on the Australians—because their sense of water security in 2000 was no less than our own.
In the water year 2008–2009, the Murray River received only 1,860 gigaliters of water inflow total. The farmers alone typically take 7,000 giga-liters. The river itself needs 600 gigaliters just for what is called conveyance water—the water necessary to keep the water itself moving through the locks and dams.
The whole purpose of the Murray River’s reservoirs is to act as a cushion—a water savings account—for precisely those years when the rain doesn’t fall. But at the end of that same 2009 water year when the river only got 1,860 gigaliters, the reservoirs were in their ninth year of below-average rainfall. The main water storages held just 980 gigaliters total. The Big Dry had all but evaporated the Murray River’s emergency water savings.12
Indeed, if you take from that 1,860 gigaliters the bare minimum for the river—600 gigaliters—and take another 300 gigaliters for the critical water needs of Adelaide, you’re left with just 900 gigaliters, for the whole river, and all its dependents, for the whole year.
So it’s not just that, as Robyn McLeod says, “every drop of water in the river is owned by someone.” Accounting for Adelaide, for the smaller cities along the river’s length, for the irrigators, for water evaporating and seeping into the riverbed itself and being lost from irrigation canals, it’s much worse than that. There aren’t enough drops for every person with a claim on the river. Every drop is owned, and some drops are owned by two different people. “Welcome to my problem,” says McLeod. “It is an absolute catastrophe.”
Or, as Laurie Arthur puts it, with characteristic reserve, “The river is overallocated.”
It is hardly a problem peculiar to Australia. Indeed, it’s fairly common—it’s just that most of the time there’s enough water to camouflage the shortage. The Colorado River, which supplies both the fertile farm fields of California’s Imperial Valley and the gaming tables of the Las Vegas Strip, is overallocated. The Chattahoochee River, which supplies both the city of Atlanta and the oysters of Apalachicola Bay 435 miles downstream, is overallocated. The Tigris and the Euphrates, shared by Turkey and Iraq, are so overallocated that some scientists predict that the Fertile Crescent, the valley framed by those two rivers where farming was born ten thousand years ago, will dry up.13
The question the Big Dry has revealed for the Murray is starkly different from the water scarcity question that faced Toowoomba. Toowoomba was simply arguing about how to restore its water supply. The question from the Snowy Mountains, where the Murray River begins, past both Laurie Arthur’s farm and the city of Adelaide, to the Indian Ocean, is what happens if the last hundred years have been unusually wet for the Murray, and the weather pattern in place the last nine years is really the normal pattern?
“Drought” implies a devastating water-related event, like “flood” or “blizzard,” but also one that comes to an end. Robyn McLeod is one of the people whose job is to take a long-term view of how best to think about the Murray River. “I don’t use the word ‘drought,’” she says.
IN SEPTEMBER 1996, Mundaring Weir, Perth’s oldest reservoir, drew thousands of visitors to the quiet eucalyptus forest around the lake the dam creates, to watch an unusual spectacle. Visitors could stand on a walkway across the top of the 1,000-foot-wide dam as 16 million gallons of water a minute cascaded across the top, just below their feet, and waterfalled down the face of the 130-foot-high dam. The dam hadn’t overflowed in more than a decade.14
Perth sits all the way across the continent from the Murray River, and for Australia, Perth has served the role that Australia is serving for the rest of us. Climate change and water scarcity hit Perth hard, and came to the city five years before the problems became clear back east.
It was hard to be worried about Perth’s water supply as the water was pouring over Mundaring dam, but the rains and the runoff of 1996 didn’t distract one man. Jim Gill was looking at the bigger picture, and losing sleep. Gill had taken over the water system of the state of Western Australia just the year before, at age forty-nine, chosen for all kinds of good reasons, with one startling exception. “I knew nothing about water,” he says.
The Water Corporation, as Western Australia’s water utility is called, had plenty of people who knew water. Gill was an engineer, manager, and government technocrat who designed bridges, then built roads in Western Australia’s deadly dry deserts (“It was very, very remote—you never saw a boss out there”), and at age forty-one had been handed the state’s tangled railroads to run.
On the phone, Gill conveys the impression of a tough, muscular, no-nonsense Aussie engineer—a guy who could wrangle outback construction workers and lay down a ribbon of macadam to a nickel mine, who could make sense of a railroad system that in 1988 still stubbornly maintained track widths different from the railroads it connected to.
In person, Gill looks like a character from a Woody Allen movie— short, with a swirl of peppery untamed hair, a big head, big hands, and small shoulders. He looks like a college math professor.
In fact, both impressions of Gill are true, and when he was given the Water Corporation to run, Perth didn’t realize how desperately it would rely on both his experience and his inexperience.
“I had no idea what was facing the community,” says Gill. “What I didn’t realize was, it wasn’t raining anymore.”
Gill used an utterly sincere naiveté to spot Perth’s impending water catastrophe. Then he used a quiet political and bureaucratic jujitsu to triumph in public water politics that ran every risk of becoming as inflamed as those of Toowoomba. And he used decades of experience building roads and running railroads to steer Australia’s first desalination plant to completion in just two years, on budget and on time.
