The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.
—Mark Fuller,
CEO, WET Design,
a fountain design company
IN THE MODERN AND AIRY TERMINAL A at Detroit’s Metro Airport sits a smooth black slab of granite. It looks something like a black river rock, except for its size. Positioned on the floor, the disk is an oval, the height of a low table, and about forty feet across.
The top of the disk is covered with an inch of water that spills smoothly off the edges and down the sides, which bulge outward, softening the granite, making it seem more like a cushion than a rock. Since there is no lip, the black skirt of water slips with perfect ease over the edges, following the bulging stone like liquid silk, disappearing beneath the disk. It’s as if a spring has bubbled up in the hectic travel terminal.
The disk is never at rest. Jets of water shoot up from the surface and land at random spots across the black oval. Everything about the streams of water is a little curious. They don’t fire off in any pattern. Some streams are continuous for long moments, like the arc from a hose. Some are clipped bursts, sending up discrete slugs of water. Sometimes just a couple arcs of water are firing, sometimes twenty or thirty crisscross the disk at once.
The jets have a playful quality—sometimes firing off together, creating great splashing clusters of landing water, sometimes firing off separately with a mischievous call-and-response quality. The fountain and its water have a personality. And there is no railing or barrier. You can walk right up and trail your hands through the water.
What is most intriguing about the fountain is the water itself. The arcing water is clear, ripple-free, and bubble-free. The water in the continuous arcs is so smooth that even though you know it’s flowing, you can’t see any motion in the stream. The water has an unearthly quality; it looks heavy, like a breeze wouldn’t bother it.
The behavior of water is so familiar to us that we sense any oddity quickly, even if we don’t quite get it. The arcs of water shooting over the black disk seem to have their own relationship with gravity. Indeed, the fountain as a whole bends the space around it—people hurrying distractedly along the concourse spot it and alter their trajectory to circle in, often coming to a complete halt, head tilted in alert wonder.
The Detroit Terminal A fountain is the creation of a group of people who think about water all the time, about how water behaves, about its texture, its sounds, about how water reflects light, about how water moves, and about how water moves us. They work for WET Design, a company based in Los Angeles that specializes in fountains, but not of the decorative carved-fish-spouting-streams-of-water variety.
“The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment,” says Mark Fuller, CEO and cofounder of WET. “Then we’ve succeeded. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.”
Today, there are lots of people who think about water all the time— oceanographers and engineers designing offshore oil rigs, people who manage water treatment plants on land and who make ice sculptures on cruise ships; businesspeople who sell water filters and project managers who specialize in constructing city-size desalination plants; plumbers, politicians, and people who lay water mains; farmers who get too little water or too much, meteorologists who predict water’s behavior in the atmosphere, and planetary scientists who study water’s behavior on the Moon, on Mars, and on Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn that geysers water vapor and ice hundreds of miles straight up off its surface into space.1
But there are few places where people consider water from the perspective that Mark Fuller and his team of engineers, architects, designers, and computer programmers do. WET now employs two hundred people, and they think of water as a means of artistic expression. For them water is both an essential collaborator and an untamable force.
“The medium we’ve chosen to work with is much more independent than any other sculptural material, Michelangelo and his limestone included,” says Fuller. “What we do at WET, from a scientific standpoint, is we play with the unnatural state of water. We try to control water. We go to absurd lengths to organize how we start with water—sweeping arcs of jets, grids that are strongly geometric—but the second the water comes out of a nozzle, nature takes over. The hand of God is present. It’s the wonderful juxtaposition of the control of man, and absolutely relinquishing control.”
That’s actually a bit modest. The fountain at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which is an attraction all its own on the Strip, knits elaborate tapestries of water in the air, choreographed to music. When it was turned on in 1988, the Bellagio fountain was unlike any that had come before, in scale, or in the ways its water performed. It was WET’s first truly grand-scale fountain. More than a decade later, the fountain still attracts thousands of spectators every day, and the hotel charges $50 a night extra for rooms that overlook it.
