WHEN I TALK ABOUT GEORGIA in the same sentence with an undemocratic land grab from a neighboring territory, people often assume I am referring to the country formerly part of the Soviet Union. But I’m not—water shortages can turn allies, even neighboring American states, into competitors. In 2008, the state of Georgia in the United States wanted land because it needed water: a year earlier various rivers dropped so low that the drought-stricken state was within a few weeks of shutting down its own nuclear plants. Water conditions had become so dire that the Georgia state legislature considered a resolution to move the state’s upper border a mile farther north, cutting across the Nickajack Reservoir to annex freshwater resources in Tennessee. The justification for the boundary adjustment was an allegedly faulty border survey from 1818. That is, Georgia was trying to use a two-hundred-year-old map to execute a land grab to capture some water that otherwise was under the control of Tennessee. One Tennessee state senator, recognizing the importance of American football in the southeastern United States, jokingly suggested that the dispute should be settled with a football game between rival schools in the two states. That attempt failed, but water remains contentious for those states and their neighbors. Since then Georgia, Alabama, and Florida have continued to battle, with multiple lawsuits and allegations. Drought is only one cause. A rapidly growing population, especially in Atlanta, as well as overdevelopment and a notorious lack of water planning, is running the region’s rivers dry. Production of thirsty energy sources just exacerbates the situation.1
But this isn’t a crisis striking only close to home; it’s global. In July 2012, the electric grid in India failed, causing the largest blackout in history.2 It affected more than 620 million people, 9 percent of the world’s population. Although there were many reasons for the power outage, it was a lack of water that triggered the Indian collapse. A major drought in India that summer increased the demand for electricity at the same time that it reduced electricity production. Because of the drought, farmers increased their irrigation of crops using electric pumps. Those pumps, working furiously under the hot sun, increased the demand for power, straining the grid. At the same time, low water levels meant that power generation at hydroelectric dams was lower than normal, making it doubly hard for the power sector to meet summer demand. Even worse, floods earlier in the year had caused dams to silt up with runoff from farms, reducing their available capacity even before the low water levels made things worse. A double water whammy of flood then drought hobbled the hydroelectric dams. The result? A population larger than all of Europe and twice as large as the United States was plunged into darkness, with railways and other critical services brought to a sudden halt.
Energy and water are the world’s two most critical resources, but what many don’t understand is even more significant: the two are intricately interconnected. They are like a hall of mirrors going on endlessly: energy needs water which needs energy which needs water . . . And strains in one can be crippling for the other with catastrophic consequences. In many ways, strains in the nexus of energy and water are our generation’s Cold War—a global crisis spanning decades that we need to solve or the future of humanity will look very different.
Virtually everywhere we look, signs of the extent of this crisis abound. The same summer of the blackout in India, a massive heat wave and record-setting drought swept across most of the United States, putting power plants in peril because cooling water was scarce or too hot to be effective. A few years earlier, the state of Florida made an unusual announcement: it would sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the Corps’ plan to reduce water flow from reservoirs in Georgia into the Apalachicola River, which runs through Florida from the Georgia-Alabama border.3 Environmentalists were concerned that the restricted flow would threaten certain endangered species. Regulators in Alabama also objected, worried about another species: nuclear power plants, which use enormous quantities of water, usually drawn from rivers and lakes, for cooling. The reduced flow raised the specter that the Farley Nuclear Plant near Dothan, Alabama, would need to shut down.
In California, two of its fabled nuclear reactors are sited on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. As one drives along I-5 between the cities, these nuclear reactors look surprisingly like two gigantic concrete breasts rising above the coast, just beside the highway and silhouetted by the ocean. Despite their evocative shape and their appealing, innocentsounding name—SONGS, which stands for San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station—SoCal Edison announced that these plants would be shut down, partly because of water. Ongoing concerns that the nuclear power plants put ocean life at risk from entrainment of cooling water and the potential for radiation leaks that could contaminate the water along with other technical challenges became too burdensome to manage. It was easier to shut down the plant than to solve the radiation leaks and water problems to the satisfaction of the public.
