Till taught by pain
Men really know not what good water’s worth.
—Lord Byron, Don Juan
In 1776, the Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote of the diamond-water paradox, “Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” Two and a half centuries later, it should be obvious that this valuation is imbalanced. While diamonds—and other commodities such as oil, copper, and natural gas—are important, they are not essential for survival. Water is vital and has become inextricably linked to many other crucial issues, including health, diet, trade, urbanization, globalization, energy, and the state of the ecosystem.
Oil was the defining resource of the twentieth century, but the hydrocarbon era was an exception: for most of human history water has been the crucial resource; in coming years, the critic Alan Moores writes, it will reassume its natural dominion. H2O will be the defining resource of the twenty-first century.
Every time man uses water, it sets off a widening ripple effect that has consequences few people understand. But we no longer have the luxury of ignoring our impact on water supplies. We must acknowledge the new hydrologic reality and adapt. The good news is that water, unlike oil, is renewable: humans may pollute it, overuse it, or allow it to evaporate into the hot sky, but we cannot destroy water. The challenge is to learn how to manage the earth’s limited supply more efficiently and sustainably.
The bad news is that people usually resist change until a crisis is underway. In the 1930s, Americans ignored warnings about drought and poor farming practices until the Dust Bowl drove 2.5 million people off the Great Plains. In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans ignored warnings about water pollution until the Cuyahoga River ignited and people were poisoned at Love Canal and elsewhere. In the first decade of this century, Americans ignored warnings that they were polluting and draining important supplies such as the Colorado River, the Everglades, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Sacramento Delta. Today, water scarcity, population growth, and environmental degradation have combined to force the kind of reckoning that the United States has not seen in forty years.
In the 1970s, the American environmental movement forced the passage of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. Thus began a remarkable period of collective action when Americans, for the first time, agreed on the need to protect the nation’s water supply. But since then, the nation’s attention has drited, and many important hydrologic lessons have been forgotten or no longer apply.
Laws designed to protect drinking supplies have become outdated, and the agencies responsible for enforcing them have been marginalized.
Since 1981 (at least), when President Ronald Reagan named James Watt as his secretary of the interior and Anne Gorsuch as his administrator of the EPA—both of whom were antiregulation and business-friendly—presidential administrations of both parties have weakened environmental protections. The EPA has been underfunded, politicized, and demoralized. The US Army Corps of Engineers has failed to build effective flood defenses. Employees of the Minerals Management Service were found literally and figuratively in bed with the company representatives they were supposed to regulate, allowing industries to cut corners, and resulting in such disasters as the 2010 sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.
In mischievous rulings such as the 2006 Rapanos decision, the US Supreme Court has undermined the Clean Water Act, muddied the definition of which waterways can be regulated, and tacitly sided with developers who fill in wetlands to build shopping malls. Congress has likewise turned a blind eye to polluters, failed to invest in crucial hydro-infrastructure, encouraged waste (by providing irrigators with federal subsidies while not requiring them to measure how much water they use), and generally taken a short-term, uncoordinated approach to water governance.
Nearly half a century after the Clean Water Act was signed in 1972, America and the world face a second defining period in which our actions, and inactions, will have serious consequences for water supplies for years to come.
There are plenty of suggestions, and sharp disagreements, over how to respond. One camp favors building up water supplies by increasing the nation’s reservoirs, canals, and pipelines (as the Schwarzenegger administration pushed for in California); this is essentially an updated version of nineteenth- and twentieth-century strategies. Another group favors a new water ethic built on the opposite approach: conserving existing water supplies and limiting new demand through efficient technologies, stringent regulation, price incentives, and broad public education.
These dueling visions have pitted some of the nation’s leading water experts against one another, especially in the West, where hydro-politics has been described as “a blood sport.” But the debate is more complex than headlines about “cities versus farms” or “concrete versus fish” would lead you to believe.