The Bellagio fountain was until December 2009 the largest in the world. That’s when WET debuted a fountain in Dubai, at the base of the tallest building in the world. WET’s Dubai Fountain is set in a thirty-acre lake (four times the space of the Bellagio fountain) and sends water five hundred feet in the air, across a span of three football fields. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa—taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of the Sears Tower—is now fronted by the largest fountain in the world. At any given moment, WET’s Dubai Fountain has 22,000 gallons of water dancing in the air. The fountain alone cost $218 million.2
The Bellagio and the Dubai, and the dozens of other signature water features WET has created—from the newly restored fountain in front of New York’s Lincoln Center, which forms patterns and moods with nothing but dozens of perfectly vertical jets of water, to the fountains in Branson, Missouri, which shoot water and balls of fire simultaneously, timed to music—all rely on technology that Fuller and his colleagues created, technology that has revolutionized what water can do.3 WET fountains make use of an underwater mount that Fuller named an “oarsman,” because it has pivots—gimbals and armatures—that allow it to aim water through three dimensions, with a range of motion and a nimbleness greater than the human wrist. The jets of water come from shooters powered not by pumps but by compressed air, giving WET’s water choreographers more control, more precision, and more power when unleashing their water, and giving the jets themselves a surprising oomph and crispness.4
The designers at WET use the technology (which is always invisible to the viewer) to coax remarkable performances from water. They can make a circle of oarsmen spin and spray water to create a ring of whirling dancers in flaring skirts. They release water’s innate sense of humor—two fans of water that seem to dance cheek-to-cheek, while in the background Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” plays. WET fountains evoke the texture of water, the sensuousness, the sounds.
Mark Fuller has, in fact, taught water new tricks. Growing up in Salt Lake City, in the winter he would create ice dams in the gutters, “to see how far I could flood the water out into the street.” Sitting in the back of a fluid mechanics class in college one day, “we were watching this 16 mm film, and it included a picture of this little stream of water that was so clear, it didn’t look like water. If you turned the faucet off slowly, slowly, slowly, you got water that looked almost like a liquid icicle. Like the stem on a martini glass.”
That’s called laminar flow—water that is moving utterly without turbulence. No bubbles, no eddies, all the molecules of water in the stream moving at the same speed, in the same direction. “It’s analogous to a laser,” says Fuller.
Inspired by the 16 mm film, Fuller and some classmates built a laminar-flow nozzle as an undergraduate thesis project—a nozzle that creates that crystalline flow, but with force and authority instead of the thinnest little stream. Fuller, who was an Imagineer for Disney before founding WET, took the idea to Epcot and used it to create the leaping fountain outside Epcot’s Imagination Pavilion in 1982, where the solid, clear beams of water still chase each other through planters in the park. “The Detroit [Airport] fountain is based exactly on that thesis project,” says Fuller.
There is nothing “natural” about the presentation of water in the black disk—there is no place where we encounter jets of water with laminar flow, that’s why the fountain’s arcs of water are so arresting. The Detroit airport fountain is unpredictable—you never know where the water is going to come from, where it’s going to land, how long it’s going to last, what other streams one arc might trigger.
The fountain’s leaping arcs of water aren’t quite random. They are meant to evoke flying from one place to another. The Detroit fountain looks like nothing so much as an abstract, idealized version of the route maps in the back of the airline magazines. The whole creation has what Fuller calls a “fugitive nature. It has the allure of a sunset. The forms we weave in the air are fleeting. They are there for a split second and gone.”
The fountain is so appealing to travelers that there are seventy videos of it on YouTube—including one person who has filmed it four separate times—and 46,000 people have watched them (not including the 25,000 people who have watched WET’s own video of the fountain). You can watch the Terminal A fountain online for ninety minutes.
WET creates fountains that irresistibly change your mood, refresh both your sense of wonder and your sense of balance.
Far from being decorative or frivolous, in fact, a particularly brilliant fountain can restore, however briefly, your full appreciation for water, can instill a sense of respect and humility, along with a smile, for the lubricant of our lives.
The designers at WET think about water differently. They try to understand not just water’s qualities and power but the emotions those qualities evoke, and why. They treat water as a sculptural medium, but also as something truly natural, something wild, independent, ultimately untamable.
The modern world allows us to approach water in strictly utilitarian terms—it is literally at hand when we need it. Our domesticated water requires zero work, zero thought, and comes with zero risk (and zero magic).
As for water’s power, its wildness, we do get the occasional reminder of that—in a particularly dramatic downpour, or a hurricane, or when we see news reports of flooding. In fact, part of the appeal of water parks is that they unleash water’s wildness in ways that are thrilling and uncommon. Because unless we’re sightseeing somewhere like Niagara Falls, we’ve mostly insulated ourselves from water’s power.
What the people at WET understand about water is precisely what is absent from our whole approach—whether in suburban Las Vegas or urban Delhi. There isn’t really a word for exactly what’s missing in our relationship to water, but it’s an ingrained sense of cherishment, almost of reverence. Why wouldn’t we revere water, of all the things we could revere?