Outside Las Vegas, Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado River, is now routinely one hundred feet lower than historic levels. As it stands, Las Vegas draws its drinking water from two straws that tap into Lake Mead. If the lake drops another fifty feet, the city’s water supply will be threatened and the huge hydroelectric turbines inside Hoover Dam on the lake would provide little or no power, potentially putting the booming desert metropolis in the dark while leaving its occupants thirsty. Las Vegas’ solution is to spend nearly $1 billion on a third straw that goes deeper, coming from underneath and up into the lake from the bottom. But even that drastic solution might not work. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, have declared that Lake Mead could become dry by 2021 if the climate changes as expected and water users who depend on the Colorado River do not curtail their withdrawals.4 We can argue about whether the glass if half-full or half-empty, but an engineer will point out that the length of your straw does not matter if the glass is dry.
Communities in water-strained Texas and New Mexico, wary of the water risks posed by hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas production from shale formations, have imposed prohibitions or constraints on what water (if any) could be used for fuel extraction, even though the amount of water required by shale production is small compared with agriculture. Activists opposed to oil and gas production use concerns about possible water pollution as the rallying cry to halt increases in drilling.
Energy can be a limiting factor for water, too. San Diego, which needs more drinking water because of its growth and the pervasive California droughts, has sought to build a desalination plant on the coast. But local activists have fought the facility—it would consume so much energy, and the power supply is thin. For the same reason, the mayor of London denied a proposed desalination plant in 2005, only to have his successor later rescind that denial.5 Politicians in Uruguay must choose whether they want the water in their reservoirs to be used for drinking or for electricity. Saudi Arabian leaders wrestle with whether to export the country’s oil and gas to earn hard currency or to burn more of those resources at home to produce what it does not have: freshwater for its people and its cities.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, the destruction was awe-inspiring. Amazingly, the city was peaceful after the hurricane passed . . . at least initially. But the widespread power outage meant that the water system—including pumps to keep low-lying areas dry and the treatment facilities that clean the water to potable standards—quit working. It was only when people realized that their drinking water was contaminated and that their neighborhoods were not going to be pumped dry anytime soon that chaos broke out. An energy shortage sparked a water shortage, destabilizing society.
We cannot build more power plants with the same old design or extract more oil and gas with outdated techniques without realizing that they impinge on our freshwater supplies. And we cannot build more water delivery and cleaning facilities the same way we always have without driving up energy demand. If we continue in the direction we’re going, widespread vulnerabilities in our interconnected water and energy systems will worsen with population growth, economic growth, and climate change, all of which exacerbate the strain. Sadly, we often compound the problems with self-inflicted policy decisions that push us toward more energy-intensive water and more water-intensive energy.
Despite the importance of each and the close relationship between energy and water, the funding, policymaking, and oversight of these resources are typically performed by different people in separate agencies. Energy planners often assume they will have the water they need and water planners assume they will have the energy they need. If one of these assumptions fails, the consequences can be dramatic, as the blackouts in India demonstrated.
But we can stop this downward spiral if we seize all the potential advantages to the nexus of energy and water. With abundant, clean, reliable, affordable energy we can solve our water problems by desalting oceans, digging deeper wells, and moving water thousands of miles uphill to thirsty people and crops. And with abundant, clean, reliable, affordable water, we can solve our energy problems by building hydroelectric systems to generate all the electricity we could ever desire, and we could grow our way out of our oil problem by irrigating biofuels. But because we don’t have infinite resources, we’re dealing with a world of constraints instead. While the challenges are difficult and the potential risks are great, with new thinking and some clever innovation we can manage this problem for a better future.
Solving the dilemma requires new policies that integrate energy and water solutions and innovative technologies that help to boost one resource without draining the other. Thankfully, we have technical solutions that make sense. There are water-lean energy options and energy-lean water options that we could implement. But we do not typically select them because the world’s politicians and decision-makers have not fully grasped the interrelatedness of these resources, and policymakers, as well as engineers, are isolated and confined to either water or energy systems.
