NY Times-7.10.2013
Earth, “the blue planet,” has a lot of water.
Most of the planet’s surface is covered with it. But less than 5 percent of
that water is fresh, and much of that is locked up in ice sheets or
inconveniently far underground. And it is not always most abundant where it is
most needed.
In short, as James Salzman puts it in
“Drinking Water,” one of four new books that dive into our species’
relationship with water, clean supplies have always been the exception, not the
norm. As recently as 1900, he writes, 1 in 70 Americans died of a waterborne
disease before age 70.
Though he ranges widely, Mr. Salzman, who
teaches law and environmental studies at Duke, focuses on what one might call
social justice. Access to water may be viscerally regarded as a “right,” but he
points out that the best way to ensure a reliable supply of pure water,
especially in poor regions, is often to privatize it.
Water management has been critical to
economic, social and cultural development for thousands of years, Steven Mithen
tells us in “Thirst.” An archaeologist at the University of Reading in England,
Dr. Mithen covers a vast portion of the ancient world: water storage in ancient
Sumeria, the terra cotta pipes of classical Athens and the aqueducts of Rome,
the “hydraulic city” of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the water-allocation policies
of the Maya.
His tone is academic and at times highly
technical, but he builds to a striking conclusion. Though we may think that the
rise of complex social and economic networks enabled ancient cultures to manage
their water, the reverse may well be true: only when a society had reliable
access to water could it turn itself into an economic or cultural power.
If some ancient empires acquired their water
by conquest, so, in its way, did a much later empire: New York City. In “Empire
of Water,” David Soll describes how the city transformed its notoriously
unsanitary water system in the early 20th century by buying up watersheds in
the Catskill Mountains and building a large network of reservoirs, pipes,
tanks, sampling stations and other devices that delivers a billion gallons a
day of excellent water into the city’s homes and businesses.
For Dr. Soll, a historian who focuses on
water issues in his work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, this past
is fraught with political deal making, hubris, unintended consequences and
government overreach. But in the end, “the willingness of Catskill residents
and city officials to embark on the world’s most expensive and ambitious
watershed management program after almost a century of bitter conflict” offers
hope that the goals of sensible water management and environmental progress
“are not as elusive as they may seem.” As for waste, a first step in avoiding
it is to recognize how much water we use each day, counting not just water for
flushing, bathing, washing and watering the lawn, but also the water use
embedded in the food we eat, the products we buy and the electricity that
powers our lives.
How much is that? A lot, according to Wendy
J. Pabich’s “Taking On Water.”
Dr. Pabich, an environmental scientist and
water activist who lives in a dry region of Idaho, says the average American
uses 100 times as much water as, say, the typical Mozambican — a level of waste
brought home to her when she realized she and her husband were using thousands
of gallons each month to irrigate their garden.
Her book recounts their effort to cut back
their water habit, by a lot. Along the way, she discovers how much water is
lost to leakage in the United States — a trillion gallons a year — and how low
its price is related to its value and growing scarcity.
At times Dr. Pabich’s environmental
correctness can be wearying. And her suggestions for reducing water use are
mostly self-evident: fix leaks, install low-flow toilets and water-miser
washers, turn off the shower while you lather, and so on.
But she also supplies a chart detailing the
“water footprint” of various commodities. For example, it takes 22.8 gallons of
water to produce, package and ship a single egg. A pound of beef requires 183
gallons. By contrast, strawberries come in at 3.6 gallons per cup, and it takes
only 1.3 gallons of water to produce a tomato.
The results of her experiment are both
gratifying and alarming. She and her husband did cut their water use in half,
but that took them only to the level that residents of places like Japan or
Poland routinely achieve.
Perhaps, she and others write, people would
think more about water if it were priced differently. Cheap water may reflect a
widespread view that access to clean water is a natural right that everyone,
rich or poor, should enjoy.
Is that the approach most likely to bring
clean water to the most people? Maybe not. “Clean water is no longer a free
gift of nature,” Dr. Soll writes. It is “a shared resource that can be
preserved only through judicious investments and active engagement.”