Gill took over the water system of Western Australia as Perth was heading into its driest years in recorded history. As CEO of Water Corporation he was responsible for securing and delivering water from reservoirs to 2 million residents, concentrated in the city of Perth but spread across an area of astonishing breadth—a single state, and a single water utility, across a piece of land as big as Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California combined.
It was a single page in a report—a bar graph—that caused Gill to ask the question Robyn McLeod is asking about the Murray River: What’s normal?
Gill started at Water Corporation in March 1995. Two months later, the utility issued a fifty-year strategic plan that had been in the works for two years, a document that laid out the predicted water needs of Western Australia through 2045, and how Water Corporation would meet those needs. It was pretty routine stuff—Western Australia is booming because its incredible mineral resources are being mined to power the global economy, and Water Corporation expected to meet the needs of the new residents and industries the way it always had, with reservoirs, and by tapping some underground aquifers.
“I looked at it as it was published,” says Gill, “and I said, There’s something funny going on here.”
Among the items in the report was the single-page bar graph—exactly the kind you learn to draw in second grade—showing rainwater inflows to Perth’s dams every year going all the way back to 1907. Each year got a vertical, and the line’s height showed how much water Perth’s reservoirs received. There were some stunning years in both directions—six lines in ninety years soar above 800 gigaliters in a single year; four years don’t even show 100 gigaliters. The average going back to 1907 was about 330 gigaliters, and that’s what Perth relied on.
What was odd, from Jim Gill’s perspective, with the bar graph in front of him in 1995, was this: From 1974 to 1995, there was not one big water year. In fact, there wasn’t even one “normal” year—not one year out of the previous twenty-one in a row where the reservoirs got even 300 gigaliters, let alone the average of 330. What was even odder was that in fourteen of those twenty-one years, the reservoirs didn’t even receive 200 gigaliters.
The most recent twenty-one years of rain and reservoir water looked completely different from the previous twenty, and from the previous sixty years.
But Water Corporation’s strategic plan didn’t acknowledge the most recent twenty-one years of low water—it assumed a future of at least 330 gigaliters of rainwater runoff a year.
“I said to the staff, ‘Well, surely the last twenty years is a better indicator of what will happen next year, and the following year, than the last ninety years.’
“They said to me, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. You have to take the entire average.’
“The problem was, from within [Water Corporation], we had a consensus that the best indicator of the future was the entire past,” says Gill. “It turned out to be good, coming in from the outside clean like that.”
Gill was new to predicting reservoir inflows. And you had to be careful, because new dams and reservoirs are expensive, hard to get approved, and hard to build.
“I was in charge of this water utility, in a state that was growing. We have a monopoly—we cover the whole state. It’s a pretty big responsibility. And I was being paid to be slightly paranoiac. I was waking up at 3 a.m. after the plan was released, thinking, There’s something going on here. It’s just wrong. We have to do something about it.”
He went back to Water Corporation’s staff. “Quickly, they started agreeing with me. They said, ‘Yup, things are getting dryer, and getting dryer more quickly.’ Which also horrified me.”
How could the outsider so easily see something that the water professionals had overlooked? And, Gill wondered, what would they do if what they were seeing on the bar chart was the new reality?
This was all just before 1996, which turned out to be a big year only in comparison with the previous twenty-two years—although the Mundaring dam overflowed, 1996 didn’t quite make it up to the ninety-year average.
It was easy enough to do the math. Perth’s average reservoir inflows were 338 gigaliters a year from 1911 to 1974. They were exactly half that, 177 gigaliters, from 1974 to 1996, including the flush year of 1996. Despite having seven reservoirs, Perth was using more water than was coming in.
Soon Perth wouldn’t even have enough water to meet its current needs, let alone support booming growth.
In February of 1996, in the midst of the first moderately wet year in two decades, Gill convened a scientific seminar for his own staff, about climate and rainfall trends. For Gill, the most startling presentation came from a scientist from the University of Washington who had studied the relationship of redwood tree rings and stream flows, going back five hundred years.
“If you core those redwoods, and measure the growth rings, going back five hundred years, the thickness of the rings is closely correlated to stream flows,” says Gill. In his presentation, the scientist first revealed fifty years of data, and there was a clear pattern. In the next slide, he revealed the prior fifty years of data. “Oh, you’d think, I see now, it’s actually wetter!” says Gill. The scientist just kept adding fifty years of earlier data, slide by slide. “Every time he unveiled a bit more of the picture, you’d come to terms with it, you’d get the picture. But the picture you got was just wrong.
“By the time he’d unveiled five hundred years of data, it was clear there was no cycle at all.”
And if five hundred years of data is humbling in rainfall and climate terms, well, Perth’s hundred years of data is in fact representative of nothing, except what you’ve built your dams to expect.
That meeting helped change the conversation inside Water Corporation, and helped change the sense of urgency. Gill and his staff took the fifty-year plan and accelerated much of the “new source development” into the next five years—three new dams, a couple new treatment plants, development of deep wells to tap groundwater.
