Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

1\ Water in Peril\ Is the crisis looming,or has it already loomed?\ The little mokoro, a boat roughly hewn from a mopane log, drifted \ slowly through the waters of the Okavango Delta. It was tiny — hardly \ larger than the crocodiles whose snorkel-eyes could sometimes be \ seen, mercilessly obsidian. The water was a startling blue with \ eddies of silt, drifts of ochre and dun, easy enough to examine, for \ the boat rode only a few centimeters above the surface. There were \ sudden splashings from a nearby papyrus island as hippos rolled in \ the muck.\ \ You could spend days poling through the Okavango's twisty \ hippo-ways in a mokoro and never see anyone. You can clamber out of \ your mokoro onto an "island" of swamp grass a meter thick, but if you \ were accidentally to plunge through — an easy thing to do — there \ would be a couple of meters of water beneath you. Everywhere \ improbable vegetation grows prolifically. There are papyrus beds, \ swamp grasses sharp as razors, and exposed roots worn smooth by heavy \ bodies passing.\ The Bayei people, swamp dwellers, find their way effortlessly \ through this maze of identical channels, but sometimes even they go \ into the swamp and never return. A legend says there are legions of \ screaming skulls in the muck beneath the islands; at the end of the \ world, when the waters dry up, they will be exposed to confirm the \ apocalypse so long forecast. At twilight, when the hippos return to \ the channels, their heavy, lethal bodies cutting Vs into the water, \ it's an easy legend to believe.\ Now the Bayei are being told that the end of theirworld may \ come earlier — not through catastrophe as prophesied, but through the \ thirst of that most voracious and expansionist of species, humankind. \ The pipelines, dredgers, and cadres of water management engineers and \ the bureaucrats of the water commission draw ever closer, persistent \ as a virus with no cure, ready to suck the lifeblood from the delta. \ And in 1996, for the first time in many years, the annual Okavango \ flood never reached the delta. The rains had failed in Angola, the \ Bayei were told.\ "How deep is it here?" I asked Kehemetswe, the Bayei who was \ poling the mokoro.\ "Two meters," he said. "That's fifteen feet," he added \ helpfully, getting it wrong.\ He wore baggy khaki shorts, a sun visor marked "All England \ Tennis Club," and 10-centimeter earrings made of chipped bone and \ braided twine.His pole was a skinny thing that bent perilously in the \ mud as he pushed us along. He said he would use it to thwack \ crocodiles if they became a nuisance. Thwack — it had a reassuring \ sound.\ "Two meters? Is that normal?"\ "Last year, three. Year before that, three. Year before that, \ three. Three. Always three."\ "What does this mean?" I asked, but I already knew the \ answer. And the next year I saw him quoted in a Johannesburg \ newspaper: "Namibia wants to build a pipe to take water from the \ river through the desert," he said. "If the water dries up, it will \ be the end of our lives. All the things of our lives solely depend on \ it."\ \ The Okavango, the third-largest river in southern Africa, rises in \ the moist tropical hills of Angola, where it is known as the Cubango, \ and flows for about 1,400 kilometers through Namibia and into \ Botswana; there it soaks into the .at plains of the Kalahari and \ spreads out in a dazzling array of channels that make up Africa's \ largest oasis and the world's most spectacular inland delta.\ Once the Okavango Delta was a lake, but a geologic era ago \ some slight tectonic shift in the earth's crust drained the water \ into secret crevices. The Okavango River continued to pour down \ across what is now the Caprivi Strip from the moist hills of Angola's \ Benguela Plateau as it always had, but the lake had disappeared. The \ river became tangled in thickets of reeds, giant papyrus, and mud, \ and then just vanished. Riviersonderend, the Afrikaners called it, \ River Without End. There are many such rivers in the wild and \ desolate north, the Great Thirstland, but the Okavango was the \ grandest, most fertile, and most beautiful of all.\ In good years the waters still overflow the marshes into the \ Boteti River and reach the parched, arid surface of the Makgadigadi \ Pans to the southeast. In the best years of all they seep \ northeastward into the even more remote and mysterious Linyanti \ lagoons. This marsh is one of the grandest places on earth. So many \ legends, so entangled with mundane and exotic fact! The munu, the \ black tree baboons that folklore says stalk Okavango women, longing \ for the day they might be men again. Lions hunting at night. Lagoons \ boiling with hippos. Endless forests of thorn acacia and mopane \ trees, home to leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, Cape buffalo, giraffes, \ a shopping cart full of monkey species, the greatest migrations of \ zebras on earth, and huge herds of elephants. These 60,000 elephants \ are the subject of bitter controversy. The Botswanan government \ prohibited all elephant hunting in 1983, to universal acclaim, but \ since then the herds have proliferated, causing massive habitat \ destruction. And they are now being culled: some 15,000 elephants \ will have to be shot, here and in Zimbabwe and Angola, to end their \ own suicidal eating binge.\ The Okavango Swamp has other enemies: drought, for one. In \ the 1990s the Kalahari region and Angola suffered from the worst \ drought of the century, and no one knows whether the marsh will \ recover. El Niño was blamed, but when the disturbance ended and the \ rains still did not come, human-induced climate change became the \ cause of choice. Mostly, the inhabitants were reduced to praying for \ rain, but the water levels continued to shrink. Now from the south, \ from Botswana's orderly and well-managed cities, comes an enemy even \ worse than drought: growing human populations and their demands for \ more, more, more. And from neighboring Namibia, too. Namibia is a \ desert country and always parched. But its population is growing, and \ in 1996, with the country's reservoirs standing at 9 percent of \ capacity, Namibian authorities turned their eyes eastward, to \ Botswana's Okavango Delta.\ By 1997 there were already threats of a "water war" between \ Namibia, which wanted to take 20 million cubic meters a year from the \ Okavango system, and Botswana, whose own dams and reservoirs were \ critically low after ten years without rain. In all likelihood this \ talk of war was mere hyperbole. Still, there were threats of sabotage \ if a pipeline proposed by Namibia were ever to be built. Late in 1997 \ residents of Maun, in Botswana, walked out of a conciliatory meeting \ called by the Namibian government, and both countries went to the \ International Court of Justice at The Hague to dispute a minor \ boundary issue, a sure sign of internation fractiousness.