James E. Nickum
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
By
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
By
Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource
By
Although warnings that water crises, even water wars, are pending have a long history -- and a long history of being overblown -- there are increasing signs that the management of water resources worldwide is now reaching a tipping point. Many lakes and rivers are vanishing, and the quality of those that remain is deteriorating. Ground-water supplies are under pressure from overuse and pollution. Some fish populations are accumulating anthropogenic toxins; others threaten to disappear altogether (remember Atlantic cod?). Climate change may already be rearranging rainfall and glacial melting patterns, making life in arid areas increasingly untenable and intensifying floods in the already wet, and more populous, regions.
Water experts have long quipped that when the problem is not too much water, it is too little water, or water that is too dirty. Increasingly, however, the problem also seems to be that water is in the wrong hands. According to the
Cracks are also showing in the world's water infrastructure. The massive inventory of dams, subsidized irrigation networks, and urban water and sewage systems built over the last half century is aging, poorly maintained, and underfunded. Cash-strapped governments and taxpayers are disinclined to pay the high costs of repairing or replacing these overstressed facilities, even while they expect them to continue to operate.
With most of the world's watercourses shared by several countries, water management can be a major source of tension, especially between the countries upstream, which often claim to have sovereign rights over the water while it is on their territory, and the countries downstream, which feel that they are left having to make do with unpredictable supplies of less and less clean water than they are entitled to. Water disputes are legion: among others, there are those between
According to the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, which is maintained by
Water issues are almost never only about the water; they involve an ever-expanding list of other matters. Population growth and improved lifestyles are major drains on water supplies, especially in emerging economies. Snowbirds flock to dry climates expecting the golf courses and lush lawns of wetter regions. The world's growing middle class is consuming more beef and more dairy goods, products that require much more water than other foods: it can take up to 75 times as much water to produce one pound of beef as it does to produce one pound of wheat. Water's fortunes have also been bound up with energy matters since the invention of the watermill. Pumping water from underground or moving it over mountains takes enormous amounts of energy: one-fifth of
Given the complexity of these issues, it is little surprise that three new books all agree that the world is facing serious water crises and yet have very different ideas about how to address them.
WATER POWERS
Solomon's book is an ambitious 500-plus-page history of leading civilizations that argues that states' ability to make the best use of water resources has been the key to distinguishing winners and losers in "the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization." Drawing both on the historian Karl Wittfogel's theory that despotic, "hydraulic" societies, with their large government irrigation and flood-control works, are bound to clash with liberal democratic, "non-hydraulic" societies and on Fernand Braudel's even more sweeping geopolitical history of civilizations, Solomon claims that "preeminent societies have invariably exploited their water resources in ways that were more productive, and unleashed larger supplies, than slower-adapting ones." He lines up the usual examples of hydraulic giants, mostly from ancient times: Pharaonic Egypt, the
Having linked water to power, in despotic and democratic systems alike, Solomon defines the prospects for countries today in terms of their access to and uses of water. He divides states between the water haves and the water have-nots. He then argues that water will become more valuable than oil and that as that happens, the
Solomon contends that fresh water is the Achilles' heel of both
But why should food self-sufficiency matter in an open world economy? Solomon's argument reflects a long-standing concern in some circles that at some point other states are going to have to feed
Solomon argues that the West will fare best in the face of water scarcity because it is the region most likely to be able to overcome the "inefficiencies, waste, and political favoritism" characteristic of "the government command systems" that have "controlled water use in almost every society through the centuries." It can succeed through "greater reliance upon the self-interested, profit motive of individuals organized by the politically indifferent market" -- which market, Solomon adds without flinching, is "anchored in a pricing mechanism for valuing water that reflects both the full cost of sustaining ecosystems through externally imposed environmental standards and a social fairness guarantee for everyone to receive at affordable cost the minimum amounts necessary for their basic needs." This is a world in which the forces of the market are unleashed but kept from doing harm by rational regulators presumably insulated from political imperatives.
