Water_ The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization Part 15

Manufacturers, likewise, responded impressively to the water pollution regulations. Chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, primary metals and petroleum producers, automakers, pulp and paper mills, textile firms, food processors, canners, brewers, and other large water users increased recycling and adopted water-saving processes. In just the fifteen years from 1985 to 2000, American industry's total withdrawals were trimmed by a quarter. PreWorld War II American steel mills that needed 60 to 100 tons of water for every steel ton produced were superseded by modern mills using only six tons by the turn of the twenty-first century. Similarly, water-intensive semiconductor silicon wafer makers reduced their intake of ultrapure freshwater by three-quarters between 1997 and 2003, and recycled much of the discharge for use in irrigation. In the decade from 1995, Dow Chemical cut its water usage per ton produced by over a third. Europe's Nestle nearly doubled its food production while consuming 29 percent less water from 1997 to 2006. In a scheme reminiscent of New York City's landmark ecosystem services plan, bottled water company Perrier Vittel invested in reforesting some heavily farmed watersheds, and paid farmers to adopt more modern methods, in order to protect the quality of its mineral water sources.

For years water had scarcely commanded a line item in corporate budgets or more than cursory attention from top planning executives. In the age of scarcity, more and more water-conscious companies were treating water as a key strategic economic input, like oil, with clearly reported accounting and future target goals. The most forward-looking and global-minded a.n.a.lyzed water risks facing their key suppliers around the world, and helping insulate the vulnerable by helping them adopt conservation and ecologically sustainable practices. Unilever's technical and economic support, for example, enabled its Brazilian tomato farmers to adopt drip irrigation that trimmed water use by 30 percent and reduced water-contaminating pesticide and fungicide runoff. Brewer Anheuser-Busch became acutely aware of the importance of its water supply chain when it was whipsawed by a drought in America's Pacific Northwest. Water shortages for crops pushed up the price of a key beer-making ingredient, barley, while diminished dam flows elevated hydroelectric prices and with it the cost of producing aluminum beer cans. Environmentalists, too, have been getting on board with collaborative efforts: for instance, the Nature Conservancy has been developing a plan to award good standing certificates to companies who use water efficiently.

Improved industrial water productivity not only enhances compet.i.tiveness directly. It also creates economic benefits by freeing water and lowering its cost for other productive uses. Yet the potential scale of its benefit pales next to the boon that can accrue from water productivity breakthroughs in the least efficient, most subsidized, and heaviest polluting sector of society-agriculture. That is because agriculture is still by far the greatest user of freshwater, often consuming over three-quarters of usage. As much as half of all irrigation water is simply lost due to inefficient flood techniques without ever reaching the crop's roots. Cutting irrigation consumption by one-quarter roughly doubled the water availability for all other productive activities in the region, including industry, power generation, urban use, or recharging groundwater and wetlands. Moreover, proven technologies to multiply agricultural productivity already existed. Microirrigation systems, such as drip and microsprinklers, and laser levels of fields to cause water to distribute more uniformly, were widely successful in reducing water consumption by 30 to 70 percent and increasing yields by 20 to 90 percent in venues around the world, including Israel, India, Jordan, Spain, and America. In the long run these and other methods are necessary elements to meeting the growing challenge of global food shortages. The problem, at bottom, is political-how to promote rapid adoption and how to level the subsidized playing field so that the most efficient farmers reap a proportionate bounty of the market profits they deserve.

American irrigation agribusinesses-led by those in water-poor California-have slowly been making investments to migrate from flooding fields to sprinklers and microirrigation systems. Yet still mostly protected from the discipline of full-market costs by price supports, tariffs, and exemptions from cleaning up all the pollution runoff they caused, politically entrenched agribusinesses lack sufficient incentives to move faster. The result is more than a missed opportunity for the United States to boost its overall economic growth and compet.i.tiveness through more efficient allocation of water. There are increasing negative economic, environmental, and equity costs, too. Inevitably, American irrigators are becoming more and more reliant on mining groundwater aquifers beyond replenishable rates to produce America's crops. Over two-fifths of all U.S. irrigation came from groundwater by 2000, nearly twice as much as a half century earlier.