\ \ In 1996, when the annual floods failed, Maun was put immediately at \ risk — not just tourism but the villagers, too, who need the river \ for washing, for fish, and for the water lily roots and reeds they \ use to build houses. The town's drinking water, drawn from boreholes, \ was also drying up. Botswana's hydrologists scrambled to find out \ just how rapidly the water table was dropping. Alarmist stories were \ heard everywhere. Namibia's pipeline would mean permanent drought, \ residents were told. Wells and boreholes would go dry.\ Namibia, in turn, had its anxieties. Few places on earth are \ drier than Namibia. Of the meager rain that does fall, four-fifths \ evaporates immediately. Only 1 percent recharges groundwater tables. \ Worse, Namibia has no perennial rivers, only seasonally flowing ones \ that are reduced to a trickle for several months and dry up \ completely in others.\ To augment the water supply, Namibia has been tinkering with \ other options, including desalination and pumping groundwater from \ its fossil aquifers. But desalination, expensive enough anywhere, is \ prohibitive in Namibia, where most of the population centers are \ inland. Overpumping groundwater has also caused dangerous increases \ in water and soil salinity, as well as the rapid depletion of the \ aquifers themselves.\ This chronic water shortage prodded Namibia to launch a \ planning process to extend its already massive network of supply \ pipelines and aqueducts, the Eastern National Water Carrier, to the \ Okavango River, which runs throughout the year along its northeastern \ border with Angola. The first phases of the plan would divert an \ estimated 20 million cubic meters of water annually (700 liters a \ second) from a point on the Okavango River near Rundu in northern \ Namibia — well before the river gets to Botswana — and pump it uphill \ through a 250-kilometer pipeline to Windhoek, the capital. Namibia \ sees the pipeline as the only feasible solution to keep pace with the \ water demands of its growing urban centers. Clearly, the need for \ both governments to negotiate a long-term solution is urgent.\ Not surprisingly, the Namibians have defended their plans and \ maintain that the amount they will be taking is negligible, even \ though they intend to quadruple or quintuple it to somewhere around \ 100 million cubic meters a year. Even that, they maintain, would draw \ off only 1 percent of the water flowing through the Okavango system. \ Richard Fry, Namibia's deputy secretary of water affairs, was \ blunt. "The severity of Namibia's water crisis leaves us with little \ option," he said after the Okavango floods failed in 1996. The dams \ supplying Windhoek and the central areas of Namibia were at an all-\ time low, and were expected to run completely dry in a year or two. \ Namibia's senior water engineer, a bluff Afrikaner called Piet Heyns, \ was blunter still: "If we don't build the pipeline and the rains fail \ again . . . we'll be in the shit," he told the press.4 The corpses of \ 60,000 head of cattle, dead of thirst, littered the landscape.\ What, indeed, are the alternatives? It's not that Namibia \ isn't trying. If desalination is too expensive, and pumping water \ from disused mines is only a temporary solution, what is left? \ Namibians are not profligate users of water. In the last few years, \ Windhoek's residents have been cutting back water use, achieving a 30 \ percent saving. The city's annual consumption of 17 million cubic \ meters has not increased significantly since independence in 1990, \ despite a growth in population from 130,000 to 220,000, and is now \ only one-third of the water consumed per capita in another desert \ city, Las Vegas. Significant increases in the efficiency of use — \ what Sandra Postel has called poetically the "last oasis" — are \ therefore unlikely, and, despite conservation, the country's water \ needs are expected to double by 2020.Where is this water to come \ from? Namibia has agreed to an extensive environmental impact study \ before spending more than half a billion dollars to dip its pipeline \ into the Okavango. But what happens if the study says the delta would \ be irreparably harmed? What happens if Botswana furiously objects? \ Richard Fry believes that Botswana will see Namibia's water crisis in \ the light of "humanitarian need" and will ultimately respond \ sympathetically to the pipeline project. But if it doesn't, what are \ the Namibians to do? And if the Namibians go ahead despite \ objections, what are the Botswanans to do?\ The nagging questions remain: Is it safe to interfere with \ the delta's only supply of water? The Okavango is robust enough to \ survive anything except the water being turned off. If that happens, \ a Garden of Eden would return to Kalahari dust, the wildlife would \ migrate or die, and 100,000 humans would be reduced to slum dwellers \ in cities already unable to cope. If it isn't safe to divert the \ water, is it necessary? Where, in the balance of competing interests, \ does natural justice lie? At what point does man's stewardship of the \ planet and its resources collide with man's own needs? What is the \ ethical position? Has it come to this: a stark choice between human \ misery and the destruction of one of the planet's most magnificent \ jewels?\ And perhaps the most difficult question of all: In any \ ecology, beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom \ diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the \ finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of the Okavango \ elephants or of gas molecules in a sealed .ask. The human question is \ not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of \ existence is possible for those who do survive.\ \ Why should the world care what happens in this obscure debate between \ two minor-league African nations? Both countries are interesting \ enough, but hardly worth the world's concentrated attention. Namibia \ is, after all, the most arid country in the southern end of an arid \ continent. And Botswana? It is also a curiosity: a democratically \ run, sensibly governed, economically sound country that has eschewed \ grandiose development projects in favor of small-scale enterprise, \ schooling, and decent housing. But this is a country that has only \ one and a half rivers. It too is mostly desert. Of course these two \ places will squabble over water. What has that to do with the water-\ rich North?