The single-page bar graph showing water flows into Perth’s dams is as plain a presentation device as you can get—it is utterly without adornment or digital-era special effects. It would be exactly the kind of report page or PowerPoint slide you might flip past. But if you take the time to study it, it has an utterly arresting quality. In fact, the single-page Perth bar graph has become a staple of the Big Dry across the country. Water officials in Adelaide, in Melbourne, in tiny Toowoomba can instantly produce versions with their own data: years running along the bottom, bars rising to show water flows. Laurie Arthur even has one for the water availability at his farm. They are all equally austere, and equally stunning.
Jim Gill has learned to use an updated version, with water flows starting in 1907 and running right up to 2008, to devastating effect, using precisely the technique he found so effective from the University of Washington professor.
Gill begins in 1995, the year he started, leaving the whole century open but covering the future years—then he slides away the cover sheet, unveiling each recent year, year by year. You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know how much water is coming.
You don’t even need to know the real amounts of water, just watch the heights of the bars. The long-term average water flow is a line 1.5 inches tall—that’s the water Perth actually needs. The tallest bar on the sheet— with a century of data—is 4 inches high, 1945. Gill’s first year, 1995, is three-quarters of an inch tall. Then comes 1996, not quite 1.5 inches. Okay! Then 1997: a half-inch. 1998: less than a half-inch. Two years in a row with one-third the necessary water.
Nineteen ninety-nine and 2000 feel like a relief—both pop back up to three-quarters of an inch tall. But wait—they only look good compared with the years just before them. Together 1999 and 2000 equal just one average year going back to 1907.
“You have to plot scenarios,” says Gill. “Let’s look at the worst years. What if we have a string of those?”
The shift in perspective is striking. You can feel a tiny bit of what the water suppliers, the water officials, see and feel at times like this. We’re grumpy about not being able to water our lawns, about our dirty cars and our short showers. This small exercise gives you a taste of the anxiety of being responsible for the empty reservoirs. How much water is coming?
Gill keeps revealing years. Two thousand and one is a stunner: barely a quarter-inch of line, a tiny stub—the lowest year of water flow in a century.
“In 2001, it was clear this was one helluva crisis. After 2001, I started asking a different question: What if that 2001 rain is repeated for two or three years in a row? What happens then? We were just going to run out of water.”
Mind you, by 2002, Water Corporation had done almost everything in its fifty-year plan to “secure” more water. “We had built three new dams and there just wasn’t much water in them,” says Gill. “You could see the mud in the bottom.”
THE POLITICS OF WATER was never far from the surface in Perth.
The city has the relaxed charm of South Florida or Southern California from a more innocent era. Downtown is compact and walkable, with a waterfront along the Swan River that is busy with people taking advantage of Perth’s mild climate; suburbs of single-family bungalows with gardens in front and a patch of yard in back roll out for miles in all directions.
Even before the Big Dry, Perth’s climate was more like that of Greece or Spain than the English countryside, and yet in Perth, as in Toowoomba and much of Australia, the individual English-style garden is much prized.
Sue Murphy was a senior Water Corporation manager hired by Jim Gill, and she succeeded him as CEO in 2008. She often uses Perth’s English gardens as an example of how water habits that literally make no sense take hold and come to seem natural. “If we’d been settled by Mediterraneans of some kind—Greeks, Spaniards—we would not have these English gardens everywhere. We have them because life in the beginning was miserable here, and people were trying to re-create what they had back home in England,” says Murphy.
It’s not just the gardens. Perth’s residents have installed 100,000 backyard swimming pools.
Despite the slow erosion of its water supply by 2001, the water culture in Perth was complacent. “We hadn’t had water restrictions of any kind for twenty-three years,” says Gill. “Perth had grown—people here are affluent. At Water Corporation, we felt all hell would break loose if we only allowed outside watering two days a week.”
Gill is a better tactician than his colleagues in Toowoomba. He didn’t attempt to shock the culture—he wanted simply to wake people up to the water situation. Water Corporation started advertising aggressively, getting residents tuned in to the drought, urging them to reduce their daily water use, inside and outside, in advance of restrictions. Dual-flush toilets were mandated in new construction, as were low-flow showerheads.
Inside Water Corporation, there was an air of controlled panic. Gill and his staff planned to be able to run Perth with no water at all in the reservoirs that had historically provided 70 percent of the city’s supply. They planned in an emergency to use nothing but wells.
Gill and his lieutenants also established a drought war room in a second-floor conference room at Water Corporation headquarters. “We were looking at the weather forecasts every day,” says Gill. “We were looking at the sunshine out there every day. I looked at the satellite images every day. I looked at the three-month look-ahead forecasts. I looked at the global circulation models. It always seemed bad.”
Beyond conservation—Perth residents ultimately scaled back per person consumption enough to save 45 gigaliters a year, which is equivalent to what an entire desalination plant produces—there were really only two options for adding water that didn’t depend immediately on rainfall: tapping a vast aquifer called the Yarragadee and building a desalination plant.