Both from irrigated and rain-fed farmland, vital water ecosystems are also being damaged from the runoff of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Since it is hard to pinpoint the runoff to a single source, American farm pollution still is not adequately regulated. The pollutants that seep into slow-moving groundwater, wetlands, and rivers are poisoning drinking water and coastal fisheries near and far away. The Mississippi River carries so much nitrogen-rich nutrients from fertilizer runoff that an expanding, biological dead zone without fish life as large as the state of Ma.s.sachusetts now rings its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Similar dead zones around the world have doubled in size since the 1960s and are a major contributor to the alarming collapse of ocean fisheries. It is a cla.s.sic tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the producer of an environmental problem is exempted from bearing the full responsibility of its costs and thus of any incentive to rectify it-and, in the age of water scarcity, as well, one of the growing, hidden inequities between water Haves and Have-Nots.

The most intriguing models of improved agricultural water productivity, however, are developing far from America in smaller, water scarce industrial democracies, like Israel and Australia, where necessity is again acting as the mother of innovation. Australia faces the industrial world's harshest hydrological environment: The continent-nation suffers acute aridity, erratic rainfall patterns, exceptionally nutrient-poor, aged soils, and lacks long internal waterway transport routes across its vast expanses. As a result, its population of only 20 million, on a land as large as the lower 48 states of America, is concentrated in the river basin of the southeastern Murray-Darling, which also produces 85 percent of the nation's irrigation, and two-fifths of its food.

Australia developed along an economic model with many similarities to the American West-dammed rivers, subsidized irrigation, and profligate water use by farmers. By the early 1990s, the damage to river ecosystems became too great to ignore. Over three-quarters of the Murray-Darling's average annual flow was consumed by human activity. As on other overused rivers, the mouth was silting up. Water in the lower reaches became so saline that it was poisoning the munic.i.p.al water supply of downriver Adelaide. Fertilizer runoff was triggering deadly algae blooms along a languid 625-mile stretch of the Darling.

The government's response to the Murray-Darling's ecosystem crisis was to radically restructure its water policies by emphasizing market pricing and trading, and ecological sustainability. The new governing principles ended irrigation subsidies, required farmers to pay for maintaining dams and ca.n.a.ls, and, of critical importance, established a scientist-calculated baseline of how much water had to be left in the river to ensure the health of its ecosystem. To facilitate independent water trading, water rights were clearly separated from private property. Governance was managed by a new basin commission.

In little more than a decade, water trading between farmers, farmers and cities, and across state lines, had taken off. There were two computerized water exchanges; farmers were even accustomed to trading over mobile phones. A kindred scheme, akin to America's cap and trade in greenhouse gas emissions, enabled irrigation farmers, who added salt to the soil and into the river basin, to buy "transpiration credits" from owners of forests, whose trees removed salinity by sucking water up through their roots.

Just as its architects had hoped, Australia's water reforms are facilitating the transfer of irrigation water from salty soil to more fertile regions, from use on lower value to higher value crops, and generally from less to more productive methods. Soil salinization has fallen sharply. River fish populations are reviving. Overall water productivity is soaring. Australia's water reforms were implemented none too soon. In the early 2000s, the continent was enduring its worst drought in a century, reviving internecine political rivalries between states and vested interests that could have torn the democracy apart without a preexisting plan. Sheep farms in the arid outback are now being bought by the government to conserve the water the animals had consumed in order to replenish the basin. Water is being more tightly rationed and the government is stepping in to pay the highest price to obtain sufficient water for the priority need of recharging wetlands and safeguarding other components of ecosystem health. Climate change, too, stalks the political struggle over Australia's freshwater-scientists predict a decline in the Murray's flow by 5 percent to 15 percent in coming decades.

As Americans feel about their own bygone, settler frontier, Australians are nostalgic, uneasy, and sometimes despairing at the prospective decline of its individualistic family farm homesteads and livestock and sheep ranches, which alone consume half the nation's agriculture water. But the reality of water scarcity imposes tough, new choices upon modern societies about how to most productively allocate its precious resources. The hard truth is that less than 1 percent of Australia's agricultural land produces 80 percent of its agricultural profits-the vast majority of the rest are marginal enterprises that lived off resource-depleting farm subsidies. In effect, they are cultural relics, worthy perhaps of preservation for social and political reasons but carried along at the expense of some of Australia's compet.i.tiveness in the twenty-first-century global economy.