Today’s water arguments reflect a growing unease about how to proceed when old certainties are being pushed aside and new options seem limited or unappealing. But the stark warnings implicit in Wisconsin’s poisoned wells, the intersex and dying fish of Chesapeake Bay, Lake Mead’s record-low waterline, the decay of levees across the country, and the resource war in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, cannot be ignored.
In January 2010, Pat Mulroy, the celebrated water manager of Las Vegas, suggested that President Obama consider a plan that would solve the riddle of water supply for the entire nation with one deft move. In 2008, she had tried the idea out on me: “We need to look at the really big picture. The West is growing drier. The Midwest is growing wetter. We’ve ignored our infrastructure for decades. But why can’t floodwaters in one part of the country be used as a water supply in another part of the country, through a series of exchanges?”
Water mavens have been asking this kind of question for years. If we can move oil from northern Alaska to Southern California, then why not move water from the Mississippi to the desert West?
Mulroy proposed dusting off a decades-old plan to collect surplus flood-water from the Mississippi River and export it to dry regions in the West. “If the West is growing drier and the Midwest is growing wetter, I see that as an opportunity,” she said. One scenario envisions piping excess Mississippi water to recharge the Ogallala Aquifer. Another plan is to use the relatively plentiful water from the East to sate Denver and farmers on the Front Range, which would free them from pumping water across the Continental Divide, allowing more water to remain in the Colorado River for use by the basin states, Indian tribes, and Mexico. Mulroy believes that such massive water transfers would launch a cascade of smaller water projects across the country, creating jobs, stimulating the economy, providing water security for millions, and “making an investment in the future”—just as the building of the interstate highway system did in the 1950s.
Known as Flipping the Mississippi, the project would be the largest water diversion in American history. Like a twenty-first-century version of the national effort to send men to the moon, it would take thousands of workers at least a decade to build; it would dwarf the construction of Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams. Mulroy suggests the project be funded with some of the billions of federal stimulus dollars earmarked for infrastructure improvements.
While the Colorado River carries about 13 million acre-feet of water annually, the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers carry 436 million acre-feet a year where they converge. “You could take six million acre-feet out of the Mississippi, and they wouldn’t even know it’s gone,” said Mulroy.
Flipping the Mississippi is a wildly ambitious idea that critics say may be technically feasible but politically impossible, and that Mulroy’s hometown antagonists—such as Bob Fulkerson, of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada—worry is a Trojan Horse that Mulroy could use to convince Washington to spend “billions of dollars to dry out rural Nevada.” (Mulroy said she has no intention of using her Mississippi plan to influence the Nevada pipeline debate.) It would certainly be expensive, environmentally disruptive, and politically fraught. And with global warming changing conditions in unpredictable ways, such a project could prove to be a multibillion-dollar boondoggle. Yet Mulroy remains committed. “If you want to really think outside the box, and really solve our water problems? Then we need to talk about solutions we’ve never had the courage to talk about before,” she insists.
Give Mulroy credit for asking the right questions and pushing for new, sometimes disconcerting answers. But at heart Flipping the Mississippi is a flashback to the costly, grandiose projects championed by Floyd Dominy and the Water Buffaloes. While conceptually intriguing, the scheme doesn’t provide a realistic answer to the nation’s new water challenges.
A cheaper, less risky, though no less ambitious, alternative is to adopt a new approach to managing water that emphasizes conservation and working with nature, rather than constantly trying to bend it to human will.
According to the proponents of this new water ethic, such as the British environmental writer Fred Pearce, the best way to ensure a healthy water supply and enough food, while protecting people from floods and droughts, is to undo many of the “improvements” people have made to natural water systems in the last century, and to re-embrace certain traditional methods of water management.
This approach requires people to stop building giant dams, allow artificially straightened rivers to reassert their natural courses, replenish aquifers and wetlands, and disassemble old levees and dams. These measures will occasionally be disruptive and expensive, but their backers say they will ultimately provide a more dependable, affordable, and sustainable supply of water than gargantuan concrete and pipe structures.