IN APRIL 2009, Senator Arlen Specter hosted a town hall at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Specter—since defeated in a Democratic primary for reelection—wasn’t just Pennsylvania’s senior senator in April 2009, he was the longest-serving U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history, elected to five terms starting in 1980.
The Muhlenberg appearance was utterly routine, and Specter was relaxed and candid. Students asked questions about the impact that the drilling for natural gas that is growing dramatically in Pennsylvania will have on the safety of water supplies in the state.
“Which side are you on, the natural gas companies, or the people who have to drink poisoned water?” one student asked.
“That’s certainly not a loaded question,” Specter said, to chuckles. “I have never taken a position in favor of drinking poisonous water, and I don’t intend to this afternoon.”
The question-and-answers moved in the direction of drinking water, and Specter said, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water.”
A few moments later the senator said, “On a very serious level, I want to have clean drinking water, and I’ve supported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But I think there is a natural inclination”—and here the senator shrugged his shoulders to say he understood the inclination—“for people to want to be a little extra-sure on the water. Where I can have access to a bottle of water, I’m going to use it.”5
Arlen Specter, the person, is entitled to any view he wants to hold. But for one of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate—a man who then sat on the judiciary and appropriations committees, and also on the Senate’s environment and public works committee—for Arlen Specter to say flatly, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water,” is astonishing, even outrageous.6 The United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world, a tap water system that is responsible in part for the extraordinary leaps in life span in the United States in the last hundred years.
It would be like Specter standing up before a group of college students, shrugging, and saying that he avoids bridges because he “doesn’t trust” the bridge building system in the United States, or that he always drives because he “doesn’t trust” U.S. air traffic controllers. If there’s something so dangerous about U.S. tap water that a senior U.S. senator takes pains to avoid it, he should tell us what the danger is, and he should be leading the fight, loudly, every day to rehabilitate the system. Otherwise, Specter’s comment is both corrosive and irresponsible. If he doesn’t drink the tap water, where does that leave the people he represents?
The absurdity is only magnified by Specter’s saying that because he wants to be “a little extra-sure,” he drinks bottled water when he can. Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. The chance that there’s something hinky about your drink of water is actually greater with a commercially packaged bottle of water than with a glass of tap water.7
At the opposite end of the silliness spectrum, Apple’s iPhone App Store offers an application called “Water Your Body,” which both recommends how much water you need each day and offers to keep track of your water consumption. “Water Your Body” even gives you “a daily and overall average grade on how well you are keeping up” on your water drinking. Because of “revolutionary research,” the app’s makers say, “we have learned just how critical it is, for your health, to maximize your individual water intake.”
Of course, “Water Your Body” is absolutely absurd. Leave aside for the moment the question of what kind of person can manage the intricacies of an iPhone but has trouble remembering to drink water. No one who is not recovering in a hospital needs to track her daily water consumption. There is no proven need to “maximize your individual water intake.” In a healthy person, you simply can’t.
The finely tuned chemistry of your body quickly turns “extra” water you drink into pee—and your body regards extra as 1 percent excess water. “Water Your Body” simply maximizes your time in the bathroom, and takes 99 cents from you. Your body already has an exquisite, built-in, water-tracking app: thirst.8
The senator and the iPhone app both trade on our water illiteracy. The cost of “Water Your Body” is just 99 cents, the cost of having leaders who don’t understand our tap water is much greater.
The world of water is changing dramatically, as we’ve seen. There is increasing talk from activists and NGOs, from companies like GE and Monsanto, and from the occasional forward-thinking elected official, of a “global water crisis.” We hear routinely, from those trying to rouse the world to action, and from nonprofit groups trying to help, that on this very day, more than 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and that before the calendar turns on another day, five thousand children will die because they lack clean water, or from an illness they got from tainted water.
And we hear that over the next forty years, the problem is going to get catastrophically worse: Between 2010 and 2050, the world will add 2.4 billion new people, equal to the populations of China and India combined.9
It’s possible that 1 billion of those unborn people will also lack clean water.
The very repetition of those statistics, though, isn’t activating—it’s numbing. Why will it matter more to us if there are 2 billion people without clean water in 2050—what, that extra billion people is going to suddenly wake the rest of us up? The billion people who don’t have water today aren’t enough of a catastrophe—but we’ll certainly dig some fresh wells and lay some new water pipes once the number hits 2 billion?