America and other leading industrial democracies have not yet fully awakened to the era's defining water challenge-or to their own strategic advantages in a world order being recast by water scarcity and ecosystem depletion. While the soft-path response emphasizing improved existing water productivity has been gaining ground, it has been doing so only fitfully. No coherent, national policy is helping nurture its embryonic development into an automatic invisible green hand mechanism with the potential to marshal water's full catalytic potency and possibly deliver a transformational, era-defining breakthrough.

Inertia and long-rooted inst.i.tutional forces are formidable impediments to innovative change at any given moment of history. So it is today. Powerful water bureaucracies cling unimaginatively to approaches forged in previous eras; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, is still scoping plans for giant, river interbasin transfers between the Colorado and the Mississippi. Farm subsidies and protective tariffs are so firmly entrenched in the political landscape that Congress has been concentrating on how to extend them to biofuels like corn ethanol, even though doing so will divert water from food production and add to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Despite the success of thirty-five years of clean water legislation in improving water quality and stimulating dramatic water productivity gains among private enterprises, the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency unsettled the regulatory environment and reopened the door to special interest lobbying by reflexively dropping 400 cases against illegal industrial discharges after a split 2006 Supreme Court decision muddied the terms under which seasonal or remote wetlands and streams deserved 1972 Clean Water Act protections. Similarly, most environmental groups continued to view the world through the original regulatory prism of simple top-down government prohibitions and remain highly suspicious of any market-oriented, soft-path innovations. In short, the jury is still out on whether the water sufficient industrial democracies will fully grasp their leaders.h.i.+p opportunity to achieve the water breakthroughs that could trigger another dynamic cycle of creative destruction within market economies or whether its trend toward improved water productivity will merely become a modest way to slim down from an abundant water diet without seriously confronting the underlying, politically entrenched and outdated practices.

Momentous innovations in water history only become clear in hindsight, after they have meandered and permeated through society's many layers, catalyzing chain reactions in technologies, organizations, and spirit that sometimes combine in new alignments to foment changes transformational enough to alter the trajectory and destinies of societies and civilizations. The way James Watt's steam engine, for instance, interacted with the nascent factory system, ca.n.a.l craze, coal mining and iron casting boom, Britain's growing imperial reach and the nation's new capital acc.u.mulation and entrepreneurs.h.i.+p-friendly political economic atmosphere, to help launch the Industrial Revolution would have defied prediction at the time. Yet at times it is possible to foresee at least some of the channels through which a great water breakthrough might multiply its effects.

One such channel visible on today's horizon is through water's interaction with three other global challenges-food shortages, energy shortages, and climate change-that together are likely to profoundly influence the outcome of civilization's overarching challenge of learning how to sustainably manage the planet's total environment. While not always perceived as such, the four are so inextricably interdependent that a profound change in any one alters the fundamental conditions and prospects of the others. Irrigation, for example, depends not just on water to nourish crops but also on prodigious energy to pump water from underground aquifers, transport it long distances over hilly landscapes, and drive the sprinklers and other methods that deliver it to plant roots. Artificial fertilizer, too, a mainstay of large-scale irrigated agriculture, requires great energy to produce, and its runoff from cropland has significant impacts on water quality and nouris.h.i.+ng ecosystems. Clearing gra.s.slands, rain forests, and wetlands for agriculture, meanwhile, worsens global warming on at least two counts-by adding greenhouse ga.s.ses to the atmosphere directly through burning and plowing, and by removing nature's sponges that absorb carbon emissions. A zero-sum conundrum of using water either to grow fuel or food to meet shortages is inherent in the decision over biofuels like corn ethanol. The growing, interoceanic s.h.i.+pping trade in virtual water crops vital to alleviating impending food famines depends upon burning expensive, fossil fuel to power the world's supercontainer fleets. Near the end of the production chain, processing and canning food products are both extremely water and energy intensive processes.

Ever since the age of waterwheels, water and energy have been coupled in power generation. Today, they are wed on a ma.s.s scale through hydroelectricity and in the cooling process of fossil fuel thermoelectric plants; indeed, one of the main constraints on adding more power plants is insufficient volumes of river water to cool them. Filtering, treating, and pumping water for cities also consumes vast amounts of energy. To gauge some idea of the scale of the water-energy nexus, nearly 20 percent of all California's electricity and 30 percent of its natural gas are used by its water infrastructure alone.