Instead of flood-irrigating fields—a notoriously inefficient practice that leads to the evaporation of water, the buildup of salt in the soil, and polluting runoff—Pearce and others recommend using traditional methods of water collection once popular in India, China, and throughout the Middle East (which were often undone by colonial occupiers, who didn’t understand how effective they were).
Chief among these methods is “rain harvesting,” which is the collection of rainwater in cisterns, qanats (vertical shatways connected to horizontal tunnels), and ponds that allow water to percolate underground and replenish aquifers. Some 800 million acre-feet of water falls from the clouds every day, and over half the world’s crops are already watered by rain. “Harvested” water is stored underground, which limits evaporation, and is carefully doled out. With wider use, rain harvesting could replace expensive, inefficient irrigation systems in many places.
Similar techniques could also improve life in urban settings. In Los Angeles, a desert city said to be the world’s most paved area, activists are pushing to build catchments and porous streets in order to collect the city’s scant precipitation, avoid floods and storm-water runoff when the skies do open, and lessen the city’s dependence on expensive water imported from distant sources, such as the Colorado River. In 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a twenty-year $1.5 billion initiative to make New York a “permeable city” that will use more trees, green roofs, porous roads, and revived wetlands to capture and retain storm water, reduce sewage overflows, clean waterways, cut costs, and green the Big Apple.
Such initiatives are gaining popularity and dovetail with new questions about the ecological impact of human water use. Bob Hirsch, of the US Geological Survey, has noticed a growing “societal shift in values over water.” While people need H2O for health and economic growth, the ecosystem—what Hirsch refers to as “the fish”—also needs water to survive. “The question used to be ‘How much water can we take out of the river?’ ” he said. “Now people ask, ‘How much water can we leave in the river?’ There is no question that ‘the fish’ has a seat at the negotiating table.”
But balancing the water needs of man and the fish is complex. One of the most promising solutions is so-called Soft Path water management, developed by Peter Gleick and other academics.
The Soft Path was a phrase coined by one of Gleick’s old friends, the physicist, mountain guide, and inventor Amory Lovins, best known for founding the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank in Colorado. In a 1976 essay in Foreign Affairs, Lovins first laid out his notion of a future powered by “sot energy,” by which he meant solar, wind, and geothermal power. The Soft Path assumes that efficiency and renewability are paramount, and that creating power is only a means to an end, not the end itself. It presupposes that man should use whatever methods will achieve his ultimate goal in the most efficient way.
Applying this ethos to water, Gleick reasons that the Hard Path, as practiced by the Water Buffaloes, treats water problems as simple engineering questions: How do we extract more water from the environment as quickly as possible? How do we remove water from rivers and lakes and aquifers and move it farther and farther away, to make deserts bloom? This approach does not take into account how we move water (by building giant salmon-killing dams and pumps), what the environmental effect might be (silt buildup, depleted supplies, destruction of wildlife), or how we use it (to supply thirsty crops, golf courses, or housing developments in the desert).
“In engineering school, I was taught how to design a dam on a virgin river to build a reservoir that will meet the needs of one hundred thousand people,” Gleick said. “But I was never taught to think about how those people actually use the water. Now we are changing the nature of our economy, and we are becoming more efficient. This is good news: it means we can do better.”
The Hard Path worked well, initially, to provide water supplies that built the nation. But now it is widely recognized that large dams are expensive, inefficient, and environmentally destructive. The Water Buffalo ethos is becoming obsolete. As global warming and demographic shifts change the way water is managed, experts are searching for ways to build smaller, cheaper, less intrusive means of supplying water. Seemingly small efficiencies, such as low-flush toilets and low-flow showerheads in homes, and relatively modest infrastructure projects, such as drip-irrigated farming, underground waterbanking, and toilet-to-tap sewage recycling, can save more water, and money, than new dams can provide.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I believe we can conserve more and more. We just need to think harder about it,” said Gleick.
Everything we do, we could do with less water.