We do have a crisis of water availability around the world—virtually every country has water scarcity problems, every country has water infrastructure gaps.
But talking about a “global water crisis” is absolutely the wrong approach. It’s the wrong perspective, with all due respect to the water activists who devote themselves both to trying to get water to people, and trying to get the rest of us to pay attention.
We already have a “global energy crisis” and a “global economic crisis,” a “global environmental crisis” and a “global health crisis.” And, of course, perhaps most pressing of all, a “global climate crisis.”
Except for the economic crisis, we haven’t confronted any of those with either urgency or imagination; the “global water crisis” might well turn out to be one global crisis too many for most people.
Depending on which scenario turns out to be correct, tackling the global climate crisis may be the most important thing humans have ever done—our very survival may depend on it—or it may simply be more important than any other policy issue right now. But tackling global climate change also requires, literally, remaking the way the industrial economies of the world operate, every minute of every day. It’s not actually something you’re going to fix by swapping out your lightbulbs.
Water is completely different.
There is no global water crisis, because all water problems are local, or regional, and their solutions must be local and regional. There is no global water crisis, there are a thousand water crises, each distinct.
It turns out that if a resident of Portland, Oregon, defaults on her mortgage, that financial failure ripples throughout the interconnected financial system of the world.
It really matters what kind of new power plant a small, regional utility in China installs, because the emissions from that plant will continue every hour for three decades, and whatever that plant sends into the atmosphere quickly reaches California, and beyond.
A family in Durham, North Carolina, that switches from two cars to one, that starts walking and riding bikes to commute and do errands, has a tiny but significant impact on the entire energy system of the world.
It’s an odd paradox: Our behavior in the face of truly global crises— the ones that seem most out of reach of individual action—can actually make those crises better, or worse.
But the water problems of Barcelona cannot be solved by conservation in New Orleans or Bangalore. Unlike your mortgage payments or your electricity use or your driving habits, how you shower or water your lawn has no impact on the water availability of people an ocean away, and may well not have any impact on people a single time zone away.
That doesn’t relieve us of responsibility for water behavior and water habits—precisely the opposite. It means we must take responsibility for our own water issues, because no one else on the globe will. No one else can.
That’s actually the good news about water: The problem is right with us, but so is the solution. Part of what is so frustrating about genuinely global problems like finance and climate is that even if you and your community, even if your country, behave with thoughtfulness, discipline, and foresight, if your neighbors don’t, all the good work you do can be instantly undone. That isn’t true of water. If Perth, Australia, remakes its water economy in an intelligent, sustainable fashion, that effort can’t be undone by water carelessness in Melbourne, Australia—or in Istanbul.
Most water problems are, in fact, solvable. When people talk about “fixing” the health care crisis in the United States, even the smartest, most determined, most insightful experts on medical care and the economy of medicine will start by telling you that the problems are complicated, layered, and won’t be quickly or easily disentangled.
Water problems involve competing interests too—farmers, industries, individuals, people with big yards versus people who live in apartments, the needs of rivers and lakes versus the needs of human civilization. But we have the technology to clean water to any level we want and within water-sheds to deliver that water where it needs to be. Until 2009, even the astronauts living in the International Space Station were having all their water delivered—by rocket ship, at a cost of $41,650 per gallon. If we can get drinking water into orbit, no ordinary human settlement is out of reach. (The space station now has an on-board recycling station that turns urine, and even sweat, back into drinking water.)10
We have the intellectual technology to resolve the conflicts over water, whether in the Colorado River basin or among the nations of the Middle East. That we don’t manage those conflicts well, that the states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama can grind their water dispute through U.S. courts for twenty years without resolution, often has nothing to do with the water itself. There’s enough water in the southeast corner of the United States for everyone. The failure to resolve the disagreement over twenty years—while many of the core problems, like Atlanta’s dramatic growth, got worse—is a failure of political leadership, a failure of water management, not a problem with the water.