Energy crises often became water crises, and vice versa. During the great northeastern U.S. power failure of August 2003, Cleveland mayor Jane Campbell soon discovered she had an even bigger crisis than darkness and a fl.u.s.tered White House wanting her to rea.s.sure the public that the cause was a local power grid failure and not international terrorism, when four electric water pumping stations shut down, and threatened to contaminate the city's drinking water with sewage; to stave off a public health catastrophe, she had to launch a second emergency action to warn citizens to boil their water, a practice that continued for two days after the lights returned. The causality of crisis transmission also frequently works in reverse, with drought-induced electrical power shortages diminis.h.i.+ng drinking water supplies, irrigation, industrial operations, and s.h.i.+pping. With the river Po 24 feet below its normal level during Italy's severe drought in 2003, power stations shut down from lack of water to cool turbines, and electricity was curtailed to homes and factories. Likewise, hydroelectricity output was halved and s.h.i.+pping reduced on the Tennessee River when it shrank to record levels during America's 2007 southeastern drought.

High energy costs are also one of the major constraints on many approaches to easing water scarcity. A third to a half of desalinization costs are energy, mainly fossil fuels-indeed, any large-scale takeoff of desal seems to be contingent upon a cost breakthrough in some renewable energy source. Likewise, the amount of weighty water that can be lifted from deep aquifers, or transported great distances through interriver basin pipelines like China's South-to-North Water Diversion Project is limited chiefly by the expenditure of energy for pumping such a heavy, hard to manage liquid.

Energy generated from fossil fuels, of course, worsens the mounting global warming crisis. When James Watt invented his steam engine in the late eighteenth century, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million; after two centuries of industrialization, the levels had risen by a third to over 380 parts-the highest level in 420,000 years and rapidly approaching the catastrophic threshold of 400 to 500 parts per million that scientists calculate could trigger the irreversible disintegration of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets.

The main feedback loops of warming-induced climate change are, in fact, also water related-an increase in what forecasting scientists call "extreme precipitation events": more prolonged droughts and evaporation, heavier flooding and landslides in wet seasons, more intense storms like hurricanes that need minimum temperatures to form, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, and, most widely felt of all, a disruptive alteration in historical seasonal precipitation patterns. Due to global warming more spring precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, intensifying spring flooding and mudslides, and diminis.h.i.+ng summertime mountain snowpack melt that normally arrives just in time to replenish dry cropland. Since the world's dam and water storage infrastructure had been designed to accommodate traditional patterns, climate change is rendering that infrastructure increasingly "wrong-sized"-dam reservoirs can no longer capture and store all the available spring precipitation runoff, while its summertime irrigation and hydropower turbine output dwindles from reduced snowmelt. Food and energy output suffers, potentially tipping fragile, water scarce conditions to full-blown water famine. At the very least, a ma.s.sive rebuilding of infrastructure looms to accommodate the change in climate.

Leading the way is one of history's stellar water engineering nations, Holland, whose society's very physical and democratic political foundations derive from extensive, ongoing water and land reclamation management in a low-lying, heavily flood-p.r.o.ne region. Following a giant 1916 flood, the Dutch accomplished one of the great engineering feats of the first half of the twentieth century. By closing off the Zuider Zee inlet from the North Sea with a giant dike, they created a Los Angelessized, artificial freshwater lake and a new water supply source near Amsterdam, known as the Ijsselmeer, or IJ. More recently, Dutch water engineers created a sophisticated combination of water pumps in winter and the natural phenomenon of planting trees-each of whose roots can suck up to 80 gallons a day-to help maintain drainage on reclaimed lowlands. But as rainfall and sea levels have been rising with early climate change, the Dutch have begun to pioneer what may become a new trend in the struggle to sustainably manage water ecosystems-the government is buying reclaimed land so that it can be flooded, thus diverting the rising water from cities and other invaluable societal infrastructure. Among those seeking to learn from the Dutch experience are state leaders from low-lying Louisiana, which is still recovering from the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina.