—Peter Gleick,
the Pacific Institute, 2009
Looking back at the major questions examined in this book—water quality (pollution), water quantity (drought and flood), and how we manage water today and in the future (infrastructure and governance)—lessons have emerged that will help people make informed, thoughtful decisions for the future. There are no universal answers to the planet’s water problems. But we can take concrete steps on the personal, local, national, and global level to use water more wisely and sustainably.
Water quality is declining around the world and is stealthily becoming a major health, economic, and environmental issue. In 2010, a billion people lacked access to clean, safe drinking supplies, and over 2.6 billion (mostly children) lacked proper sanitation, a crucial health indicator.
In the United States, the volume and complexity of pollutants flowing into waterways is on the rise. As water quality worsens, it has become glaringly obvious that federal environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, as well as many state regulations, require updating. Just as important, the agencies in charge of enforcing these laws must be reinvigorated and given the backing to do their job properly.
With little oversight, industrial polluters such as BP, ExxonMobil, and GE have allowed toxins and suspected carcinogens such as benzene or PCBs to linger in the environment for decades. Stocks of salmon, smelt, oysters, and other aquatic species have been decimated by agricultural runoff, dams, mines, and other human interference. Ineffective federal laws, combined with an inability of state governments to work collectively against water pollution, have allowed rich fisheries and commercially important waterways, such as the Chesapeake Bay or the Mississippi River, to become severely impaired.
If the nation’s “worst environmental disaster,” the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has taught any lasting lesson, it is that the desire for corporate profits combined with lax oversight will result in environmental catastrophes that neither man nor the environment can afford. Society relies on fossil fuels and minerals: it is not realistic to expect resource exploration to stop in the near future, but it can be limited, monitored, and made safer with better regulation and oversight.
Certain glaring omissions—notably the Halliburton Loophole, which exempts natural gas drillers from major environmental laws or having to disclose what chemicals are used to hydrofrack shale—court environmental disaster. It is pure hubris to allow the injection of toxic chemicals into the ground, at explosive pressure, with no real idea of the effects. If a resource as valuable as the New York City watershed, which provides drinking water to over 9 million people and adjoins the heavily fracked Marcellus Shale deposit, is polluted for the sake of profit, there will be no way to undo the damage.
Regulators must be given the political and financial backing to curb such practices; industry and individuals should be incentivized to participate in slowing the tide of poisons leaching into waterways; and the nation should make the cleansing of toxic waters a priority. Without action, human and environmental health will suffer, and the nation will set itself back in many significant ways.
When it comes to personal responsibility for water pollution, it bears repeating that whatever substances we pour into our drains, flush down our toilets, or spray on our lawns end up in the water supply. According to a study by Johns Hopkins University, 75 percent of ingredients washed from homes survive wastewater treatment. These chemicals impact the ecosystem, including humans.
Even seemingly benign products, such as perfume or soap, contain endocrine disruptors that are suspected of causing fish intersex and death and may impact human health in ways that are not yet understood. Antibacterial soaps are increasingly popular, but once chemicals in them, such as triclocarban, are flushed into streams, they may act as immunosuppressants that weaken fish’s ability to ward off disease.
When the USGS fish biologist Vicki Blazer explained how emerging contaminants are suspected of killing fish, or causing intersex, in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a group of seventh graders wondered how they should respond. “Ask your parents about the products they use,” Blazer said. ” ‘Do we really need antimicrobial soaps? Does it really matter if a few dandelions sprout on our lawn?’ ” We know that these chemicals affect fish, and the human endocrine system is similar to that of fish, Blazer said. “It is possible that these chemicals could have some of the same effects on humans as on fish.”
In 2010, the Obama administration provided the EPA with its largest budget in history, $10.5 billion a year, a 34 percent increase over 2009, but it remains an open question whether the agency will be able to shoulder its growing regulatory burden. While EPA administrator Lisa Jackson appears to be doing the best she can at a time of divisive politics and economic recession, she has been only partly successful in standing up to powerful industrial lobbies, and needs to build greater public support for the environmental battles ahead.
