Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it's making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.
Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:
Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.
Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.
Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently. A lot of water is used to grow hay and alfalfa. Some of it, a good portion of it, is actually used to grow alfalfa which is then shipped to countries like China to support their dairy industry. So in a sense, we are exporting Colorado River water to China in the form of alfalfa so they can support their dairy industry and have the alfalfa grown here. And again, it's not because farmers are unpatriotic or bad people or anything like that. They are responding to incentives.
It's very important with water that we begin to create other opportunities for water. If farmers could make as much income by selling water to an urban area or selling water to a conservation organization or a water trust in order to put that water back to depleted ecosystems, they would do that. It is an economic decision. It is up to policy and our public officials that are overseeing our water supplies to make the laws and practices work for the benefit of a sustainable water feature and right now, we are just not doing that. The subsidies are great and the water laws essentially are grounded in something called prior appropriation and beneficial use which means use it or lose it. So if you have a water right, you basically need to show that you are using it or you could risk losing it. And so there is an incentive to use water efficiently in much of the West. State laws are beginning to change that and open it up, but we still have some sort of really crazy practices around water that need reform.
Going forward, we need to ask better questions like: How do we repair the water cycle? How do we make use of natural systems, whether it is flood plains, ground water aquifers, river systems, wet lands, etc to help us become more resilient? I think there is a lot of potential there to do that. We are just coming off of this age of water engineering, you know, the big dams, the big canals, the big dikes to control floods, the big diversion systems to move water around. It has been a very engineering-intensive century but we have really not looked at nature’s work in the way that we could, like the fact that nature is cleaning water whenever it runs through a wetland — it's absorbing and storing water. Whenever we allow a river to connect to its flood plain, it recharges ground water which we can then tap during times of drought. We have really been substituting civil engineering for ecological engineering — nature’s engineering — and in some sense, we have to rebalance that because I think it's nature’s piece that is going to give us the resilience we're going to need to deal with climate impacts.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Sandra Postel (47m:45s)
by arthur-robey-2