\ As we shall see, the Okavango is the world in miniature. All \ the great themes that are being played out on the global scale with \ water — diminishing aquifers, dropping water tables, alarm about \ sustainability — all the issues that are facing more populous places \ much more critical to global peace, are here being traced in sinewy \ outline. Here is a rapidly growing population placing a strain on a \ fragile and finite resource — just as it is in North Africa, China, \ many parts of Asia, sections of Europe, and the southwestern United \ States. Here are humankind's competing imperatives, for food and \ for "development." Here is a simple example of the transboundary, \ supranational nature of water basin and water resource debates — just \ as is happening along the Nile, the Mekong, the Ganges, the Tigris \ and the Euphrates, the Jordan, the Rhine and the Danube, the \ Colorado, Rio Grande, and Columbia. Here is a small-scale example of \ growing interstate tensions over an increasingly anxious need for \ life's most critical resource. Here, poignantly, is the imminent and \ probably unpreventable destruction of a superb and precious \ ecosystem, with all its intended and unintended consequences — much \ like the Three Gorges on China's Yangtze River. Here are human \ politics brutally undisguised, and a sign that necessity will always \ trump ethics — as the Americans have done to the Mexicans over the \ Colorado. Here engineers are trying to solve problems not of their \ own causing, with predictably dismal results — as in China, Libya, or \ the planet's most expensive welfare system, California's waterworks. \ Yet here also, by way of contrast, is the possibility for \ international cooperation: water wars are not inevitable. Namibia, \ Botswana, and Angola have set up a commission to discuss water \ rights, just as the Indians and Bangladeshis have done in their \ squabble over the Ganges.\ \ I was in the Kenyan town of Narok the night a group of Maasai morans, \ warriors going through their rites of passage to tribal elder, \ clashed with the thuggish national police of Daniel Arap Moi. The \ cause of the ferocious riot that followed is of no consequence — \ warrior exuberance had gotten out of hand, and the police had \ overreacted — but, to be safe, I left them to rattle their sticks and \ truncheons at one another and took refuge in a nearby village. There \ I was invited in by a family of Gabbra, who lived in a tiny four-hut \ complex 3 kilometers from the nearest well.\ The senior woman of the household, Manya, invited me to stay \ and pressed on me unwanted gifts of food she couldn't afford. It was, \ I knew, a typical African welcome.\ In return, I picked up one of the four yellow plastic drums \ piled in front of the hut — it had started its life as a bulk \ container for vegetable oil in some far-off industrial city — and \ offered to help her fetch water. The family laughed, politely, but it \ was obvious what they were really thinking: white people, mzungu, are \ so inept. Fetching water was woman's work. So I stayed behind with \ the men, who were smoking on a wooden bench outside one of the huts.\ Later that evening Manya and her daughters returned, each \ with a 15-liter pail balanced on her head. They swayed down the \ trail, singing one of their working songs to pass the hours, as they \ had done that morning, and as they would do on the days that \ followed, and as they expected to do, if they thought about it at \ all, forever.\ A little later we ate corn mash and fried banana and sucked \ on mangoes. I declined the water, partly out of politeness and partly \ out of fear. The well was an old one and had originally been used by \ fifty families. Now, four times as many drew water from it, and they \ had to go down farther every year. A few months earlier, Manya said, \ two men had descended into the well and had passed up the muck in \ buckets, deepening the well by the height of a man. The water was \ muddy and smelled unclean.\ All over East Africa — indeed, all over Africa — it is normal \ for people to walk a kilometer or two or six for water. In the more \ arid areas, people walk even greater distances, and sometimes all \ they find at the end is a pond slimy with overuse. More than 90 \ percent of Africans still dig for their water, and waterborne \ diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, bilharzia, and cholera are \ common. The bodies of many Africans are a stew of parasites. In some \ areas the wells are so far below the earth's surface that chains of \ people are required to pass up the water.\ In Mali a few months later I stayed in a village in which an \ American non-government organization (NGO) had installed a solar-\ energy pump and a galvanized storage tank; it was still working \ perfectly five years after it was put in place. In Niger, across the \ border, a similar pump had broken, and one night a child had opened \ the stopcock on the tank and the water had all run out, soaking into \ the parched earth. The child was beaten, but it was too late. The \ water was gone and the villagers all moved. They never returned.\ A year after that I visited a family of walnut growers in \ California's Central Valley. They had a drilled well out back, but \ had recently had to refurbish it because the water had run dry. They \ were down to 230 meters before they struck water again. They didn't \ mind. Their trees and gardens were irrigated by water brought in from \ the California Aqueduct and supplied to them at 10 cents a cubic \ meter, far below the cost of either collecting or transporting it. \ They were careful water managers, however, and meticulously metered \ the amount of water given to each tree — not like their neighbors, \ who let the water flow freely in furrows and frequently forgot to \ close the sluices. Yet they were members of the local golf club, \ whose fairways and greens were watered and fertilized all summer to \ preserve the lushness that golfers demand. They saw nothing \ incongruous in their behavior.\ The rainfall in that part of the Central Valley was only 15 \ to 18 centimeters a year, the same as on the Kenyan plains. The water \ table was even lower. No one in Kenya could afford to install the \ kind of pumps that would deplete a subterranean aquifer, or "draw it \ down" at unsustainable rates, faster than it could be naturally \ replenished. Same climate, same rainfall, similar families. But when \ Bonnie Schuch, the walnut grower, wanted to fill her swimming pool, \ she turned the faucet without a second thought. Manya had never seen \ a swimming pool. Lazing in the water had never figured in her dreams.\ \ The trouble with water —and there is trouble with water — is that \ they're not making any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, \ but no more either. There is the same amount of water on the planet \ now as there was in prehistoric times. People, however, they're \ making more of — many more, far more than is ecologically sensible — \ and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives \ (humans consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, \ and, increasingly, their industry. Humans can live for a month \ without food but will die in less than a week without water. Humans \ consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly change \ the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many \ people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong \ amounts. The human population is burgeoning, but water demand is \ increasing twice as fast.\ The environmental movement, accustomed by now to fits of \ gloomy Malthusian soothsaying, has forecast increasingly common \ collisions between demand and supply. Even officials of so sober an \ institution as the World Bank have joined the chorus. Ismail \ Serageldin, the bank's vice president for environmental affairs and \ chairman of the World Water Commission, stated bluntly that "the wars \ of the twenty-first century will be fought over water." Although he \ was roundly criticized for this opinion, he refused to disavow it, \ and has frequently asserted that water is the most critical issue \ facing human development. Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros \ Ghali said something similar about water wars. So did Jordan's late \ king Hussein, who had obvious cause to mean it. Egypt has more than \ once threatened to go to war over diversions of the Nile. Water is in \ crisis in China, in Southeast Asia, in southwest America, in North \ Africa — indeed, in much of Africa except the Congo, Niger, and \ Zambezi basins. Even in Europe there are shortages. Drought is no \ longer a word alien to England, where water tables began dropping in \ the early 1990s. In many parts of Europe, downstream towns and cities \ are feeling the consequences of the careless alteration of age-old \ hydrological ecosystems, as rivers suddenly rage out of control, \ wetlands dry up, and contaminants enter the groundwater. Yes, even in \ Europe there is a crisis in water supply and management, as \ groundwater tables sink and rivers are reduced to a trickle or \ increased to a destructive flood.\ Of course, there are skeptics, just as there are those who \ don't believe in the widespread notion that one generation is simply \ the earth's steward, holding it in trust for generations to come. \ These skeptics believe that the problem is overblown, and even if it \ isn't, it will surely be solved through human ingenuity and \ technological advances in the future.\ But these people are a constantly shrinking minority. \ Everywhere you look, there are signs that the water supply is in \ peril.\ \ • The level of the Dead Sea has plummeted more than 10 meters over \ the last hundred years. The river Jordan has been reduced to little \ more than a drainage ditch. In northern Israel, the Sea of Galilee, \ which gives much of the south its water, is shrinking and threatening \ to turn saline. In Gaza, overpumping is reducing the hydrological \ pressure, which is letting the seawater in, and the wells are \ producing water that is less and less potable. Already Jordan, \ Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Cyprus, Malta, and the Arabian Peninsula \ are at the point where all surface and ground freshwater resources \ are fully used. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt will be in the \ same position within a decade.\ • About 250 million people inhabited the earth 2,000 years ago. By \ 2020 there will be 400 million along the North African shores and in \ the Middle East alone. And the water supply is shrinking as fossil \ aquifers are used up.\ • The Sahara is expanding. A trivial few thousand years ago, hippos \ played where there is now only stone and scrub. \ • Lake Chad — once, it was supposed, one of the sources of the Nile — \ is shrinking at a rate of nearly 100 meters a year. Already, in dry \ years, humans can wade across it safely, if they are wary of \ crocodiles and hippos.\ • Water supplies in the Nile Valley itself — the cradle of \ civilization — are in peril. Egypt is an efficient user of water, but \ Egyptians are consuming virtually all the available supply, and the \ population is growing at more than 3 percent per year. There are a \ million new Egyptians every nine months.\ • In millions of hectares of northern China, the water table is \ dropping at a rate of 1 meter a year. Irrigation — and its wasteful \ runoff — is blamed. Beijing can now supply itself only by diverting \ water from farmers, who give up farming and retreat to the cities — \ adding to the water demand there. Huge diversion schemes are afoot to \ bring in water from the water-rich and flood-prone south, but this \ may not be enough, or may not be in time to match need to supply.\ • In the Punjab and in Bangladesh, where there is flooding almost \ every year, the rate of drop in the water table is even faster than \ in China. Too many people, too little retained water. \ • The water level in the once pristine Lake Baikal, the deepest \ freshwater lake in the world, is sinking steadily. At the same time, \ the quality of its water is deteriorating as effluent from \ unregulated factories pours into it.\ • In Europe, although there are successes, most of the major rivers \ carry industrial and human wastes to the sea. Even in remote parts of \ continental Europe, the water from streams can be unfit to drink. In \ many parts of Slovakia, Poland, and western Russia, the rivers run \ yellow with industrial poisons. \ • "There is far less good water to drink in England and Wales than \ was previously supposed, the Environment Agency claims in a report \ issued today." In these words the British media, in March 1998, \ reported that a supposed buffer supply of about 1 billion liters of \ water did not in fact exist. The study, which looked closely at \ rainfall patterns over recent years, found the northwest, Thames \ Valley, and west of England and Wales to be the hardest-hit areas, \ though there has been an increasing incidence of drought in general, \ and certain critical aquifers are shrinking. In the fourth year of \ the major drought of the early 1990s, The Economist reported, the \ margin between supply and demand in England had shrunk alarmingly to \ 3 or 4 percent. England — England! — was facing droughts.\ • In the southwestern United States, politicians have notched the \ rhetoric up and are beginning to view northerners' reluctance to \ divert water southward as an act of ecological aggression — not just \ from northern California, Oregon, and Washington, but from Alaska and \ Canada, too. Some of the grandest rivers of northwestern Canada, in \ this view, are being "wasted" — allowed to flow uninterrupted into \ the oceans instead of being channeled southward to irrigate parched \ farmland. Las Vegas is demanding a greater share of the waters of the \ Colorado River. Many places in the High Plains are overdrafting the \ aquifers on which the region's farmers depend.\ • Entrepreneurs in Colorado and other states have run into furious \ and passionate opposition to their plans to "mine" water; the private \ control of water resources is more and more an issue. In 1974, Roman \ Polanski's movie Chinatown had as its underlying theme the \ willingness of politicians and developers to murder for the right to \ bring water to the American Southwest — so valuable a resource did it \ appear. Since then, there have been several celebrated real-life \ civil trials involving the crucial question: Who controls supply?\ \ It's now, of course, just a small curiosity of American \ history, but the last time one state took up arms against another was \ over water. In 1944 Governor Benjamin Moeur, a politician with a .air \ for the dramatic, dispatched the Arizona National Guard to the \ Colorado River during the construction of the Parker Dam, his \ declared intention being to stop California's "theft" of Arizona's \ water. A one hundred–man unit with machine guns mounted on trucks \ appeared at the dam site, and construction stopped, as well it might. \ The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently ruled in favor of Moeur's claim \ that California had been acting illegally in expropriating water \ without Arizona's permission. But Congress set the decision aside by \ passing a retroactive bill to legalize the theft, and that was the \ end of that.