In fact, our approach to water management in the golden age of water has been so cavalier, so profligate, that it’s a kind of good news. We can do better quickly. We don’t use nearly the amount of water we go through— we waste an incredible amount. In the United Kingdom, 19 percent of water pumped leaks away. In Italy, it’s 29 percent. London loses a day’s water from its mains every four days. In New York, whose water from upstate is so clean it gets no filtration, the city loses a whole day’s drinking water every week to leakage, more than a billion gallons of losses a week. In the United States overall, we lose 7 billion gallons of water from leaking water mains—a day. That’s more fresh water than thirty of the fifty states in the United States use each day.11 The bad news is that there aren’t a hundred big leaks in London or New York that can be quickly fixed to dramatically reduce the leaking; there are ten thousand leaks. But as water systems that are a hundred years old get replaced, water efficiency should steadily improve; big cities have a literal reservoir of clean water right in their own water mains, and smart utilities that are replacing old, leaking pipes install self-monitoring systems that make spotting future leaks simpler, quicker, and less disruptive.
Agriculture is even less water-smart; poor farming practices squander nation-size quantities of water. Worldwide, farmers use twice as much water as all other uses combined—67 percent of world water use goes to agriculture. And as much as half the water used for irrigation is wasted.12
Agriculture needs a blue revolution to follow its green revolution— farmers need to be shown how to make better use of rainwater, how to use irrigation water more effectively, with more precision, and the financial incentives need to be flopped so that instead of water and electricity being so cheap that wasting makes sense, farmers are rewarded financially for learning to grow the same amount of food with less water.
That’s obviously easier to prescribe than to accomplish, but it doesn’t require any technological leaps. The efficient farming practices exist.
In the United States, withdrawals of water for irrigation peaked in 1980. Adjusted for inflation, the United States produces 60 percent more agricultural products today than in 1980. And U.S. farmers use 15 percent less water, as a group, than in 1980. The water productivity of U.S. farmers has increased 90 percent—adjusted for inflation, the water that in 1980 produced $100 worth of products, today produces $190 worth of products. That kind of leap is good news not just for areas that have water scarcity and water management problems; it means we can, in fact, produce a lot more food while using less water.13 Along with crops, there are huge quantities of water to be harvested from the world’s farm fields.
We all need to update our idea of what “clean water” means. The blossoming of micropollutants in water supplies around the world should have exactly the same energizing impact as the discovery of bacteriology at the turn of the nineteenth century. That insight led to water filtration and distribution systems that inaugurated the century-long golden age of water we’ve just lived through. The micropollutants are a similar red flag—the world’s natural water circulation system is huge beyond human comprehension, but not, as it turns out, huge beyond human influence.
We don’t understand the impact of the micropollutants—the traces of medicine, the residues from chemicals and plastics we use in our everyday lives—on either human beings or the natural systems we depend on. We don’t swim all day long in our drinking water, so it’s possible that minuscule quantities of chemicals won’t affect our health. At the same time, we can hardly be comfortable when our “clean” wastewater is altering the physiology of whole lakes and rivers full of fish. Now is the moment to figure out the impact of what we’ve been unintentionally putting into water, and develop inexpensive techniques for removing the micropollutants before we return the water to its source or reuse it ourselves. Micropollutants, like most water problems, will only get worse, more difficult and more expensive to deal with, as time goes on.
But it’s also true that as individuals, we often get wildly exercised over potential tap water problems, misjudging the relatively small risk from water, and ignoring the much more damaging problems closer to home. If you walk into a mall in the United States and take a stroll, the health problems of the people around you have nothing to do with what’s in their tap water. In the United States, we have a long way to go in terms of improving routine health and fitness before the quality of our tap water is a central issue—especially because tap water overall is so safe. In fact, most American adults and children could do with a little more tap water, a little more of the activity that makes you thirsty, and a little less soda.14
It’s equally important to reimagine our idea of “clean water” at the lower end, to stop using water cleaned to drinking-water quality standards for things like flushing toilets and watering lawns. In the United States, half the water supplied to homes is used outside—for lawn watering and car washing. In many communities, as an artifact of an older era, it is still against the law to use gray water, or treated wastewater, for things like lawn watering, maintaining athletic fields, or flushing toilets—or the system to provide such water isn’t available. That’s simply silly.15
In Orlando, Florida, and surrounding Orange County, recycled wastewater has been used without fanfare since 1986—going on twenty-five years—for exactly those kinds of outdoor uses. A purple-pipe lawn watering or irrigation system isn’t just permitted for new homes, apartments, and developments, in Orange County it’s required by local law. In fact, if the purple-pipe reclaimed water service is available in a neighborhood, residents and businesses are forbidden to water their lawns with drinking water.
That’s a mind-flip, and one that has had dramatic results.