In water poor, monsoonal, subsistence countries that lack modern infrastructure buffers from water's destructive extremes, however, the impacts are likely to be reckoned by increased deadliness: Traditional, hand-built mud dams that aren't washed away in the intensified flooding often run dry of their precious, captured, seasonal flow during the prolonged drought that follows, withering crops and killing livestock. For the hundreds of millions who live daily in this precarious, impoverished condition, the consequences are often famine, disease, misery, and death. Worse lies ahead: Climate models predict that the harshest effects of global warming are likely to fall disproportionately on regions with the scarcest water; the temperate zones, inhabited by mostly water-wealthy nations, are expected to suffer the mildest initial effects. Yet in the end, no one will be spared if, as some models predict, the alarmingly rapid melting polar ice caps raise sea levels by 15 to 35 feet and inundate sh.o.r.elines, and ultimately change the salinity and temperature mix of the North Atlantic enough to halt the interoceanic conveyor belt to bring a frosty, ice age ending to human civilization's brief reign during Earth's unusual 12,000-year stable and warm interlude.

More optimistically, the same relations.h.i.+ps work in converse-any important innovation that alleviates water scarcity is likely to multiply the upside benefits to help societies meet their food, energy, and climate change challenges. Genetically modified crops that require less water, or breakthroughs in diffusing microirrigation and remote-sensing systems, would help feed the world's soon-to-be 9 billion and save fossil fuel burning energy now used to overpump groundwater for irrigation. Breakthroughs in desalinization could help provide water for crops and cities in coastal areas. Free standing, small water turbines, another promising innovation, could generate renewable electricity in fast-running streams and rivers around the world, producing inexpensive local electrical power, facilitating the removal of ecosystem-injuring dams and providing a clean alternative for communities, possibly augmenting their autonomy over the means to produce wealth and with it, their democratic voice in society. Much-ballyhooed fuel cells, which might get their hydrogen from water and yield water vapor as a by-product, could provide widely available clean renewable energy that liberates resources for food, water, and ecosystem health. But at least as important as any extraordinary new technologies-indeed, likely much more so-is the gradual, humdrum acc.u.mulation of low-tech and organizational advancements in the productive use of water supply already available to man in the form of more efficient existing waterworks, increased small-scale, decentralized capture and storage of existing precipitation, and smarter exploitation of nature's own cleansing and ecosystem renewal cycles. By one estimate, statewide application of existing efficiency techniques could reduce California's total munic.i.p.al water consumption-with commensurately reduced energy costs-by one third. Water savings in profligate agriculture would be far greater.

With no technological panacea in view comparable to the giant dams and Green Revolution in the last century, the winning responses to the world's water crisis are most likely to emerge fitfully out of a messy, muddling-through process of compet.i.tive winnowing and trial and error experimentation with diverse technologies, scales and modes of organization, as each locality and nation seeks to find solutions tailored to meet its particular conditions. Uncertainty, multiplicity, and fluidity are likely to characterize the landscape until clear trends emerge. Historically, Western democracies' market economies have excelled at innovating and creating growth in just this sort of environment-indeed it is one of their main claims to fame. Centrally managed economies and authoritarian states, on the other hand, have tended to do best where technological trends are clear and the main challenge has been to apply them effectively. Thus the Western model enjoys a built-in organizational, as well as water resource, advantage in the unfolding global compet.i.tion to find the most effective responses to the novel challenges of water scarcity.

Yet history also bears witness that the West's great water advances have been often brought forth by special leaders.h.i.+p at key moments. Teddy Roosevelt's visionary commitment at the turn of the twentieth century to exploit the undeveloped potential of America's Far West by launching a new federal inst.i.tution to promote irrigation and by building the Panama Ca.n.a.l stood out. Similarly, so did Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era commitment to swiftly multiply the benefits of the Hoover Dam by erecting similar government-built giant, multipurpose dams elsewhere in the country, and De Witt Clinton's use of New York State financing for the Erie Ca.n.a.l early in the nation's history to fulfill the founding fathers' vision of opening a route through the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley. By creating in each case a coherent environment with clear goals and reliable rules, these leaders inspired confidence among individuals and private enterprises whose partic.i.p.ation was necessary for the achievement of their purpose. It is precisely such galvanizing, visionary leaders.h.i.+p and reliable commitment to principles that is yet to arise today. Albeit, given the awareness and means in today's world to resist the social and economic displacements often attenuating to such bold, society-changing projects, doing so is comparatively harder. Nevertheless, until it does, the full potential of the organizational innovation of enlisting market forces in the delivery of a sustainable environment-an invisible green hand mechanism that improves water productivity, allocation and ecosystem health through an automatic market price signal for water that reflects the full cost of water supply, delivery, cleansing and ecosystem maintenance-is likely to be impeded by embedded vested interests, incomplete frameworks, and rules of the game that are too uncertain to fully engage private market partic.i.p.ants.