\ \ At a 1998 UNESCO conference, "Water: The Looming Crisis," Peter \ Gleick, a short, neatly bearded, precise fellow who exudes a \ justified air of authority and competence, was up on the platform \ arguing passionately for different ways of looking at water. The \ crude global or continental measures are all very well, he was \ saying, but they tell us nothing about the human costs. Even national \ figures can be misleading, as we know. Parts of Bangladesh may be \ flooded, others parched. Or a country can be underwater one month and \ stricken with water shortages a few months later. Water availability \ is one measure, certainly. Actual water use — withdrawals from the \ system — is another, and it tells us different things, some of them \ difficult to interpret. A further way of looking at water is to see \ how we can provide for the basic water needs of all citizens. "The \ actual amount you give to each individual — the number of liters — is \ not that important," he said, "only that we move from zero to \ something."\ Gleick paused and leaned forward on the lectern. "You ask me \ about costs?" he demanded. "I can tell you the cost of not providing \ basic water for drinking and sanitation will far outweigh the cost of \ doing so." These costs, he said, were currently running between $100 \ and $200 billion a year for health care and social welfare \ alone. "About half the modern world doesn't have the same basic \ amenities the ancient Romans took for granted."\ Gleick recommended that UNESCO adopt a "human entitlement" of \ 50 liters of water per person per day. "Drinking water, 5 liters; \ sanitation water, 20 liters; bathing water, 15 liters; food \ preparation, 10 liters. Total, 50 liters." These figures, he pointed \ out, are far below even the minimal average withdrawals per capita in \ the most water poor of countries. "This is not a technological issue. \ The technology is easily available. It is a political and \ organizational issue. Water is a social good — we all agree on that. \ People should pay for its use, to encourage efficiency and as a \ recognition of its value. But perhaps a universal 'lifeline rate' \ should be established, and anything above that should be priced much \ higher. To water a lawn, for example, should be truly expensive."\ I was only half listening. I was still puzzling over \ something else he had said about the amount of water withdrawals on a \ continentwide basis. Most hydrologists accepted Malin Falkenmark's \ notion that 1,700 cubic meters per person per year was the cutoff \ between a country being water stressed and reasonably comfortable. \ Yet when I looked at Gleick's figures for actual water use, as \ opposed to available water, no one was really using the full 1,700 \ cubic meters. Even the Americans and Canadians, the greatest water \ hogs, were using only 1,693 cubic meters a year, out of a resource \ much greater than that. In descending levels of use, Oceania (the \ Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji) \ used 907 cubic meters, Europe 726, Asia 526, South America 376, and \ Africa a puny 244.\ And I had just that morning finished reading a pamphlet put \ out by Population Action International which had dealt with revised \ UN population estimates for 2050, projections made in 1996 that were \ sharply lower than those the United Nations had been gloomily \ forecasting only two years earlier. Even with the downward revision \ of population forecasts, the "medium projection" numbers showed that \ in a world of 9.4 billion people in 2050, a billion people would be \ in "water scarcity" and 970 million in "water stress." Another \ report, published by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, had found \ that "caught between the growing demand for fresh water supplies on \ the one hand and limited and increasingly polluted supplies on the \ other, many countries are making difficult choices." How to square \ these circles?\ When Gleick's lecture was over and he made his way to the \ coffee machine in the lobby, trailed by a wake of hydrologists from a \ dozen countries, I stopped him and asked about the slipperiness of \ the numbers. "Your book is called Water in Crisis," I said. "This \ conference is called 'Water: The Looming Crisis.' How do you match \ this 1,700 cubic meters a year with actual consumption and come up \ with a crisis?"\ "First of all," he said, "you have to be careful with these \ numbers. To some degree, water statistics are a technocratic \ illusion. A thousand cubic meters a year doesn't necessarily mean \ water stress. Israel is well below that, at about 300 cubic meters \ per person per year, and while they're on the edge, no one at present \ suffers from a lack of basic amenities. In Nigeria, which has lots of \ water, more than half the population goes without safe drinking \ water." If a country draws less than its available resources, he \ suggested, it doesn't mean that it is living thriftily. It might \ simply mean that the infrastructure is a shambles. He'd just been \ approached, he said, by National Geographic magazine, which was \ planning a major feature on water and wanted to use some of his \ data. "They made the same point to me. 'No one uses 1,700 cubic \ meters,' they said. But that's only one way of looking at it. They \ were ignoring, for instance, the use of rain-fed agriculture. When \ that's added in, many, many places approach 1,700 meters." He \ shrugged. "You have to look at total resources, renewable resources, \ usable renewable resources, the ability to transfer water from water-\ rich to water-poor places, the development level of the economy, the \ annual consumption, and the deprivation level, all matched against \ population trends and economic resources. When you do that, you'll \ see that there are crises in many places.\ "And another point. Forecasts should be scrutinized carefully \ and used cautiously. In the 1960s, water consumption in America was \ forecast to increase by up to 150 percent by the year 2000. This has \ not happened for a number of reasons. A fundamental change in \ attitude, for one thing. A shift from profligacy to conservation has \ stabilized demand, and withdrawals are in fact shrinking slightly."\ Just before he turned to walk away, he repeated a point he'd \ made on the podium. "It is difficult," he said, "to see the abyss \ before you fall into it. Are we really on the edge? Take Mexico City, \ for example. They're providing basic water needs for their citizens. \ But we already know that unsustainable pumping of the local \ groundwater has caused parts of the city to subside by nearly 20 \ meters. They're now bringing water in from 300 kilometers away, \ pumping it uphill a substantial distance. Population is still growing \ explosively. How close to the edge are they? How close to \ catastrophe? That's why we should be looking at these things. In many \ places, unpleasant surprises are inevitable."