Orange County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, now distributes almost as much treated wastewater as it does potable water. Orange County residents use 57 million gallons of drinking water a day, and they use 51 million gallons a day of treated wastewater on their lawns and landscaping.16
More to the point, Orange County has closed the loop—most of its drinking water comes back to it and is used a second time. Orange County has tapped one of the most readily available water sources that most communities overlook: the water its customers have already used, that the county already has in its pipes and treatment tanks.
The psychological change is just as dramatic: After two decades, residents in central Florida expect athletic fields and wide expanses of green space, golf courses and backyards, to be watered with recycled water. It’s hard to retrofit communities with a second, inbound water system, but it’s not particularly challenging to lay purple-pipe systems in new construction—any more than it is difficult to provide new homes with electricity or cable TV, with natural gas service or high-speed Internet lines.
Consider an interesting thought experiment. In the United States in the ten years from 2000 to 2009, more than 9 million new single-family homes were built and sold.17 Perhaps not all those new homes could have easily been equipped with a purple-pipe system—new construction is typically concentrated in subdivisions, but not just plumbing is required; the local water utility has to be set up to treat wastewater and return it to customers. Still, if even a quarter of those homes, 2 million, had been plumbed to use recycled water in yards and toilets, that would be 2 million homes (and 5 million people) that would be using half the potable water of similar homes built before 2000. That saves enough drinking water to supply 1 million more homes—or 2 million homes with purple pipes themselves. Even if we can’t instantly and affordably change the world we live in, we can change the new world, the world we’re building every day. Patricia Mulroy reduced water use per person by a hundred gallons a day in Las Vegas—but it took her twenty years.
The water habits we’ve become accustomed to are just that—habits, customs. And that, too, is good news. Most people now would literally recoil if the passenger sitting next to them on an airplane lit a cigarette, but most people over thirty may well remember a time when smoking on airplanes was routine. It wasn’t finally banned until April 1988.18
If we change our behavior, if we are forced to or wooed to, we quickly change our expectations, and a virtuous cycle often begins.
Changing behavior can start in the simplest ways, as many U.S. companies are discovering. Measuring the amount of water you use, and how you use it, quickly reshapes your appreciation of water. Campbell Soup, in its 2010 corporate sustainability report, started providing a measure that it has come up with for its own use: cubic meters of water used per metric ton of food produced. In 2008, Campbell used 10.33 cubic meters of water per metric ton of food. In 2009, it was down to 9.35. In human terms, a can of classic Campbell’s condensed tomato soup (10¾ ounces) required 107 ounces of water to make in 2008, and 96 ounces of water in 2009. Campbell has set a public goal of getting that down to 53 ounces of water per can of tomato soup by 2020—two cans of soup for the water it uses now to make one.19
That kind of water reporting—along with reporting of the details about energy consumption, pollutants, and greenhouse gas emissions— should be required of all public companies. It should be as routinely available as sales data and earnings per share data and the details of executive compensation. Most companies have that data right at hand, because they pay for their water and their energy already. Looking at it, and letting everyone else look at it, would change how we think about water, and the world.
Water problems aren’t simple or trivial. People are dying every hour because water is badly managed. But water problems are eminently solvable, in an era when so many problems seem insurmountable.
This hasn’t been a book about how cities can more smartly manage municipal water systems or how farmers can improve their irrigation efficiency. This book isn’t a polemic on behalf of urgent water activism, or a sober warning about the future of water supplies. It is not a book about California’s collapsing water system, or how to rescue our crumbling water infrastructure, or the issues around water pollution. There are already many invaluable books about all those topics.
That is one of the challenges of grappling with water—any piece of the water story deserves a book of its own. There is, in fact, an encyclopedia of water, first published in 1972, called Water: A Comprehensive Treatise. It was conceived and edited by Felix Franks, a British scientist and academic, and a review of the first three volumes in the journal Science in April 1974 called it “easily the most ambitious and extended treatment of this ubiquitous liquid.” Franks’s encyclopedia eventually ran to seven volumes and 3,896 pages. And it deals exclusively with the physical and chemical properties of H2O.20 There’s no way of producing a book about water that is exhaustive without also producing a book that is exhausting.
Everything about water is about to change—how we use water, how we share it, how we think about it. That makes it a vital moment to understand where we’ve been, and to imagine how our water future might be different, and why. That’s why this book has tried to be about just one theme: our relationship to water.
Our water problems are real. Our approach to water must change, and we’ll be happier if we realize that, and handle the change with creativity and forethought rather than confront it as a crisis. It’s water we’re talking about, so there will be no avoiding the change. What we can choose is the time and the approach and the level of panic.