The profit motive would be a trustworthy guide if the world ran as in an economics textbook, but in real life, the market is not politically indifferent and self-interest rarely takes adequate account of environmental standards or social fairness. If anything, it is a surfeit of invisible hands that is depleting aquifers and leaving contaminants to run off from farms and highways. A classic example that Solomon misses in his otherwise fascinating section on
Solomon, a former financial reporter, places too much faith in the particular "governing model" that will "redeploy the existing water resources from less to more productive hands." Vested interests and entitlements are inflexible, both domestically and internationally, especially where legal systems are strong. Authoritarian systems certainly have their rigidities, as Solomon rightly notes, but their ability to overlook the niceties of property rights allows them to make major shifts in the use of natural resources. Over the past decade, for instance, the Chinese government has redeployed massive amounts of water from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity industry and for use in homes. So it is rash to assume that the Western market model will prevail over the Chinese or the Indian market muddle (or vice versa), or that these models will not evolve.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Gleick's lively book on the booming bottled-water industry and its "war on tap water" illustrates why one might not want to trust market forces to redeploy fresh water to its most valued uses. Americans now drink an average of 30 gallons of bottled water per person each year -- 20 times as much as they did 30 years ago -- and usually from plastic bottles that they may or may not bother to recycle. These days, a liter of bottled water is more valuable, or at least higher priced, than a liter of oil. Last year, on the campus where I teach in
The success of Masafi and Perrier and
For both Solomon and Gleick, the world is now radically changing the ways in which it deals with water, and the ways in which it does so will reveal a lot about everything else. But unlike Solomon, Gleick envisions an approach to water management that tries to harmonize relations between humans and nature, between governments and the market, between the privileged and the marginalized. Ultimately, for Gleick, "access to affordable safe tap water would be universal and bottled water would become unnecessary." However, the "anti-tax, anti-government, and anti-regulation" philosophies that Gleick condemns may prevail for a while longer and "continue to cripple municipal infrastructure of all kinds and weaken government enforcement of water-quality protections."
GOOD TILL AFTER THE LAST DROP
Rogers and Leal share Gleick's concern over bottled water, but they focus on finding "workable solutions" for fixing a wide range of water problems. Even where political positions are deeply entrenched --
The great strength of Rogers and Leal's book is its inclusion of cases that are about the unmentionable side of water: sewage. Industries around the world have long recognized the economic and environmental benefits of reusing water, but the public utilities have lagged behind. Even after it is treated, sewage water is usually considered something that should be disposed of in the least harmful manner. Treating sewage is also costly. In
As Rogers and Leal argue, however, sewage is waste only so long as it is treated as waste; it can be a resource. Some of their book's most interesting cases are about how to turn wastewater into an asset. Treated sewage is increasingly becoming a low-cost alternative to more traditional water supplies: it has been used to recharge ground-water reserves in
FLOWING UPHILL
Solomon trusts market forces; Gleick distrusts them; Rogers and Leal think they can be harnessed alongside the state's power to good effect. Given enough time, economics does seem to wind up dictating how water gets used, and not necessarily in twisted ways. Water is increasingly being used to irrigate high-value crops instead of low-value ones, and it is being redirected from farms to cities. In an open international system, trade not only expands national economies but also, in good Ricardian fashion, allows them to escape the limitations of local water supplies. Food grown in wetter areas can be exported to drier ones, allowing the local water to be used for higher-priority uses. The point of the 1,200-mile
Nonetheless, it bears repeating that economics does not necessarily yield socially or even politically optimal solutions. As water experts say, water flows uphill to money. The rich and powerful, frequently the urban and industrial, have the biggest pumps. And there often is an inverse relationship between economic rationality and political rationality: the economic laws of scarcity push prices up even as the political laws of scarcity give officials a reason to keep prices down. Another complication is that water problems are irremediably connected, sometimes as a symptom and sometimes as a cause, to many other issues: globalization, demographics, governance, energy, health, the role of women and children, the environment. The world's water problems reflect all the world's problems.
James E. Nickum is Secretary-General of the International Water Resources Association, a Professor at Tokyo Jogakkan College, and Editor in Chief of Water International
Available at Amazon.com:
Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
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