\ \ The human "need" for water depends on definitions. The crisis, real \ though it be, is to some degree a management problem, a matter of \ allocation and distribution, and not just a pure problem of supply, \ although in some places — North Africa, the Middle East — it is that, \ too. Peter Gleick defines water needs as "access to basic drinking \ water and water for sanitation needs," which seems straightforward \ enough. By this test, and according to the latest data, most of \ Africa, most of Asia, and western South America fail. More starkly, \ over 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and \ more than 2.9 billion have no access to sanitation services. The \ reality is that a child dies every eight seconds from drinking \ contaminated water, and the sanitation trend is getting sharply \ worse, mostly because of the worldwide drift of the rural peasantry \ to urban slums. Of course, Gleick's measure is personal and \ humanitarian, and doesn't factor in agriculture or industry. Other \ water experts define needs differently. Population Action \ International, for example, maintains that the number of people \ living in "water stress and water scarcity" was 436 million in 1997, \ and projects that the percentage of the world's population without \ enough water will increase fivefold by 2050. UN figures show it will \ be worse than that. Per Pinstrup Anersen, director of the \ International Food Policy Research Institute, says that one in every \ five countries is likely to experience a severe shortage within \ twenty-five years. Malin Falkenmark, whose figure for "water stress" \ of 1,700 cubic meters per person per year has been adopted by most \ hydrologists, nevertheless suggests that any nation with less than \ 1,000 cubic meters per person per year is "water scarce"; it takes \ 1,100 cubic meters to grow the food needed for one person's \ nutritious but low-meat diet for a year.\ I reviewed my notes.\ Europe has, on the whole, plenty of water, about 4,066 cubic \ meters per person per year, based on a 1998 population of 498 \ million. In only isolated instances are Europeans without access to \ safe water, and those are generally caused by civil war or by \ temporary pollution problems. But of course the average is skewed by \ the Scandinavian countries, which have water to spare (90,000-plus \ cubic meters per person in Norway, and a whopping 624,000 in \ Iceland). In the south, the situation is much more dire. Spain has \ only 2,800 cubic meters, much lower in the east and south, where \ consumption is passing critical levels. The south of France is not \ much better off, and the situation is compounded by the serious \ industrial pollution pouring down major rivers into the \ Mediterranean. The French, with two of the largest private water \ companies in the world, are beginning to charge realistic delivery \ costs to the affluent, with their swimming pools and Jacuzzis, in the \ hills of Provence.\ North and Central America have, at first glance, water to \ spare. For a population of 427 million, there is an available and \ renewable water supply of 6.945 million cubic kilometers of water, or \ 16,260 cubic meters per person per year. But, again, the figures are \ crude. Canada has more water than the United States, by about half a \ million cubic kilometers, with a tenth of the population. Many parts \ of the United States have plenty of water — or would have if people \ weren't polluting so much of it. But in other parts they are draining \ aquifers by recklessly mining them dry, compounded by a snarl of laws \ and regulations designed for a simpler era, when natural resources \ seemed to be limitless. The United States has a theoretical \ availability of over 9,000 cubic meters per person per year, more \ than five times the stress level. Yet there are water shortages. \ Virtually all the available rivers have been dammed, and already more \ water is being shifted from one place to another than in any other \ country on earth, and major wetlands have been thoughtlessly drained. \ Still, there are positive signs: demand has been dropping — in \ certain places, such as Boston, substantially — and more thought is \ being given not only to the natural functions rivers perform but also \ to the restoration of wetlands, most notably in Florida.\ Mexico is relatively parched, with a potential supply of a \ little less than 4,000 cubic meters per person. Parts of Mexico were \ always desert, but these areas are spreading throughout the northern \ part of the country because of misuse. Other human-caused deserts are \ extending in many parts of the Americas, including southwestern Utah \ and Oklahoma, parts of southern California, the southern half of \ Arizona, most of New Mexico, western Texas, and southern Nevada. The \ remaining soil in many of the same regions is rapidly becoming \ saline, impossible to cultivate even if the water were available.\ South America averages a hefty 34,960 cubic meters per person \ per year for a population of 296 million, but the figures are \ hopelessly skewed by the Amazon Basin, the greatest reservoir and \ rain forest on earth and the greatest source of the planet's \ biodiversity. Paraguay is the only American country where less than \ 50 percent of the population has access to safe water. Peru has the \ least water in South America, with a mere 1,700 cubic meters per \ person of potential availability, and little Suriname the most. \ Suriname's admittedly tiny population of 420,000 people is awash in \ 468,000 cubic meters of water each.\ Africa has a disturbingly low water resource potential of \ 6,460 cubic meters for each of its 650 million people, and even this \ paltry amount is inflated by the Congo River and the moist tropics. \ Africa also has the greatest desert on earth, the Sahara, which \ covers 8.6 million square kilometers.\ Africa also has some of the greatest lakes in the world, \ among them Victoria, shared by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, at 69,484 \ square kilometers; Tanganyika, shared by Burundi, Tanzania, Congo, \ and Zambia, at 32,893 square kilometers; and Nyasa, shared by \ Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania, at 29,600 square kilometers. Lake \ Chad, shared by Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, once measured \ more than 20,000 square kilometers, but by the early 1980s it had \ been reduced to 17,806 square kilometers and is still shrinking \ rapidly.\ An average for Asia, with a population of around 3 billion \ and available water resources of 10,114 cubic kilometers, represents \ another crude measure. Some countries, such as Laos, have more than \ 55,300 cubic meters per person per year. But others, such as heavily \ industrialized Japan, are dependent on only 4,400 cubic meters per \ person. The critical countries are China, India, and Pakistan, which \ together account for more than 2 billion of the total population, and \ there the picture is much more dire: China has no more than 2,295 \ cubic meters per person, and that mostly in the south; India has even \ less, at 2,240, and is heavily dependent on the Ganges and the Indus \ rivers in the north.