In typical Gill fashion, he went for both. “We wanted two solutions on the go at any one time,” says Gill, “because one might fall over at any time.”
Yarragadee posed political and scientific problems: Assessing the dynamics of deep aquifers is very difficult, and there wasn’t much science available on the Yarragadee. Farmers and residents in the area were suspicious of tapping the aquifer to supply the entire city, worried their own wells would dry up, worried about salt water creeping in from the Indian Ocean, worried about the sustainability of sucking water out of a source that, while seemingly large, had taken 100,000 years to accumulate.
Environmentalists were equally opposed to a big desalination plant. One of the problems with desalination is that, when you take in a hundred gallons of seawater, you typically produce about forty-five gallons of pure drinking water. You’re left with fifty-five gallons of water that has all the salt in it that was originally in the hundred gallons—double-concentrated brine. You aren’t, in fact, adding any salt back into the ocean that wasn’t there to start. But before it is diluted, that stream of brine can do a lot of damage to the ecology of the ocean where it is disposed of.
The site of Perth’s proposed desalination plant—and the place where it was ultimately built—is on a bay called Cockburn Sound. So the desal plant wouldn’t be sending double-concentrated brine back to be diluted by the Indian Ocean’s tides and currents. The brine would go into a semi-enclosed bay. The very real worry was that the desal plant’s super-salty effluent would turn Cockburn Sound into a lifeless salt sea.
Desal faced opposition for another reason, one Americans find hard to appreciate. In Perth, there is widespread agreement that the absence of rain is the result of climate change. A desal plant is a huge consumer of electricity. So there was resistance to desal based on the idea that the desal plant was only necessary because of climate change—but that building it would increase greenhouse gas emissions and so ultimately make worse the very problem it was supposedly solving.
As Perth’s water crisis became more and more obvious, all kinds of ideas were floated. The level of water or engineering expertise was irrelevant. Colin Barnett, running for premier of Western Australia, backed what became known as Colin’s Canal—the idea that all Perth’s water problems could be solved with a big ditch. Because the unpopulated northern part of Western Australia is flush with tropical rainfall that runs into the ocean, Barnett argued that the state should simply build a canal to bring the water down to Perth. Sometimes the distances in Australia seem to confound even Australians. It is literally the equivalent of proposing to supply Las Vegas, Nevada, with water by building a canal from Niagara Falls, New York.15
Gill set his staff to analyzing whether the city could really tap, and then rely on, the Yarragadee Aquifer, which was his first choice, and the first choice of many at Water Corporation. He was skeptical of desalination—it wasn’t just expensive and energy intensive, many recent desalination plants had proved infuriatingly difficult to get built and running properly. The largest desal plant in the United States, in Tampa Bay, was just half the size of the one being considered for Perth, and Tampa Bay’s plant ran 30 percent over budget, didn’t start making water until five years after its scheduled completion date, and took yet more years to provide the amount of drinking water it was designed to.16
But unlike Toowoomba, where city officials locked in on a single solution, Gill took both the aquifer and desalination seriously. He sent staff members to a German engineering firm with experience building desalination plants, then he went to Germany himself.
“I did have quite a bit of doubt about whether we could do it right,” says Gill. “I went to Stuttgart and I said, Make your best case. I needed them to convince me it would work, that it would not take three to five years to come to nameplate capacity. They were very convincing.”
For Gill, even years later, it wasn’t a close call. “The preferred source was very clearly the Yarragadee,” he says. “There was minimal environmental impact, it was less expensive, less energy was required.”
But the Yarragadee opponents were loud and potent. And Gill came up with two masterstrokes that helped make desalination publicly acceptable.
First, he proposed powering the desalination plant with all-new windmills, installed at a windmill farm up the coast from Perth, so the water factory would use only renewable energy. No climate impact at all.
To tackle the problem of discharging 42 million gallons of brine a day into Cockburn Sound, Water Corporation designed a discharge pipe for the water factory that over its final six hundred feet has forty nozzles sticking up like porcupine quills, a nozzle every sixteen feet, at different angles, to widely disperse the flow of double-salty water. And to satisfy the critics that Water Corporation’s design would work, Gill hired an outside consultant to assess the outfall pipe. He hired the most vocal critic of the desal plant, a prominent scientist, professor, and water expert named Jorg Imberger, who had said publicly, “Desal is like taking an aspirin for a tumor.”
Imberger’s study showed that the porcupine-nozzle design worked perfectly. The nozzles completely dispersed the high-salinity water from the plant, even in the enclosed bay. “It doesn’t cause a problem,” said Imberger.
Although Perth thinks of itself as having confronted its crisis and had a reasonable public debate about it, in the end the decision was made based on politics, rather than a technical analysis—as it was, in the end, in Toowoomba.