This book is an effort to rescue water not so much from ignorance as from being ignored. We think about and talk about our relationship to technology and to our pets, to our stepchildren, to our weight, our food, our medicines, and our diseases. But we almost never talk about water, about the significance of water to us, about its meaning and its value. Even the shelves full of books about water tend not to be about water itself. Water is intentionally the central character of this water book—it deserves to be.
We desperately need a fresh way of thinking about water. Or, more realistically, a starting point for thinking about water. Most of us haven’t ever thought about it very much. But we’ll need a foundation for understanding water as water issues become more urgent. We’ll need a framework for thinking about the fate of water, because the fate of water is our fate.
We are at the start of a new era of water, an era when we’ll need to use water much more smartly. Most important, we should be at the start of an era of much greater water equality—an era when no one dies simply because they can’t get water, of all deprivations. There’s no excuse for public officials not making clean water for their citizens a top priority now. But the era of smart water should make drinking water easier and cheaper to provide even in challenging circumstances. There will be less excuse than ever for not guaranteeing basic access to water.
For the parts of the world that have luxuriated in the golden age of water, the era of smart water need not be the start of an era in which water scarcity or water limits desiccate the way we live. Quite the contrary: Using the right water for the right purpose may well open our eyes to the kinds of untapped sources of water, starting with our own wastewater, that we routinely overlook now.
The biggest water problems of all are water illiteracy and water mythology. It is our understanding of water—whether we live in Toowoomba, Australia, or the slum of Vasant Kunj, India—that will ultimately determine whether we solve our water problems. With very few exceptions, nothing stands in our way except our own attitude.
That’s why the comments of Senator Arlen Specter that he simply doesn’t trust U.S. tap water are so unsettling, why the iPhone app offering to permanently archive your personal water consumption glass by glass is so silly. If we’re going to have an era of smart water, we’re going to have to leave the era of water mythology behind.
Our attitudes are already holding us back in ways we don’t ever get to see. The very same hotel executives at MGM Resorts who took a chance on a custom-designed showerhead for their luxury Las Vegas hotel, the Aria, had a second decision to make about the hotel’s plumbing: what kind of toilets to install in the 4,004 rooms. Senior vice president Cindy Ortega argued for installing dual-flush toilets, with one button for flushing liquids and a second button for flushing solids. The toilets are common across Europe, Asia, and Australia, and the flush button is elegantly designed and easy to understand—a small button for the small flush (1 gallon), a larger button for the large flush (1.6 gallons). Once you’ve used a dual-flush toilet, standard toilets seem primitive and pointlessly wasteful.
Dual-flush toilets are so rare in the United States, however, that they are a mere novelty. Despite the urgent water scarcity issues in Las Vegas, not a single major hotel there uses them. Ortega was all for them.
The conversation was as serious as the showerhead conversation, she says. “We installed dual-flush toilets as tests for some of the executives who have bathrooms in their offices.” There was a lot of discussion of whether the toilets were harder to clean, says Ortega, and about whether guests “would be ready to accept the fact that there wasn’t a trade-off in having one, in a luxury hotel.” There was also some question about whether guests would be able to figure out which button to push. “Would people push the wrong button? Would they push the button more than once?”
In the end, they went with a single-flush, low-flow toilet instead, 1.5 gallons per flush. “Whether it’s true that the guests would not accept it, we’ll never know,” says Ortega. “It was 2005 when we had to decide.”
Is it really possible that guests spending $400 a night for a room with a TV remote with twenty buttons, along with a second, touch-screen remote that controls the curtains and lighting for the whole room—not to mention the iPhone or BlackBerry that most visitors carry—is it really possible those guests wouldn’t be able to figure out which button to push to flush the toilet?
IT IS 63 DEGREES, the sky is clear blue and bright, the air has the freshness of spring in the mountains, when it still gets cool each night and each day has to warm up from scratch. I can hear the waterfalls roaring faintly in the distance.
A couple hundred steps through the woods is a small but dramatic canyon cut by Little Bushkill Creek, in the Pocono Mountains, a hundred miles north of Philadelphia, where I live, and a hundred miles west of New York City. The creek itself is no more than five or six steps wide, flowing fast, and as it comes down the flank of the mountain, it flumes over five waterfalls in a space that you can hike in just a few minutes. A leaf that hits the current just right can enter the Upper Canyon Falls and come washing out Lower Gorge Falls four or five minutes later.