\ Most hydrologists lump the Middle East (the Levant, the \ Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq, and west to Turkey) in with Asia. \ But the politics of the region are unique, and so are its water \ problems, the most obvious of which are the fractiousness of Israel \ and its neighbors over shared water resources, and Turkey's role as \ upstream provider to Iraq and Syria. The region holds about 190 \ million people, 60 million in Turkey alone, and has a shared water \ availability of 370,000 cubic kilometers. Bahrain and Kuwait have no \ water of their own; at the other end of the scale, Iraq has 5,430 \ cubic meters per capita per year.\ Australia, at 4.7 million square kilometers, is the sixth-\ largest country in the world. It is also the driest inhabited land \ mass on earth. It has the least river water, the lowest runoff, and \ the smallest area of permanent wetlands on the planet. Australia is \ not as barren as the Sahara, nor as arid, for even in the heart of \ it, in the region around Lake Eyre, there is still an average of 20 \ centimeters of rainfall a year. New Zealand has 91,800 cubic meters \ per person.\ \ But these figures don't necessarily tell us much about the world's \ flash points. How should they be calculated? There are a number of \ criteria: where the water supply is static or falling; where there is \ a dependency on water supplies from outside national boundaries; \ where rainfall is unsteady or meager; where populations are \ increasing; and where there are incompatible demands for water from \ competing internal sources (agriculture, basic population needs, \ industry). In Africa alone, by these measures, 300 million people, \ one-third of the continent's population, already live under \ conditions of scarcity, and this number will likely increase to more \ than a billion by 2025. Nine of the fourteen nations of the Middle \ East already face water-scarce conditions, and populations in six of \ them are projected to double in the first twenty-five years of the \ twenty-first century. India could join the list of water-scarce \ countries by 2025, almost entirely because of population increase. \ China, with 22 percent of the world's population and only 6 percent \ of its fresh water, is in serious trouble already: one-third of the \ wells in the northwest have gone dry, and more than three hundred \ towns have suffered water shortages.\ In 1992 Sandra Postel calculated that "if 40 percent of the \ water required to produce an acceptable diet for the 2.4 billion \ people expected to be added to the planet over the next thirty years \ has to come from irrigation, agricultural water supplies would have \ to expand by more than 1,750 cubic kilometers per year — equivalent \ to roughly 20 Nile rivers, or to 97 Colorado rivers. It is not at all \ clear where this water is to come from."\ Worldwide, more than three hundred river systems cross \ national boundaries. Hardly any of the world's major rivers are \ contained within the borders of only one state, and even fewer now \ that the world's last great empire, the Soviet Union, has broken up. \ Watersheds seldom acknowledge humankind's political conceits and pay \ little attention to frontiers. Downstream problems are not always \ solvable if upstream is in another country. Were Ethiopia to divert \ or use substantial portions of the Blue Nile, Egypt, entirely \ dependent on the Nile for its moisture, would be starved of water, \ and Egyptian politicians have always made it clear that they would \ have no option but war were that to happen.\ Wars, or threats of wars, have been made in several riparian \ systems. The water resources of the Golan Heights and Gaza have \ figured largely in the military minds of Israel and its neighbors. \ The Jordan, Yarmuk, and Litani rivers have all been subject to \ military planners, and Israel has always treated water as a matter of \ national security. Water, and the Indus in particular, has poisoned \ relations between India and Pakistan. India and Bangladesh squabbled \ for decades over the Ganges, and though both these disputes have been \ tentatively resolved, there are several unsettling internal water \ issues that have frequently threatened to end in violence and have \ several times spilled over into riot, murder, and assassination: \ militants from Tamil Nadu state have threatened guerrilla warfare on \ neighboring Karnataka, and Sikh separatists have manipulated water \ issues to their gain. Iraq, Syria, and Turkey have each mobilized \ troops in defense of water rights on the Euphrates and Tigris. In \ Europe, upstream "grooming" of the Rhine and the draining of its \ safety net, the Rhine wetlands, have caused downstream flooding; \ industrial pollution is another irritant. The United States has \ essentially "stolen" the Colorado from Mexico, using much of it to \ irrigate the deserts of Arizona and California, but a good deal of it \ to fill swimming pools in Los Angeles and fountains in Palm Springs. \ The Paraná, dammed and flooded, has caused friction between Argentina \ and Brazil.\ Only one-third of the water that annually runs to the sea is \ accessible to humans. Of this, more than half is already being \ appropriated and used. This proportion might not seem so much, but \ demand will double in thirty years. And much of what is available is \ degraded by eroded silt, sewage, industrial pollution, chemicals, \ excess nutrients, and plagues of algae. Per capita availability of \ good, potable water is diminishing in all developed and developing \ countries. In the gloomy forecast of an eminent food \ bureaucrat, "Worldwide use [of water] has become so excessive that \ the implications for irrigated food production are considerable." As \ Mostafa Tolba, former head of the United Nations Environment Program \ (UNEP), put it in 1998, "Just to match demand, major water projects \ will have to be started within the next ten years, or global supply \ will be overtaken." But most of the "easy" sources of water have \ already been exploited, and much of the water is in places where it \ isn't needed. Demand, it seems, will inevitably intersect with \ supply. And then what?\ Will we find the resources through conservation and increases \ in efficiency — Sandra Postel's "last oasis"? Will we find it through \ heroic engineering (in bigger dams, longer pipelines, and greater \ desalination plants), or in the invention of new technologies such as \ fusion power?\ Namibia and Botswana will probably not go to war over water. \ What would be the use? Botswana will concede a little, Namibia reduce \ its demands a little, and the crisis will be staved off. Only the \ Okavango — an ecosystem in balance since man was a little hominid \ scavenging on the savannas of East Africa — will suffer and be \ diminished, a jewel that will glimmer less brightly. \ \ Copyright © 2000 by Jacobus Communications Corporation. Reprinted by \ permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