Bold action is called for to protect water quality. To gain the public’s trust and backing, government leaders must do a much better job at educating taxpayers about why water is important, which problems need fixing, and why they should be willing to pay for them. As the water managers of Orange County, California, showed when they convinced the public of the benefits of toilet-to-tap sewage recycling, the success of new initiatives hinges on making a strong case to the citizens who will be asked to pay higher water rates and back public bonds to underwrite river cleanups, treatment plants, and other pollution controls.
The same could be said of government efforts elsewhere. India and China, which together comprise 40 percent of the world’s population, have seen a spike in water pollution as they scramble for economic growth, but neither government has made meaningful investments in pollution controls. The Asian Development Bank predicts the region will need at least $8 billion of new infrastructure just to meet the UN’s 2015 target of reducing by half the number of people without access to clean drinking water. That kind of investment is unlikely to appear.
It is comforting to imagine that the United States and other industrialized countries, as well as the UN and the World Bank, private industry and wealthy individuals, will share knowledge and fund major global cleanup efforts. But the evidence suggests this is wishful thinking.
As populations and pollution skyrocket around the world, the prognosis for the earth’s water quality, and thus human and environmental health, is grim.
The issue of water quantity—whether people will have too little water or be faced with too much of the wrong kind of water this century—is equally pressing.
By 2025, the global demand for domestic and industrial water use is predicted to rise by two-thirds. Experts disagree on whether there will be enough accessible freshwater to meet this requirement. While improvements in efficiency and conservation will help reduce water stress, parts of the world will face localized drought, if not widespread cataclysm.
An increasingly worrisome question is whether there will be sufficient water for food supplies.* According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 70 percent of global water use is devoted to irrigated agriculture, which is notoriously unproductive. As emerging nations adopt more meat-centric diets, pressure on water supplies will heighten: it takes 634 gallons of water, mostly for cattle feed, to produce an eight-ounce piece of beef.
Between 2010 and 2025, the world’s population is expected to grow from 6.7 billion to 9 billion. Yet water scarcity in that same period is expected to cut global food production by 385 million tons a year, which is more than the average yearly US grain harvest. More people with less food and water is a potentially explosive combination.
As with water pollution, water supply in Asia is a particular concern. Some experts worry that by 2030 the region’s water needs will exceed supply by 40 percent, though others say those fears are overblown. The historian Steven Solomon predicts that a lack of water could hobble India and China’s phenomenal growth. These two nations have already faced domestic unrest over water scarcity, are arguing with neighbors over transboundary waters, and are vying with each other for Himalayan glacial melt. As the climate warms, and populations expand, these simmering tensions could easily flare into broader problems, even violence.
These are the kinds of water challenges the world will face in coming decades. In response, people will have to adopt a combination of old and new techniques to use water more efficiently than they do now.
No country uses water as carefully as the city-state of Singapore. With a population of just 4.8 million, Singapore is built on a marshy island surrounded by swamps and has limited natural water supplies. In 1942, invading Japanese troops blew up the island’s main water pipeline as a way to subdue the populace. In the 1950s, the island faced water rationing, floods, and rampant contamination. But since the mid-1960s, Singapore has built up a world-class water system.
Demand is controlled by high water taxes and tariffs, the use of efficient technologies—such as low-flow toilets, taps, and washers—and exhortations by the government, which educates and constantly reminds citizens about the importance of conserving every drop. Supply comes from a variety of sources: 40 percent is piped in from Malaysia, while a remarkable 30 percent is provided by desalinated ocean water and recycled waste-water (Singapore’s recycled wastewater is so thoroughly cleansed that it is used by the nation’s booming high-tech industry, which, like Intel’s fabs, requires ultrapure water). The rest is drawn from large-scale rainwater harvesting and other local sources. This tightly controlled hydro-logical system is overseen by a well-funded, highly educated, politically autonomous water authority. Its members invest in dams, bioreactors, and desalination technology as they see fit. As a result, Singapore’s per capita domestic water use fell from 165 liters a day in 2003 to 155 in 2010, and the nation’s supply is clean and relatively secure.