Geoff Gallop, the premier of Western Australia and both Jim Gill’s boss and admirer, was briefed right along on the science and the politics of choosing either the aquifer or the desalination plant. He chose the A$340 million desalination plant. “I was always a bit nervous about the politics of taking water from underground, despite the science,” says Gallop. “We’ve got our wine industry there, all the agricultural industry down there. The science was okay. But the politics of desal proved much better for me, whatever the science.”
Once Gallop chose desal, Gill didn’t hesitate. He controlled the plant construction tightly. Companies bidding to build and run it, for instance, were assessed by two separate teams—one evaluating engineering and construction competence, the other evaluating financial stability. (Tampa Bay’s desalination plant suffered through bankruptcies of three of its main contractors.) During construction, no tours, or reporter visits, or politician photo ops were allowed. “Managing that was very difficult,” says Gallop. “If the desal construction process had become politicized or had union problems, the press would have started to write, ‘The ill-fated desal plant.’ They avoided that completely. On time, on budget. That was a brilliant bit of management.”
The Perth water factory is the first facility of its kind in Australia— the first city-scale desalination plant being used to provide drinking water anywhere on the continent. Gill got it built in crisis mode—contracts let in July 2004, spring-pure water flowing to Perth’s water mains in November 2006.
The heart of the factory is a vast building, three acres under one roof, a warehouse-like space three stories high that is stuffed with pipes, pumps, electronics, and a noise so loud that you can feel it thrumming your bones. The roar drowns out everything, and the noise never rests, it never pauses or cycles. That’s what a modern reverse-osmosis facility sounds like.
Turning seawater into drinking water is a straightforward business— military and passenger ships have been doing it at sea for decades—but if you want to make city-size quantities of drinking water from the ocean, you need muscle. You need to suck in city-size quantities of water, and you need to slam that water through reverse-osmosis filter cartridges so fine that almost nothing gets through but the water itself.
Perth’s desalination plant guzzles 55,000 gallons of water a minute. To get everything out of the water—to squeeze out the salt and the shark poop, the seaweed, the decaying jellyfish, the bilgewater from a passing freighter—the water factory has to crank the water up to a pressure of 940 pounds per square inch, the same pressure the ocean exerts 2,100 feet down. It is almost enough force to crush the protective pressure hull of a nuclear submarine.17
Inside the main building at Perth’s water factory, there are thousands of white filter cartridges arrayed in racks—55,000 gallons of water a minute jetting through them, each cylinder holding fast against 940 pounds per square inch of water pressure, all that water jacked along by a line of enormous pumps right down the center of the building. That’s where the noise comes from: the pumps pushing the water through the tiniest of reverse-osmosis filter pores. It is, in fact, the sound of Perth rescuing itself from water disaster.
Although it sits incongruously on a resort-worthy slice of coast, facing a vista of turquoise Indian Ocean, the desal plant is a massive industrial operation, wedged next to a power plant. One of the striking things about it is that it is immaculately clean. There is not a weed or a scrap of litter visible on the sixteen-acre site. Even the gravel is well groomed. Just outside the main reverse-osmosis building is a small blue-gray box that looks like it might hold electronic controls. In fact, chief engineer Steve Christie pops open the hatch, and there’s a spigot inside: This is freshly desalinated ocean water, the water made by the water factory. Ninety minutes from Cockburn Sound to your palate. It tastes wonderful.
And Christie says the cleanliness of the facility—which is not open to the public—is no accident. “The whole system is sealed,” says Christie. “Our aim is that not even an ant could get in. We want to be able to take the water and send it, clean and fresh, straight into the piping system to people’s homes.”
The Perth desalination plant has operated smoothly since opening— it consistently supplies 17 percent of Perth’s annual 300-gigaliter water thirst. And it was a reasonable choice that solved the immediate problem, although whether it was the best choice is a different, perhaps unanswerable question.
“There’s no solution to the water problem without the people being involved,” says Gallop, of choosing the plant over the aquifer. “When the politics of water get hot, you need public support. I really did want the people on side with this.”
And there’s no question that Jim Gill, with his bar graph, rescued Perth—perhaps from the very crisis that the Australian scientist Tim Flannery had predicted in that famous newspaper headline “Perth Will Die, Says Top Scientist.”
But there is a much larger question about Jim Gill’s handling of Perth’s nerve-rattling plunge into water scarcity: Did Jim Gill waste a good crisis?
Gill doesn’t shrink from the question. He thinks, in fact, that it is the most important question.
“In some ways, we defined the problem and the solution within the existing framework of abundant water,” says Gill. “And we’ve still got abundant water here.
“What I really believe is, we just use too much water. It’s an amazing leap of arrogance that to get rid of five hundred milliliters of urine we use six liters of drinking water—twelve times the amount of the urine. That’s crazy. It’s just an example of how we are not serious in our life about how we manage resources.18
“Perth people use a lot less water than they used to”—20 percent less, per person. “And you could argue that if we hadn’t pushed back the problem so effectively, if the water hadn’t continued to flow from the taps, we’d be further along on the long-term goals.
“You could argue that. But we had to stave off the crisis.
“I do think we’re living an unsustainable lifestyle. We need to wean ourselves from abundant water.”