Without any imminent solutions to the deepening global water scarcity crisis, water rich nations are likely to be buffeted by a growing number of unfamiliar foreign water shocks, much as they had been from oil in the latter twentieth century. Diplomatic standoffs, water violence, and possibly even water wars are likely to occur in overpopulated regions of extreme scarcity, such as the Middle East. Soaring world food prices, famines, and environmental spillover from the global quantum jump in resource consumption and waste generated by fast-growing Asian giants like China and India threatens to destabilize poor countries dependent upon good imports. When grain prices were spiking in the spring of 2008, World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned that without a new Green Revolution some 33 countries faced social unrest.

The smooth functioning of the integrated global economy and the critical trade in oil and food also depends upon some nation, or group of nations, stepping forward to commit their navies to guarantee unimpeded supercontainer sea pa.s.sage through nearly a dozen strategic straits and ca.n.a.ls that are potential choke points if closed. Feasible threats include terrorists or pirates sinking an oil supertanker in the narrow, pirate-infested Strait of Malacca, a war that closes oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, or a blockage of the Red Sea's southern strait at Bab el Mandeb.

Foreign policies are likely to be realigned and influenced by water-driven alliances, just as they were in the last century by oil. Saudi leasing of cropland in friendly nearby states; a similar, but ultimately unsuccessful effort by South Korea to secure the fruits of Madagascar's potential farmland; and China's provision of work crews and dams, bridges, and other water infrastructure to resource-rich African nations are possible harbingers of the formation of new virtual water and other resource-security and diplomatic blocs within the larger world order that could prove more bonding and outflank the defense umbrellas currently provided by the West. Indeed, water-based alliances could emerge as one of the new international paradigms of the postCold War order. New, nontraditional foreign policy thinking is required. Strategic alliances with other regional water Haves, for example, could offer many avenues for exerting increased leverage in many parts of the world. Turkey was already exerting its influence as the Middle East's water superpower to act as broker-and presumptive water enforcer-of peace talks between Syria and Israel. Over four-fifths of fresh river water flowing to oil-rich Arab lands originates in non-Arab states. Under more dire and polarized political conditions as water grows scarcer, it is conceivable as a thought experiment-however highly unlikely in practice-to imagine the formation of a water bloc among Ethiopia on the headwaters of the Nile, Turkey on the Tigris-Euphrates, and Israel on the tiny Jordan, perhaps in league with a cartel among international exporters of food-virtual water-as a diplomatic countermeasure should Middle Eastern oil suppliers turn extremist and try to take excessive advantage of their disproportionate oil power. Similar considerations could apply in central Asia, where the currently dysfunctional state of Tajikistan has potential control over 40 percent of the region's water sources and, through a program of giant dam-building, could deliver badly needed hydropower to nearby Afghanistan and Pakistan. Forward-looking Western foreign policy makers also have to be cognizant of the enormous leverage China's control of Tibet gives it over the mountain sources of the great rivers, and therefore the economic and political fate, of Southeast Asia.

Endless foreign policy challenges are also likely to emanate from the world's abject water poor, roughly calculated as the one-fifth of humanity without access to enough clean water for their basic domestic needs of drinking, cooking and cleaning, the two in five without adequate sanitation, including simple pit latrines, and the 2 billion more whose lives are devastated every decade by their exposure to recurring water shocks like floods, landslides, and droughts. For the most part they live in Africa and Asia, both in failing states and poor, usually rural regions of developing ones. For them, progress is not primarily measured in terms of harnessing hydrological resources to enhance their productive society but in terms of brutal survival against the natural ravages of unmanaged water and the prevention of catastrophes stemming from the collapse of aging and often poorly built waterworks. As world population soars, so too will the absolute number of abject water poor and international spillover to the richer parts of the world. From India to Africa, hundreds of thousands of climate migrants are already on the march from unbuffered water shocks, shortages and infrastructure failures-there is no reason to expect that they will politely stop at their national or regional borders to quench their driving thirst for survival.