There’s potential for more good news: because we use so much energy for water and so much water for energy, we have the opportunity for cross-cutting conservation. By saving water, we can save energy, and by saving energy, we can save water. Most of us don’t realize that we use more water for our light switches and electrical outlets than our faucets and showerheads because the water is used to cool power plants far away, out of sight and out of mind. It also doesn’t occur to us that as a nation we use more energy to heat, treat, and pump our water than we use for lighting. Counterintuitive to what we’d expect, turning off the lights and appliances saves vast amounts of water, and turning off the water saves vast amounts of energy.
In the end, the most important innovation we need is a new way of thinking about energy and water so that we make better decisions about these precious resources: holistic thinking that recognizes these resources as interconnected, and a systems-level approach that acknowledges how one change in one state to a water system could impact an energy system five states away. Most important, we need long-range thinking because our energy and water decisions last decades to centuries, so it’s imperative that we get them right. This book will show us how we can change our thinking about energy and water to be more integrated, with the goal of long-term sustainability, and that, once we adopt this new mindset, many solutions open up that will enable us to manage the water-energy nexus holistically and set us up for a better future.
Water, energy, and civilization go hand in hand. The various multicentury Chinese empires survived as long as they did in part by controlling floods in the Yellow River.6 This political and imperial power is captured in the word zhi, which has simultaneous meanings “to rule” and “to regulate water.” In fact, an article by the Economist in 2009 noted that “the Chinese word for politics (zhengzhi) includes a character that looks like three drops of water next to a platform or dyke. Politics and water control, the Chinese character implies, are intimately linked.” Indeed, water and politics go hand in hand for many societies and cultures, not only the Chinese. In the social sciences, there’s a hydraulic theory of civilization in which water is the unifying context and justification for many large-scale civilizations, and we can see it playing out in a variety of contexts throughout history. One interpretation of this idea is that the justification for forming large cities in the first place is to manage water, and that large water projects enabled the rise of megacities; cities and water projects go together.
The Romans certainly understood the connections between water and power: they built a vast network of aqueducts throughout their empire, many of which are still standing. The aqueduct of Segovia in Spain was operational after nearly two thousand years up until the twentieth century. And, the magnificent Pont du Gard in southern France proudly stands as a testament to humanity’s investment in its water infrastructure.
According to Trevor Hodge, whose book on Roman aqueducts is frequently cited, “The aqueducts went wherever Rome went, an outwards symbol of all that Rome stood for and all that Rome had to offer.”7 In other words, the Romans would build roads, bridges, and water systems as a way of Romanizing new territory. Ultimately, the Roman empire’s vast water infrastructure came to be considered one of the ancient world’s greatest achievements. And, similar to the Chinese empires, it helped them keep a hold on their power, much like modern politicians of today who erect dams as monuments to themselves.
Other ancient civilizations collaborated to build massive waterworks, like the Khmer empire’s vast water network that reached its apex in the thirteenth century. The most famous feature of this water system is the temple known as Angkor Wat.8 That complex included several water retention ponds, storage systems, distribution channels, and a water temple, which is the main religious shrine that most people associate with the site. And those water temples are not just something that far-flung ancient civilizations built in the middle of jungles: the San Francisco Bay Area also has a modern-day water temple that was erected in 1934 to celebrate the arrival of piped water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir over 160 miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountains.9
Just as water and civilization go hand in hand, so too do sustained water scarcity and societal downfall. We’ve seen this play out in the surprising number of civilizations that have collapsed over history, often with ecological strain as precursors—in particular sustained drought and ensuing stress on water systems.10 While Angkor Wat and the surrounding water system were strategic assets that helped consolidate power, when the water system failed, Angkor’s power went with it. Other research has revealed that three of the five multicentury Chinese dynasties—the Tang (618–907), Yuan (1271–1368), and Ming (1368–1644)—collapsed at times coincident with multidecade drought.11 That research examined a stalagmite in the Wanxiang Cave, China, at the northern fringes of the monsoons and therefore a useful indicator of strong or weak monsoon activity. The stalagmite that provided the key historical timestamp formed slowly over 1,810 years starting in the year 190 CE, creating a finely resolved year-over-year mineral record that reveals how wet or dry that particular year was. Lining up those mineral records with Chinese written records, which go back thousands of years, showed a remarkable sequence of eras with major societal expansions and collapses or civil unrest. During wet years, when there was enough water for rice cultivation, populations expanded. For example, the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) doubled in population, going from about 50 million people to more than 100 million in the span of 150 years. During extended periods of weak monsoon activity, dynasties struggled and fell. The coincidence in timing is striking.