AcknowledgmentsviiiPrefacexiiiPart IThe Where, What, and How Much of the Water World1Water in Peril32The Natural Dispensation273Water in History46Part IIRemaking the Water World4Climate, Weather, and Water675Unnatural Selection856The Aral Sea1057To Give a Dam1178The Problem with Irrigation1369Shrinking Aquifers14610The Reengineered River166Part IIIThe Politics of Water11The Middle East18512The Tigris-Euphrates System20413The Nile21614The United States and Its Neighbors23115The Chinese Dilemma263Part IVWhat Is to Be Done?16Solutions and Manifestos275Notes317Bibliography331Index339

\ San Francisco Chronicle....provides a fascinating and disturbing worldwide survey of water delivery.\ \ \ \ \ Don GaytonThat water will be the oil of the 21st century has recently become a well-worn refrain among journalists, pollsters and analysts of all types. But few have examined the value of water as Marq de Villiers has in his Governor General Award-winning book. De Villiers, whose essay on water appears on page 50, tracks the moral, philosophical, scientific, economic and ecological concerns about water from prehistorical times to the present and raises troubling questions about the world's water supplies in this accessible, eloquent and enlightening book. \ — Canadian Geographic\ \ \ KLIATTAnyone who has traveled outside of the U.S., Canada or Western Europe has probably had to think twice about using any local water. Safe at home, we normally do not think too much about our tap water, or if we do, we readily fill up on whatever mineral water strikes our fancy or whatever happens to be on sale. Water makes us face the reality of how precious and dear water is everywhere. It covers the history and social effects of water control, availability and purity from the Danube to our own deserts. Alternately thought provoking and chilling, this is an excellent work. Economics, politics, whole populations and nature itself are so entwined with our use and abuse of water that no one can fail to be brought up short by the arguments of de Villiers. After dealing with the pros and cons of dams, shrinking aquifers, irrigation and re-engineering rivers, de Villiers touches on biotechnology: "What happens though, when farmers can grow more food with less water and with a tenth of the labor?...the complete industrialization of farming. Millions of third world peasants will be out their livelihoods, no longer necessary.... They will be forced into the cities as slum dwellers. . .Is that really what we want? You can look neither at water nor at food in isolation of other systemic problems." (p.272) Former South African, now Canadian, de Villiers shows us that no problem is isolated from our water problems. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Houghton Mifflin, Mariner, 352p. maps. notes. bibliog. index., $15.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Katherine E. Gillen; Libn., Luke AFB Lib., AZ , November 2001 (Vol. 35,No. 6)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalThe author, whose Boer childhood was spent on the edge of the Thirstland in South Africa, has had a lifelong fascination with water and studied water issues while writing his previous books on exploration, history, politics, and travel. His latest, winner of the Governor General s Literary Award for Nonfiction in Canada, depicts the current extent of world water scarcity, engineering efforts, and national and international water policies and briefly provides guidelines for dealing with the coming world water crisis. Like Paul Simon s Tapped Out: The World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It (LJ 1/99), this book pays special attention to Middle Eastern water issues and to those affecting the United States and its neighbors. However, De Villiers s very readable work provides more in-depth treatment of the hydrology, natural history, and available technologies, while Simon provides more detailed and thoughtful recommendations for preventing and dealing with the anticipated water scarcities. De Villiers concludes somewhat cursorily with a chapter on solutions and manifestos. Still, his entertaining yet thought-provoking narrative style will make this book a good choice for serious summer reading. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Margaret Aycock, Gulf Coast Environmental Lib., Beaumont, TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ BooknewsThis global examination of water, with especial focus on the Aral Sea, The Nile, and the Tigris and Euphrates, includes topics like water in history, desertification, the effect of climate change on rainfall and water tables, the effect of pollution on global water supply, water shortage and social collapse, water wars, the political and ecological consequences of exporting water from one river basin to another, the problem of dams, and the shrinkage of irrigated acreage and underground aquifers. Villiers is the author of six books on travel, exploration, history, and contemporary politics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \ \ \ \ The New YorkerThe author's argument here is exceptionally persuasive because he does not scold or inveigh but lucidly and readably reports...deVilliers does not despair, and he closes with a chapter on remedies.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsA well-researched, fluent summary of the political and biological state of our global water resources, from Canadian author de Villiers (The Heartbreak Grape, 1993, etc.). The problem is not so much that there isn't enough water, explains the author, although growing populations may put that to the test. It is that water isn't where we want it: too much in the north when we need it in the south; too much seawater when we want freshwater; too much locked up in glaciers when we need it in our highballs or our sprinklers. So we go forth and fight for it, or steal it, or finagle it, or hold back what once flowed by. Twain had it right: "Whiskey is for drinkin'; water is for fightin'." Not that we have treated the water we do have access to with any sort of decency. De Villiers brings a sympathetic regard to the troubled waterscape, from the shrunken befouled Aral Sea to the waterway robbery of the Colorado River to cockamamie schemes from the Soviet bureaucracy to divert the great Arctic rivers. He details the downsides (or at least the overbalancing of cons to pros) of dams, irrigation, and tapping into aquifers—including salinization, siltation, habitat destruction, and microclimate changes. Numerous examples are given up to buttress points that are well-made—of the ripple effects of tinkering with natural systems, for instance—if not earthshaking in their novelty. The value of this book is in giving readers perspective: where mistakes have been made and where thorny water issues are likely to raise their heads in the future. On the other hand, de Villiers's chapter on "solutions" is a blend of wishful thinking(technological answersand population decline) and doomsaying (water wars). Written with grace and an eye for captivating material, making this catalog of water misuses (past, present, and future) all the more poignant.\ \