IN AUSTRALIA, IN UNDER TEN YEARS, one vitally important point has been made bluntly clear: Despite their utter reliability, our water systems are anything but robust. They are durable. But they are rigid, locked into their own assumptions of where the water will come from and where it will be needed. They have no flexibility, no adaptability. When the rain they rely on falls somewhere else, when the river stops flowing, when the underground aquifer we’ve been tapping starts to fall, we look around in astonishment and betrayal. What just happened?
Our water habits rely on those same assumptions of water availability. Abundant, flowing water is its own invitation to indulgence. That’s true in nature—who can resist putting a hand in the flowing current of a creek? And it’s especially true in a world where literally no signals tweak us about our water use, either as we’re using it or even in our monthly or quarterly water bills. The astonishing monthly electric bill is a sharp reminder of why we use the air conditioning carefully in summer; the price of a gallon of gas encourages us to consider cars with good mileage when it comes time to buy a new one.
But we’ve set up a system that treats water differently. A short shower is virtuous, but hardly rewarding, whereas a long, steaming bath—using in twenty minutes the water many Australian cities hope is a full day’s supply—is alluring, easy, and relaxing. Why not? You could take a bath four days a week without actually knowing how much water you were consuming; you could take a bath four days a week without noticing a change in your water bill. Indeed, despite water scarcity from one end of Australia to the other, even in cities like Perth and Toowoomba confronting crisis conditions, the typical home water bill remains less each month than the cell phone bill. Imagine how water habits would change if our bathroom and kitchen faucets simply displayed a small, digital readout showing how many gallons we were using, and had used from that faucet that day? It would be fascinating, it would be fun, it would save a lot of water.
In Perth, Jim Gill retired as CEO of Water Corporation in December 2008, and was succeeded by Sue Murphy.19 “You cannot overstate how hard it is to follow Jim Gill,” she says. “He is the water god in this state, and in some ways in Australia.”
Murphy shares with Gill a career steeped in engineering and construction. She spent twenty-five years at one of Australia’s leading engineering firms before Gill hired her to manage construction of that first desal plant. And she, too, knew nothing about water when she joined Water Corporation. “For me,” says Murphy with a smile, “water was just a source of large construction projects—dams, reservoirs, pipelines.”
But as CEO, Murphy’s mission is completely different from Jim Gill’s, although she feels it with at least as much urgency. She wants to confront the problem Gill didn’t have time to confront: Perth’s water culture. Water Corporation is using a new slogan, “Water forever,” that in just two words captures the challenge. Murphy wants to reset the assumptions about water, to dig into the sociology and the psychology of water use and permanently alter how people think about it.
“The drivers of water have been supply and demand,” she says. “Our job as the Water Corporation has been to simply increase the supply. But now our job is not simply to accept the demand and meet it with supply, but to take demand and manage it down.” She likes the phrase “nega-liters”— the liters of water she doesn’t have to deliver because people find more efficient ways to use water. “We treat nega-liters as the cheapest water we supply.” It is cheaper and easier to teach people to use the water they already have more carefully and productively than to build more dams, desal plants, and pipes.
“From my point of view, the mantra of the whole twentieth century has been ‘cheap,’” Murphy says. “The mantra of the twenty-first century is going to be ‘value’—what’s the best value?”
It’s an idea that, in fact, is almost never applied to water, at least explicitly. What’s the best use of a gallon of drinking water? Flushing away some pee? Watering a backyard? Growing rice? Making a microchip?
Murphy agrees with Gill that Water Corporation didn’t use the crisis either to scare or to force people into living differently with their water. “Fundamentally,” she says, “we haven’t changed anything.” That’s why she wants to ask harder, more complicated questions.
“If you look at how we set out our society here in Perth, we have quarter-acre blocks, with a nice lawn, so we can play football in the yard. In the last twenty-five to thirty years, things have changed. Mom and Dad aren’t home in the afternoon that much. The kids are in [day care]. Dad doesn’t really want to spend the weekend doing the yard. The backyard has become a place for entertaining, but not really a place for the kids to play football.
“That’s why we need good shared spaces—that can be watered with recycled water.”
This isn’t water as an infrastructure problem, it’s water as a sociology problem.
Because of the dramatic water scarcity, and the relentless public focus on how to find new water sources, says Murphy, “We’ve got some public acceptance of the idea that using less is good. But we haven’t locked in new behavior. We’ve locked in gains like dual-flush toilets. Behavior is less tangible, and I don’t think it’s changed.
“It’s like the difference between a crash diet and changing your eating habits forever.
“If we are going to change the way we construct society, we have to distill what we love and what makes it great,” says Murphy. “That’s not the mandate of the water utility. But someone’s got to start that conversation.”
And, of course, water has always shaped society—economically, sociologically, geographically. So the modern water supplier is not a bad place to start the conversation about “water forever.” But it’s also true that, crisis or no, it is in fact a lot easier to build a desal plant than to get 2 million people to build new habits.