Research in caves in Israel produced a similar conclusion: the Roman empire, whose vast water system with sprawling aqueducts was one of its greatest achievements, also collapsed at a time coincident with sustained drought.12 Although the invading hordes of tribes is one of the conventional explanations for the empire’s demise, I cannot help but wonder if water strain at the edges of the Roman frontier might have driven the tribes toward invasion.
Other water-related societal failures include the Mayan collapse around 900 CE, which is one of the more spectacular collapses in recorded history. Whereas debate remains about the precise timeline and causes of the Mayan collapse, researchers have suggested that climate change and extended drought along with failure of Mayan water systems triggered a contraction of their population by 50 percent or more over the span of decades.13 The climate record from a cave in Belize indicates that there was a rise in Mayan warfare when drought was under way, suggesting that water wars were a contributing factor. Interestingly, the Mayan downfall happened at roughly the same time as the Tang dynasty was ending in 907 CE. Brian Fagan’s work on the rise and fall of civilizations ties these two events together with global climate change.14 Later on, drought hit the Khmer empire and the Anasazi Indians of the American desert Southwest at around the time those empires collapsed. But it was not bad news everywhere. Europe had the problem that its water abundance caused crops to rot and mildew. Lower rainfall improved agricultural yields and multigenerational political stability in Europe. That means while civilizations elsewhere were imploding, Europe was thriving, building projects over multiple generations such as massive cathedrals that still stand today.
In addition to the dramatic impacts of water availability and scarcity on civilization, climate changes affect the global water cycle, creating a cascade effect in which climate change ultimately means civilization change. Although the concerns over climate change are multifaceted—its worst effects include declining crop yields, increasing ocean acidification, and decreasing comfort in many parts of the world—the changes in water are perhaps the most critical as those are what provide the largest potential impact to society. In an unfortunate feedback loop, global climate change impacts the hydrologic cycle by increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods. Those events drive increases to our energy consumption as we use energy to mitigate problems with the water system. Consuming more energy emits more carbon, which drives the whole process faster in a pattern that works against us.
Other examples abound. The regions in the Middle East and North Africa torn by civil unrest today also seem to be the ones where there is a battle over access to energy resources or where drought has strained food supplies.15 Drought in Syria bankrupted farmers, who fled to the cities to find work. Large urban populations of unemployed farmers, along with poor governance, fanned the flames of civil unrest, ultimately triggering a refugee crisis.
Because modern water systems depend so heavily on energy, modern society depends on energy and water. Unfortunately, an energy shortage can become a water shortage, critically destabilizing society. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization depends on the comingling of our energy and water systems, and how we solve the crises these systems currently face.
The quantity of water is not the only factor that matters to the fate and relative prosperity of a society: the water must also be clean. Despite the importance of clean water and sanitation, the close connections between public health and water supplies were not revealed scientifically until the mid-1800s. The first scientific identification that cholera is spread by water sources contaminated with human waste was made in 1849 by Dr. John Snow in London.16 As Bill Bryson explores in At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Snow’s findings were produced between two famous cholera outbreaks that struck London in 1848 and 1854. After the 1848 outbreak, Snow was able to determine that public wells that drew water from the heavily contaminated Thames (at the time, untreated sewage was emptied into the river) were the source of the problem.
The sudden spike in mortality exceeded that of London’s famous plague episodes, producing such spectacular consequences as five hundred people dying in a small neighborhood over the span of just ten days. Unfortunately, Dr. Snow’s findings that human waste was contaminating water and killing people were rejected by Parliament because they did not fit prevailing ideologies and because the actions that would be required to fix the problem were deemed too expensive. Similar rejection is offered for today’s climate scientists, who tell us our waste is killing us, though in a much slower and less direct pathway, and that fixing the problem will require significant investments in new infrastructure. Snow was later vindicated as a hero, and perhaps the same fate awaits our present-day scientists who warn us of climate risks and offer solutions.