Most nations are much larger and more complex than Singapore, but the core lessons of the island’s water efficiency are transferable.
America, for instance, could make rainwater harvesting a priority, desalinate and recycle wastewater on a much larger scale, and, especially, do a far better job of educating its citizens about which water problems need fixing, why, how, and when. Like Singapore, the United States could create a federal water agency to administer a national water policy.
America has never had a central water authority or a comprehensive water policy. Partly due to historical legacy, and partly due to sensitivities over federalism and states’ rights, the nation’s waters are overseen by a jumble of agencies that by one count includes six cabinet departments and twenty federal agencies, directed by thirteen congressional committees with twenty-three subcommittees and five appropriations subcommittees. With so many people and jurisdictions involved, overlap, redundancies, and rivalries are inevitable.
For America to take water management as seriously as Singapore does, it will have to streamline its byzantine governance system and create a new office at the federal level—perhaps a water czar or an interagency national water board*—to develop a framework for federal, state, and local agencies (many of which struggle in isolation) to operate in sync. A federal water office could set new quality standards, work with existing regulators, coordinate agencies on all levels, and fund research into new ways to adapt to changing conditions.
In a century destined for increased water scarcity, climatologists say, the world will also face more flooding.
In 2010, protracted rains sent high water surging down China’s Yangtze River, straining the Three Gorges Dam—the world’s largest hydroelectric project—setting off mudslides, and causing deaths and evacuations. In just that year, over a thousand people were killed and $21 billion in damage was caused by floods across China. In Indonesia, meanwhile, a tsunami killed at least four hundred people, and in Pakistan, where flooding was the worst in eighty years, more than sixteen hundred people were lost to floods. In the United States, high rains caused the Red, James, and Missouri Rivers to overflow and flooded thousands of acres throughout the Midwest, forcing mass evacuations in Fargo and Bismarck, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota. People were rescued by helicopter, and the National Guard was once again called on to build emergency flood defenses with sandbags.
While worries about flooding often take a backseat to fears of drought, the projected rise in precipitation and sea levels this century will become a serious problem that needs to be addressed with stricter oversight and greater investment.
The United States can learn much from the example of Holland (as detailed in chapter 21), which has the world’s best flood-defense system. As with Singaporean water conservation, the key to Dutch flood control is a serious, national commitment. For America to build effective flood controls, the 1928 Flood Control Act, immunizing the US Army Corps of Engineers from prosecution when its levees fail, must be rewritten. The Corps itself must be revamped, and given support to replace the failing infrastructure with robust flood defenses that integrate traditional concrete and steel structures with natural storm-barriers, such as reeds, wetlands, and islands.
Another significant issue going forward will be the economics of water. “Water flows towards money,” hydrologists such as Bob Moran say, implying that the rich control the tap. While this is often true and can be abused, it is not always a bad thing.
In recent years, more H2O has been flowing from low-value crops (cotton and alfalfa) to high-value ones (nuts and berries). Ailing farms are selling their water rights to productive industry and burgeoning cities. Food grown in wet, green climes (the northeastern United States, Brazil) is increasingly being exported to dry, brown ones (Arizona, India), allowing their water to be conserved for drinking supplies, for maintaining aquifer levels, or for other high-priority uses.
Yet people have tended to dance around the question of pricing water in a way that reflects scarcity.
Because water is an essential resource, it has no “market value,” as, say, oil does. But with no price incentive to use it efficiently, people often squander water by flood-irrigating farmland, using vast quantities for energy and mineral projects, and polluting it. In many places water is free, or priced so low that the revenue it generates is not enough to maintain, or upgrade, reservoirs, distribution pipes, and treatment plants. While citizens have good reason to be wary of water privatizers, cheap water invites waste.
Many resource economists believe that in the twenty-first century the price of potable water will have to better reflect its availability.