On the hopeful side, a Western breakthrough in exportable techniques that dramatically increases existing water use productivity, improves sustainable water ecosystems, and enhances international food export supplies, of course, would quickly become a powerful lever to helping other nations and individual communities cope with their water scarcity challenges. Abundant production of internationally traded food could help strengthen the existing world political economic order by rea.s.suring water-poor countries that their best interests lay in relying upon the liberal, free-trade region to provide, at fair prices, the food they need to import. They could yield extensive diplomatic goodwill for Western interests and promote indigenous democratic development in other parts of the world as well.

But any such water-driven democratic development would likely require imaginative, flexible, and conditional solutions beyond solely large-scale, national government-ministry-directed projects of the twentieth-century variety, including a willingness to build upon and help revive traditional, small-scale water management practices from the precolonial era. In rural parts of India and central Asia where British colonialism did not penetrate with its centralized, modern water techniques, for example, some such traditional methods and local governing mechanisms have remained intact. Village built and managed water tanks in India offer small, local, partial, but helpful solutions to the nation's great water storage shortages. In rural Afghanistan and eastern Iran, highly respected village mirabs, mirabs, or water foremen, are still selected annually among local orchard growers and farmers who share a water source to set watering schedules and amounts and to settle disputes so that wellhead and upstream farmers do not consume more than their fair share before it flows to users at the bottom. The or water foremen, are still selected annually among local orchard growers and farmers who share a water source to set watering schedules and amounts and to settle disputes so that wellhead and upstream farmers do not consume more than their fair share before it flows to users at the bottom. The mirab mirab system is remarkably reminiscent of the Dutch water parliaments that became a prototype for the founders of the Dutch Republic's democracy, as well as of democratically functioning local inst.i.tutions like Valencia's public water court. It does not require too great a leap of thinking to imagine how expanding the power base of such long-established, local water inst.i.tutions and practices might become one of the building blocks to rebuilding failed, or never fully formed, states that otherwise menace the world order. system is remarkably reminiscent of the Dutch water parliaments that became a prototype for the founders of the Dutch Republic's democracy, as well as of democratically functioning local inst.i.tutions like Valencia's public water court. It does not require too great a leap of thinking to imagine how expanding the power base of such long-established, local water inst.i.tutions and practices might become one of the building blocks to rebuilding failed, or never fully formed, states that otherwise menace the world order.

Although the water crisis of the world's poorest has been on the international agenda and the subject of numerous, high-level meetings among serious-minded people since the 1970s, and the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, endorsed by world leaders at the second Earth Summit at Johannesburg in 2002, included a specific target of halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015, the truth is that the legions of the world's water disenfranchised are continuing to swell. The familiar dynamics of ruthless indifference among those far away and diffused political power are at perpetual play. Moreover, one perverse, unintentional effect of the multilateral campaign for clean drinking and sanitary water has been to divert increased investment away from also badly needed food production infrastructure. Without a pressing crisis to rivet all world leaders' serious attention, there is not nearly enough financial commitment from rich countries, nor even sufficient political will from government leaders of many suffering, water poor ones. In a changing global order without a single dominating world power to set the agenda, the task of rallying action is chiefly being left to an amorphous international process led by weak, multilateral inst.i.tutions and diverse nongovernmental ent.i.ties. If only a small fraction of the debate and study they have committed over the years had been translated into concrete action, the water crisis might have been solved many times over.