Bryson reveals another telling anecdote about an episode known as “The Great Stink” in London in 1858. Although untreated sewage had been dumped into the Thames for decades, the currents had done a great service to the metropolis by washing the waste away to sea. However, the combination of heat wave and drought that summer meant there was less water to dispose of the wastes. That stagnant water and stagnant air produced a remarkably noxious smell, triggering a temporary suspension of Parliament, whose building sits within smelling distance of the Thames. While the event was unfortunate and unpleasant in many ways, it led directly to the creation of an ambitious public works project to insert twelve hundred miles of sewers into a crowded city of 3 million people. Doing so not only addressed the problem of waste disposal, but it also created the lovely river embankments that still stand today as a key piece of London’s urban landscape along which many people stroll.
In the mid-1800s, Londoners could solve their water problems by simply flushing waste away farther along the Thames. But, today, with a higher global population and density, there is no “away.” It’s impossible to rely on dilution as the solution. Instead, industrialized societies invest energy: energy for water treatment and energy for wastewater treatment. And, like the London experience, where the sewers became walkways, if we do it the right way, we can solve our water problems while simultaneously building structures we can use for other purposes. Investing energy to clean our water is one of the great public policy achievements for modern civilization in the past 150 years.17 Energy also lets us heat our water, which is critical for sterilizing medical equipment, washing our hands, ridding our society of many disease-carrying pests (many pesticides are made from petrochemicals), and cleaning scrapes and wounds.
Although the scientific and democratic advances since the industrial revolution have been significant, the largest public health problem globally remains the more than 1.1 billion people without access to clean water sources for drinking, cooking, and washing. That number is expected to grow to 1.8 billion people by 2025. In China alone, 100 million people lack improved water sources, and 2.6 billion globally remain vulnerable to waterborne diseases because they lack access to sanitation (which is a polite word for wastewater treatment).18 Nearly 4.8 billion people, or 80 percent of the world’s population in 2000, reside in areas with significant water security or biodiversity threats. Improving water quality is a significant way to improve public health worldwide.
Delivering universal access to clean water to improve public health will require a lot of energy for treatment and transport to where it is needed. And if we’re not careful, just throwing more energy at the problem might make other problems worse. Even though the energy can be used to clean up the water and improve public health, if we use energy that pollutes, then it might undo those benefits by depositing pollutants back into the water systems. Air laced with pollutants from smokestacks and tailpipes can cause premature mortality or weaken productivity because of sick days that keep employees from work, either because they do not feel well, or because they have to stay home to tend to a sick child. Emissions from our energy consumption accumulate in the air. With the right meteorological conditions, those emissions are converted into dangerous chemicals, such as ozone, or fine particles that settle deep into our lungs and cross into our bloodstreams. If the concentrations of these substances are too high, then the air actually becomes dangerous to breathe. “Ozone Action Days” are declared on the days when ozone levels are high enough to cause damage, and outdoor physical activity is discouraged.
Poor air quality is causing an asthma epidemic in the United States, and it has been declared one of the most important public health problems worldwide, afflicting millions of people.19 Asthma attacks alone cause $20 billion in health expenses annually in the United States, and the epidemic is growing in its severity. Far more deadly than auto accidents, air pollution is blamed for 7 million premature deaths each year worldwide, more than 4 million of which are from household air pollution due to activities such as burning fuels like wood or cow dung in primitive cookstoves that produce a lot of smoke and soot. Air quality problems cause $150 billion in economic losses and 150,000 to 200,000 deaths in the United States alone. And that’s despite the relative cleanliness of U.S. air compared with other energy-intensive countries.
Coal is one of the main culprits for bad air quality. In China, where coal is used for generating two-thirds of the country’s electrical power, often in dirty, unscrubbed power plants, the air pollution is breathtaking—literally. The numbers are staggering: at least 1 million people die annually in China from air pollution.20 In the United States, where we use less coal than China, and where the coal itself is cleaner (for the most part, U.S. power plants use low-sulfur coal, which has fewer pollutants), and where it is burned more cleanly (U.S. power plants are more likely to have scrubbers than Chinese power plants), coal combustion still causes expensive damage to our public health and ecosystems.