The law of demand states that people demand less of a good as it becomes more expensive. This theory was validated in Santa Barbara, California, when, during the drought of 1987–91, the city raised water prices to help reduce consumption. Before the drought hit, Santa Barbara water was priced at a flat rate, meaning that the cost did not change when people used more water. In 1990, after three years of extremely low rainfall, prices shifted to a block rate: as water supplies dwindled, prices were raised in price “blocks,” and consumption dropped by 50 percent. After the drought ended, water use rose, but only to 62 percent of predrought levels. “These prices permanently changed people’s habits and attitudes,” UC Berkeley economist David Zetland wrote of Santa Barbara. “People change their behavior when the price of water increases.”
To allay fears that wealthy interests will take unfair advantage of the poor by jacking up water rates, the sensible compromise is to guarantee people enough free water to ensure survival—experts recommend a minimum of thirteen gallons per person, per day—and to charge for use beyond that, using tiered rates that put the cost burden on the heaviest users.
Water and money will be closely entwined in other ways this century: the need for significant investments in water infrastructure will force painful choices.
Most of the world’s hydro facilities were built in the last century, are aging, and will need to be upgraded in the not-distant future. But these crucial facilities tend to be built out of sight, or buried, and are largely ignored even as they malfunction or disintegrate.
In the United States, some 240,000 water pipes burst every year, according to the EPA. By another estimate, from the USGS, 650 water mains break every day—a rate of one every two minutes. These leaks result in a loss of 1.7 trillion gallons of water a year, which is worth $2.6 billion annually and is enough water to supply 68 million people.
Many municipal water pipes are fifty to a hundred years old; some were built at the time of the Civil War; a handful of pipes in Alaska, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington are made of wood. Dilapidated sewer systems spew untreated sewage into waterways, while corroded water mains allow toxins to contaminate drinking supplies or rupture into floods that wash out roads, strand people, and cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage.
With so many bits of water infrastructure aging across the country, the American Water Works Association has deemed this “the dawn of the replacement era.”
Water infrastructure is expensive, is often large, and can run for miles underground, making it difficult to maintain or replace—especially for older industrial regions with weak economies. In 2009, America’s water systems cost $1 trillion a year to operate; the Obama administration’s federal stimulus bill provided $6 billion for water projects, with $2 billion of that earmarked for improvements to drinking-water systems. But that money is a mere drop in the ocean. The EPA estimates that, just for drinking-water systems, repairs and upgrades will require a $334 billion investment over the next two decades, mostly to improve aging pipelines and pumps.
This is an onerous and politically unpalatable cost. But utilities provide essential services, and without repairing and replacing old parts, water systems will face a general collapse. Furthermore, water infrastructure is a good investment. According to the US Conference of Mayors, every dollar invested in water and sewer improvements has the potential to increase the long-term gross domestic product by more than $6.
The greatest threat to freshwater supplies is human indifference. It has allowed disease, poverty, conflict, and environmental destruction to proliferate. Some fear that humans have already passed the world’s hydrologic tipping point.
In an influential 1968 article in Science, titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin, a leading American ecologist, wrote of “the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment” and described the pattern by which people acting in their own self-interest destroy shared resources. The hypothetical example he used focused on medieval farmers who shared a field, “the commons,” and allowed their cattle to graze indiscriminately. As each farmer added more and more cows to the field, he reaped benefits, but with each cow added, the field became more degraded; eventually, all of the grass on the common was eaten, at which point all of the farmers and their cows suffered. The shared resource was destroyed by individuals concerned only with their own well-being.
The field in Hardin’s parable is a metaphor for the unrestricted use of modern “commons,” such as the earth’s atmosphere, national parks, and fish stocks. Lately, Hardin’s theme has been taken up by water experts. By allowing virtually unlimited access to water, and by focusing on individual success rather than on collective benefit, they fear, humans are running blindly into a tragedy of the hydrologic commons.
Unless people snap out of their apathy, no amount of investment, regulation, lofty goal-setting, or technical breakthroughs will save the planet from a hydrological tragedy. Success, even partial success, in overcoming ignorance and inaction will help end many of the root causes of the problems discussed in this book and allow people to live healthy lives. Surely, this is worthy of our time, interest, and resources.