The creek is surrounded by wooden boardwalks that run right alongside the falls themselves. In a few places, there are bridges spanning the creek, and you can stand two feet over the stream and look down over the very top of three different waterfalls, an incredible vantage.
The creek is shadowed and dappled, the water is the color of dark honey. Looking downstream toward the main falls, the water betrays no hint of the precipice to come right up to the last moment. The water folds over the edge and shatters into a white cascade of foam and mist a hundred feet tall, crashing into the pool below and quietly reassembling itself into Little Bushkill Creek.
This is a place where you can get right up close to the water, to the creek, to the waterfalls themselves.
At the top of the series of falls, standing on a footbridge over a short, six-foot waterfall, you can smell the water below—woodsy—and your legs are brushed by a light, insistent breeze. That’s the force of the stream and the waterfall pulling the air along with it. I take in a deep breath, and it’s like breathing in a bit of the mountain and the sunshine and the creek itself.
It’s hard to be in a bad mood around beautiful flowing water. Whatever cares you have are lightened when you spend some time with water. The presence of a brisk, bright mountain stream makes you smile, it makes you feel better, whether you’re already feeling good or you’re low. Being in water is almost always refreshing—whether a bath, or a swimming pool, or the surf at the beach—but simply being near water is refreshing.
Standing alongside Little Bushkill Creek as it breaks over the falls, I suddenly solve one of the trivial if nagging water mysteries of the modern world: why we leave the water running while we brush our teeth. The answer is simplicity itself. We like running water. Even if it’s just coming out of the bathroom faucet and splashing into a white porcelain sink.
A short hike above the falls, the creek widens out, and it’s clear and shallow enough that you can see the bottom. There’s a spot where a huge, flat rock sits in the midday sun in the middle of the stream, a rock the size of a queen-size bed. I rock-hop out to the boulder, lie on my back, and close my eyes. Dry and warm, I am instantly immersed in water. I am surrounded by the stream, by the colorful chatter of flowing water: bubbling, sliding, slapping, gurgling. We have more words for the sounds water makes than for water itself.
In many places around Bushkill Falls, there is not the slightest hint of the world beyond the forest and the water. There is no cell phone service, there is almost no litter, no power lines or buildings. Just the path, and the sounds of the forest and the creek. It strikes me that, even for solitary pioneers crossing the continent, it would be hard to feel completely alone with such lively flowing water at hand.21
Water is a pleasure. It is fun. Our sense of water, our connection to water, is primal. Anyone who has ever given a bath to a nine-month-old baby—and received a soaking in return—knows that the sheer exuberance of creating splashing cascades of water is born with us. We don’t have to be taught to enjoy water.
We may not know the details about how it gets to us, how much it costs, or what’s necessary to protect it, but we like water. Each of us individually, and all of us together, have a huge reservoir of goodwill about water, even a sense of proprietorship. The water that comes out of the kitchen faucet—that’s my water.
When it comes to thinking differently about water, when it comes to actually appreciating it and doing the work required to reimagine how we use it every day, that affection, that sense of protectiveness, is one of water’s lucky virtues.
Climate change may or may not be caused by human activity, it may or may not be remediated with a cap-and-trade system, but in terms of the public conversation, it’s hard to muster much affection for the atmosphere, or for polar ice caps. That’s one reason polar bears are so often part of the conversation.
The financial system might well be in dire need of structural reform, and the stability of the global economy may indeed depend on getting that right—not to mention the stability of each of our jobs—but the banking system isn’t fun, and few of us have any sense of protectiveness about it.
We all know what it feels like to be thirsty, and what it feels like to be refreshed with a glass of water. We know what a dried-up lawn looks like, what it feels like, and we know what a plush, well-watered lawn feels like. We know what water that’s been sitting in the bottom of the canoe all summer looks like, and what it’s like to stand at the base of a waterfall and feel the power of water, the spray and the spirit. We do have a big thirst— physically, societally, and also emotionally.
When you think about the qualities of water that are so appealing— the energy, the playfulness, the adaptability, the variety of mood, the artistry, and also the sheer everyday usefulness—what’s striking is how much the personality of water mirrors our own personality as people. In the best sense, the spirit of water and our own spirit are the same.
Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it. We have a huge advantage over the generations of people who have come before us, because we can understand water and we can use it smartly. Everything about water is about to change— except, of course, for water itself. It is our fate that hangs on how we approach water—the quality of our lives, the variety and resilience of our society, the character of our humanity. Water itself will be fine. Water will remain exuberantly wet.