Looking at coal through the lens of the energy-water nexus gets tricky. The same coal that dirties our air and water also makes electricity that we use to clean our water. And an electric cookstove powered by electricity from a coal-fired power plant far away is cleaner than burning cow dung in our homes. How are we going to balance this tension in the future so that we continue to have the clean water and stoves, but without all the pollution?
Ashlynn Stillwell, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pointed out to me that the unit of currency in Botswana is the “pula,” which literally translates as “rain.” In the movie Rango, the municipal bank in the middle of a desert community stores water in the vault, not gold. Terms like petrodollars and black gold suggest that energy and money are also synonymous in some contexts.
As the building blocks of industrial processes and agricultural production, energy and water both foster wealth creation and prosperity. And the consumption of energy and water also increases with wealth. Rich people consume a lot of energy for their homes, cars, and food, and use a lot of water for their lawns. As with many correlations, it is not clear if affluence causes energy and water consumption, or if consumption causes affluence, but the relationship is salient.
Whereas the United States is responsible for approximately 20 percent of global energy consumption, it is also responsible for about 20 percent of global economic activity. In fact, it turns out that energy consumption and economic activity have a roughly linear relationship. That is, countries that have higher per capita energy consumption tend to have higher gross domestic product. Per capita energy consumption is dependent on the wealth, lifestyle, culture, prevailing climate, and affordable access to energy for each country. It ranges from more than 800 million British thermal units (Btu) of energy per person per year for a small, rich, resource-abundant country such as Qatar to less than 10 million Btu per person per year for residents of Eritrea, a poor country with limited access to resources.21
This type of consumption has a positive feedback loop: countries with a lot of energy resources can become rich either by extracting those resources to sell to others or by harnessing them directly for their own economic activity such as manufacturing or agriculture. Whether those resources enrich the entire population or a small subset depends on factors such as effective governance structures and market systems. Then, as people become wealthier, they tend to consume more energy for electricity, meat, and transportation, all of which are typically preferred by the affluent. The water and energy used to make those products are called embedded energy and embedded water. Some call it the energy footprint, water footprint, or virtual water. I consume more water embedded in the grains I eat because of their irrigation than from the faucets at my house.
For a while, this pattern is a virtuous cycle, but at some point the cycle reverses itself because of the negative health effects of consuming dirty energy sources: energy consumption begets wealth, which begets more energy consumption, which begets pollution, which reduces wealth. We need to clean up our energy systems so that our consumption makes us healthy and wealthy instead of sick and poor.
As energy consumption varies by national income, so does water use. Affluent people eat more meat, which is very water intensive, because of all the water used to grow the feed for the livestock. The rich also use more electricity for appliances and tools. Electricity is also very water intensive, since power plants use a lot of water for cooling.
Not only do poor countries withdraw less water per person, but they also withdraw much less for industrial uses. Poor countries use a much higher fraction of their water for agriculture because they are closer to subsistence farmers, using most of their water just to feed themselves. By contrast, for the industrialized nations, where food needs have mostly been met, water can be used for other purposes. In the United States, only 39 percent of water withdrawals are for agriculture, compared with 70 percent globally.22
Mary Clayton was a physically fit and active twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Texas when she spent a month during the summer of 2011 doing project work in Ghana to help build a water system for a school. In Ghana, as in many parts of the developing world, it is the responsibility of women to fetch the water. Clayton came back describing the enormous burden of carrying water and what a challenge it was for her. She also shared anecdotes of girls—including girls younger than school age—who were stronger and able to carry more water a greater distance than she was. She fondly remembers the young girls laughing while trying to help her lift the bucket to her head that they so easily carried every day. If it is a burden for a fully grown, strong, healthy woman, imagine how many times girls in Ghana must have carried that burden to build the strength they needed.