There is reason for hope. Because humans cause most of the world’s water problems, we have a degree of control over them, and we can choose to solve them.
In the summer of 2008, Bob Hirsch presented the annual M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman Lecture to the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc., in Boulder, Colorado.* For an audience of some 250 of the nation’s leading water scientists, USGS’s former chief hydrologist described how Stephen Ambrose’s writings about Lewis and Clark had shaped his thinking about the evolution of American hydrology. The historian characterized the nineteenth century as an era of “discovery and description,” and the twentieth century as an era of “command and degrade”; he hoped the twenty-first century would be regarded as “the century of restoration.”
In his lecture, Hirsch drew parallels to this historical scheme. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American hydrologists measured stream flow, the behavior of groundwater, and the chemistry of American rivers. “When we look back [at those studies] now, they help us understand how our nation’s rivers have changed chemically over a hundred years,” Hirsch told the audience. The twentieth century, the period of “command and degrade,” witnessed massive degradation of surface-water quality (epitomized for the nation by the burning of the Cuyahoga, and for me by the poisoning of my local waters, such as Newtown Creek and the Housatonic River). This was also the time of significant groundwater depletion, such as the draining of “fossil water” from the Ogallala Aquifer by high-capacity pumps and center-pivot irrigation systems, while point-source pollution and the environmental impact of large dams emerged as national issues. In 1971, Wolman published a seminal paper in Science entitled “The Nation’s Rivers,” in which he pointed to how little we knew about the degradation and improvement of rivers and underscored the need for long-term data collection on which to build informed decisions.
“Our science has followed [Wolman’s] pattern and needs to continue” to do so, Hirsch said, to applause from the crowd.
Hirsch ended his talk by echoing the hope that this will be the century of hydrological restoration. He emphasized the importance of “integrated water management,” in which the needs of all users are taken into account and where engineered structures are integrated with natural features—as has been done in the New York City watershed, where strict water regulations and aggressive land conservation have maintained water quality and avoided costly treatment plants. “Today we have some of the most exciting pieces of integrated scientific work focused on restoration in the Everglades, the San Francisco Bay Delta, the Grand Canyon, the Platte River, and many other places,” said Hirsch. “We know that these systems … have been severely degraded. Now, in the twenty-first century, our society has set about to try to restore them—maybe not to a pristine condition, but clearly to a better condition.”
After years of neglect, signs are that Washington is slowly acknowledging that the nation’s waters are in trouble and require the kind of careful attention long advocated by such experts as Bob Hirsch, Bob Moran, Bob Bea, and Peter Gleick.
For now, the nation has only a vague idea of the quality and quantity of its freshwater supply, and whether there is enough of it to meet future demands. Amazingly, the last comprehensive census of US water resources was completed by the Water Resources Council in 1978. But “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” say hydrologists, who have been pushing for a new national census.
In October 2010, four days after Lake Mead dropped to a record-low water level, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the first small step in that direction: a three-year, $1.5 million study of the Colorado River. Called WaterSMART,* this will be the first study to measure the state of three river basins—the Colorado, the Delaware, and the “AFC” (Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint) systems—where there is “significant competition over water.” The study, conducted by the USGS, examines water quality and quantity, climate change, and will predict how much water needs to be left in rivers to sustain aquatic life—“the fish.”
The study is belated and modest, but represents the sort of clear-eyed, science-based, integrated approach that is urgently needed to assess the state of the nation’s water supply, explain it to the public, and spur action in coming years.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, most people have not run out of potable H2O yet, but they continue to take it for granted, waste it, contaminate it, and mismanage it. These practices are unsustainable. A growing number of hydrologists, economists, and diplomats warn that localized water problems could coalesce and tip the earth into a fullblown “water crisis.” To forestall an emergency, we must redefine how we think of water and how we use it. In short, we must learn to treat deceptively simple H2O for what it really is: the most valuable resource on earth.