Australia is taking its water scarcity seriously, but Australia is unusual in that, with 85 percent of its people within a thirty-one-mile strip along its coastline, almost all of its urban water problems can be solved with desalination. And desalination has what Australians have come to see as a standout advantage: It’s climate independent. The oceans aren’t going anywhere. If you’re willing to pump in the energy, the water factories will pump out clean water. But “climate resilient water” isn’t cheap.
Perth has a second desal plant under way, Brisbane and Sydney have plants built and operating, and Melbourne and Adelaide each have plants under construction. Overall, just the desalination plants that Australia’s state governments have built, or committed to building, will cost A$13 billion—A$600 for every resident of Australia, just for construction.20
It is quite possible, in other words, to spend enough money so we don’t have to do what Jim Gill insists we must: wean ourselves from abundant water. At least some of us can.
IF YOU STEP ONTO THE PORCH of Laurie and Deborah Arthur’s farmhouse at five-thirty in the morning, it’s easy to be surprised by the perfectly camouflaged, and momentarily motionless, visitors.
The Australian bush spreads out before you, dawn is just spilling over the flat land. There are tall trees near the house, giving way to wide vistas of scrub, crossed by a dirt road. If you step down off the porch, the ground itself suddenly seems to ripple, whirl, and race away from you, as if a wave were bunching under the brown dirt and rolling out.
It takes a minute to get your bearings, to figure it out.
It’s the ’roos.
The kangaroos have quietly congregated in the Arthurs’ yard overnight—perhaps fifty of them—and to the unpracticed eye, a kangaroo in the bush is invisible, even fifteen yards away, until it starts to fly.
The kangaroos have the coloration of deer—brown except for white bellies—but what is so striking is how they move. It’s like no other creature—the kangaroos seem to hover, defying gravity, their legs pumping an unseen blur, their bodies angled forward like in a Road Runner cartoon, moving at an arresting speed across ground they do not seem to touch. It’s hard to get your eyes to keep up with them—they are moving so fast, so silently, so effortlessly that you can lose them against the brown scrub while you are looking right at them. Their movement is unearthly— their speed, their ability to change direction without a flicker of exertion, their ability to be one place, disappear, and reappear someplace else in an eyeblink. Close to the Arthurs’ farmhouse, the kangaroos are stubbornly territorial. They are reluctant to give way, they go off a bit and turn back and gaze at the house, then instantly they’re racing for the horizon.
The ’roo posse is part of Laurie Arthur’s unspoken covenant with his land. Lots of farmers consider the kangaroos a damaging nuisance. But as with the eagles, Arthur thinks the kangaroos are as entitled to roam the Murray Valley as a guy in a John Deere combine.
“We certainly have 250 kangaroos on the farm now,” he says. “We’ve had four or five as pets for a while. A joey will get separated from its mum, and Deb will take it inside, make a little pouch for it, which she hangs from a doorknob, so they can climb in when they’re feeling nervous.”
Arthur does a similar thing when he gets cranky. He fires up his tiny red helicopter, with the cockpit that is nothing but an acrylic bubble, and he floats up to a thousand feet.
“When I get in a nasty mood, I get up here, and I just feel relaxed and happy,” says Arthur. “When I’m up here, I just can’t sweat it, you know?”
The chopper’s engine is so loud, two passengers in the cockpit need headsets to talk, even sitting with their legs practically touching. The view is majestic—a thousand feet of altitude over the flat Murray Valley takes the horizon out a dozen miles or more in every direction.
It is late fall in Australia—May—and spread out below Arthur are thousands of acres of his land, all chocolate brown, like pans of brownies. The ground should be gleaming green with crop.
“This is my forest”—Arthur traces his finger along a wide band of dense trees, not green but khaki—“that’s red gum forest. This is my forest, crying out for water.”
Suddenly he smiles. “As you can see, except for the drought, we’ve got the world by the throat.”
It may be Arthur’s thirty years working the land that has given him a sense of calm in the face of a crisis no less urgent, no less potentially devastating than that Jim Gill faced. It isn’t fatalism—Arthur is working as hard as the lack of rain will let him—but he knows he can’t make it rain, and he knows that there is no one to rescue him.
Arthur is an unusual farmer in many ways, not least because over the last decade he has also slowly migrated into the top ranks of water policy and water politics in the Murray basin, and in Australia. He sits on the seven-member National Water Commission. He chairs the water task force for Australia’s National Farmers Federation. And he sits on the board of directors of Sun Rice, Australia’s nearly A$1 billion rice growers cooperative—“although I’m not sure how long they’ll let me stay, since I’m not growing any rice.”
In all, Arthur’s off-farm work consumes a couple days a week, and often finds him in Australia’s capital, Canberra, or in Melbourne or Adelaide for meetings. Although those roles are both demanding and important, the ten thousand acres in Moulamein anchor Arthur’s attention. “I’m a farmer,” he says. “Full stop.”
But the work in conference rooms and offices gives Arthur a helicopter perspective on water policy, to go with the everyday, dirty-boot-level perspective.