Those girls would miss hours of school each day to get water from far away, carrying the heavy jugs of water balanced on their heads to cover a distance over a mile between the well and the school. But once they have the water, they are not done, as the water needs to be treated before it can be drunk. In remote villages where piped water systems and centralized water treatment with electrical pumps and other advanced techniques are not available, water is treated the old-fashioned way: it must be boiled. There’s a similar story for getting fuels: women often have to collect fuel from remote areas, again vulnerable along the way.
When they return after having fetched water and fuels, they need to use the fuels to boil the water as a form of treatment. Those fuels—including crop residues, animal waste such as cow dung, wood, and untreated coal—are burned in inefficient and dirty stoves that are used for cooking and heating. Unfortunately, the outdated cookstoves perform badly, producing indoor air pollution that has been linked to the premature death of over 4 million people every year, more than half of them women and children.23 In other words, antiquated energy and water systems put women at risk when they are collecting the water and the fuels, and when they are using the fuels to treat the water. These old energy and water systems literally deprive girls of their education and kill women by the millions.
Such archaic, labor-intensive approaches take a toll on prosperity and economic opportunity.24 In many places, the world’s poorest women are also traditionally responsible for planting and harvesting crops, milling grain, and fulfilling household chores; tedious responsibilities that leave little time for an education or employment outside of the home. Even if they could go to school, they might not have the lights they need to read books at night to study or, as the earlier anecdote noted, have to miss hours of school to fetch water. In turn, they have few or no options to work, earn an income, and gain independence, which perpetuates poverty. This fact is especially galling considering that more than 70 percent of the 1.5 billion people living on less than one dollar a day are women.25
Although the scenario I described sounds like something from the developing world somewhere far away, it is also part of the United States experience in the not-too-distant past. The University of Missouri in 1920 issued a poster as part of an information campaign—or propaganda, depending on whom you ask—to encourage farm owners to modernize the water systems of their homes and operations. It is aptly titled “The Farm Woman’s Dream,” and shows a woman—presumably poor and dressed in rough clothes or rags—carrying water without any gloves in the freezing cold along an icy path uphill from a hand-pumped well. The dreary image evokes a sense of hard labor associated with getting water into our homes. In the upper part of the image is the farm woman’s purported dream: nicely dressed in short sleeves, comfortably indoors, opening spigots at a sink, with hot water coming out, its steam curling to the ceiling. The poster is targeted at women, not men, a telling example of who endured the greatest burden from not having access to modernized systems, and who would reap the greatest benefit from the modern improvements. The burdened, vulnerable woman in Africa today, struggling to fetch water, is not much different than the burdened, vulnerable woman in the rural United States less than a century ago. Access to water and energy turns the story around.
For that poor hill country woman and the vulnerable women in Africa today, their dream—the solution—is the same: with a modern water system (with pipes and pumps) and a modern energy system, including electricity to drive the pumps and fuels to heat the water, women can be liberated from tedious and dangerous chores. Novel electrical appliances such as the dishwasher and washing machine provided women in the United States even more freedom to pursue opportunities outside the home beyond menial labor.26 Chores like cooking and cleaning were no longer as time consuming and complicated, and a new generation suddenly had the chance to pursue higher education and their own careers. In turn, American culture began to shift to accommodate working women.
“The Farm Woman’s Dream”: A U.S. government poster from the first part of the twentieth century depicts piped heated water indoors as the dream of every farm woman. [University of Missouri, College of Agriculture, Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, 1920]
Similar changes will take place in the developing world when we work harder to promote greater access to electricity and the adoption of modern energy tools. Distributed energy and water systems that use advanced technologies like nanofilters and smart controls can help democratize resource access, improve health, and liberate a whole new generation of people. Improved living conditions from cleaner and more reliable energy and water services would open up the possibility for alleviating poverty among women while also giving them more choices for goals in life.
Typically, international policy discussions regarding energy and water specifically focus on economics, security, and the environment, leaving human rights and women out of the conversation entirely. But by working to improve global access to more efficient sources and making these sectors more resilient, we will achieve a healthier, cleaner, and more sustainable future for all of us. Doing so will empower women, which in turn empowers society.