As in Perth, there are really two layers to the frustration of the irrigators. The first is, simply, no rain. There’s not much to be done about that. Farming with no water is like trying to farm with no seed or no dirt.
The larger issue is how the Murray River itself is managed. “In Australia,” says Arthur, “everybody wants river health, as long as the other guy does the health part.”
Mike Young, one of the country’s most prominent and well-regarded water economists, suggested that every Murray River irrigator give up 1 percent of his water rights a year, until farming’s water stake is down to a more sustainable level. Of course, the water entitlements are property, like land or buildings. And giving up 1 percent is like giving up the right to farm 1 percent of your land each year.
“Why us?” asks Arthur. “There is a parochialism, a defensiveness, when it comes to water, no question. I can feel it slinking out of my spine sometimes.” He winks. “I have to restrain myself.
“But the failures of the past are being brought to account on one group of people. Our position is, if you want our bloody water, come and buy it. If the very basis of your business is water, how can they take that away without compensating you?”
Arthur’s defensiveness isn’t paranoid. Wayne Meyer is a professor at the University of Adelaide, who has spent much of his professional life studying farming, irrigation, and the most effective use of water—living for years among Australia’s irrigation farmers.
“The irrigators have been living in a dream world,” says Meyer, “just like the cities of Perth and Adelaide. The irrigators have developed an entitlement sensibility.
“The big problem for irrigation is, it never generates enough money out of the irrigated production”—the food—“to be competitive with the productivity of water used in an urban or industrial setting.
“Irrigation,” Meyer says, “has to be a societal decision. Because it doesn’t win in a bid system. The Hyatt Hotel in Adelaide will always outbid the orange grove.”
Arthur knows that too. He doesn’t think he’s entitled to a fair shake from the sky, just from his fellow Australians. “The irrigation systems were set up without an understanding of the soils or the groundwater,” he says. “It’s been a miserable way to manage the Murray basin. And an event like this has caught everybody short. It has brought everything to a head.
“Is there an argument that this isn’t the place for flood irrigation farming? If someone wants to say this isn’t the place for an irrigation scheme, an argument that the whole thing should never have built, I could listen to that.” Just don’t decide that without acknowledging that it’s society pulling the ground out from under a whole way of life that society had previously promoted.
Meanwhile, Arthur works as hard as a fifty-six-year-old man can. In 2008, he took his combine and a crew north for seven weeks to do contract harvesting for Australia’s largest wheat grower—just to make money.
The new woolshed got finished, with help from many neighbors, just ten hours before the sheep shearing started. Although the newly revived sheep flock yielded good wool, the price was low, and the total sale didn’t cover the cost of the new shed, not to mention the cost of taking care of the sheep themselves.
Arthur pushed forward with his new water pipeline, to improve the efficiency of his irrigation, but just to the end of the first stage—running to one of four fields he hopes it will supply. “I’m out of money. The pipe is going to cost $450,000, and I’ve spent $195,000 so far.”
In a twist on the classic O. Henry story, the first stage of the pipeline to improve Arthur’s use of water was paid for by selling water. Arthur sold a tiny slice of his entitlement to the government—3 percent of his total water, for which he received A$195,000. The Murray River gets to keep that water. But that water is gone forever—it’s the first time Arthur has ever sold water—so the new pipeline had better pay off.
Arthur’s strategy, his skill, his determination, his work ethic mean nothing without water. There are, in fact, many ways to die of thirst in Australia, and Laurie Arthur’s farm may be dying of thirst right in front of him.
“The big question is, is this climate variability or climate change? I have a couple million dollars’ worth of gear—everything from what I’m driving, this old ute, to the new woolshed, riding on that question— $2 million worth of capital eating its head off with depreciation and opportunity cost. That’s my bet.”
Arthur thinks the rain—some rain—is coming back.
“If I really knew this was a step change in the climate, I’d cash out. Right now. If this is a step change, I’ve backed the wrong horse.”
Why is he up until 2 a.m. five days a week, working on a farm that is yielding only frustration? Arthur doesn’t hesitate. He breaks into a smile just like the one he has a thousand feet up in his helicopter. “Life is short,” he says. “I can see the end of it from here.”
Just steps off Arthur’s front porch, to the left, is a patch of fenced ground tucked under the trees along the creek, easy to overlook as you come and go to the house if you don’t know it’s there.
It’s the grave of Laurie Arthur’s brother Neil, who died in April 2001.
“He was just getting divorced,” says Arthur. “He died in a plane crash, piloting the plane we owned together.” Neil Arthur’s girlfriend was also killed when the Beechcraft Bonanza went down near the town of Goulburn. “He was flying with his new love.”
The Arthur brothers farmed together—bought land, picked crops, planted and harvested, made decisions, together.
“You know, when my brother was alive, we talked about every decision. And if we agreed on something, then we did it. If one of us didn’t agree, we usually didn’t do it. And if we agreed, it always worked out, you know?”
In 2001, the Big Dry hadn’t taken hold yet. The choices Laurie Arthur is making now are harder, with less margin for error.
“I’d really appreciate having him here now.”