Several promising principles have been enunciated. These include striking a balance between the "3 E's": Environmentally sustainable use of water; Equitable access by the world's poor to fulfill their basic water needs and for communities to share in the benefits of local water resources with the poor; Efficient use of existing resources, including recognition of water's value as an economic good. Yet no galvanizing consensus has emerged on how to practically realize these or other principles. As a result, the small army of jet-setting, water conference-goers often resemble the proverbial endless talking shop, issuing declarations of broad good intentions but disagreeing too much to get on board with concrete paths proposed to achieve them. This was ill.u.s.trated at the third triennial World Water Forum held in j.a.pan's historic capital of Kyoto in 2003, impressively attended by 24,000. Conference-goers became embroiled in a furor over a report of a high-profile committee headed by former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus that proposed specific financial means to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for water. Citing the staggering investment sums needed-on the order of $180 billion globally per year-for water infrastructure, and recognizing the paltry commitments industrialized governments were willing to make, the Camdessus report strongly endorsed private sector partic.i.p.ation; adding fuel to a controversial suggestion, it cited large-scale, centralized waterworks like dams as potential targets for private financing that are an anathema to activists who had fought against them on the World Commission on Dams. Protests erupted at the session where the Camdessus report was launched. Angry anti-private-market water activists, NGO representatives, and union members marched through the venue, and unfurled a banner that read, "Water for People, Not for Profits."

On current dynamics and trajectories, not only will the U.N.'s self-declared International Decade for Action "Water for Life" (20052015) likely expire without achieving the Millennium targets, but the ma.s.sive dry s.h.i.+ft in the global water continuum of Haves and Have-Nots will continue to lurch toward deepening scarcity. Countries with scarcity are likely to veer toward famine; countries already in water famine face greater human catastrophes and political upheavals. Overtaxed water ecosystems are likely to grow more and more depleted and less and less capable of sustaining their societies. As the gulf between those with sufficient water and those without deepens as a source of grievance, inequity and conflict, the new politics of scarcity in mankind's most indispensable resource is becoming an increasingly pivotal fulcrum in shaping the history and environmental destiny of the twenty-first century.

EPILOGUE.

Looking back over time brings into relief the close a.s.sociation between breakthrough water innovations and many of the turning points of world history. From about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago, following several millennia of experimentation and development, large-scale irrigated agriculture in the arid, flooding river valleys of the Middle East's Fertile Crescent and the Indus River, and along the Yellow River's soft loess plateaus, provided the technological and social organizational basis for the start of modern human civilization. During the same period, man began transporting large cargoes on rivers and along seash.o.r.es in reed and wooden sailing vessels, eventually aided by a steering rudder. Sailing in turn, nurtured the rise of international sea trade and Mediterranean civilizations where indigenous agricultural conditions were relatively poor. Civilization's slow march through rain-watered, cultivatable lands began in earnest a little under 4,000 years ago with the spread of plow agriculture that allowed more intensive farming over a greater expanse of cropland through the application of animal power.

Mastery of the art of quenching red hot iron in water to make steel weapons and tools about 3,000 years ago made possible construction of qanats and aqueducts, which reliably conveyed enough freshwater to sustain the rise of the great cities that anch.o.r.ed every civilization. The inland expansion of civilization was facilitated by the innovation of transport ca.n.a.ls that connected natural waterways, starting in China 2,500 years ago and replicated everywhere with great impact over the centuries from southern France's seventeenth-century Ca.n.a.l du Midi to America's nineteenth-century Erie Ca.n.a.l. Some 500 years ago, global distance barriers were defeated by Europeans' momentous discovery of how to sail back and forth across the open oceans; from the mid-nineteenth century, interoceanic sailing times were compressed by the cutting of great sea ca.n.a.ls for new, speedy steams.h.i.+ps and gunboats that forged the world order of the colonial age.

Just prior to start of the Christian Era 2,000 years ago the seminal invention of the waterwheel captured the power of flowing water to turn mills to grind man's daily bread; a thousand years later water-power was applied with more complex gearing to a widening array of industrial applications and ultimately, a quarter of a millennium ago, to power the first factories. The waterpower barrier was finally shattered by the steam engine in the late eighteenth century-arguably the greatest invention of the last millennium which catalyzed the defining innovations of the Industrial Revolution-and was transcended yet again by hydroelectric power in the late nineteenth century and a panoply of water-a.s.sisted power generation inventions in the twentieth century. The sanitary revolution helped foment transformations in human health, demography, and clean drinking water that sustained ma.s.sive modern industrial urban concentrations. Less than a century ago, 5,000 years after the original big dams of antiquity, history's first giant, multipurpose dams began harnessing the planet's great rivers to deliver electricity, irrigation water, and flood control on a ma.s.sive scale that remade landscapes at a stroke and was vital to launching the worldwide Green Revolution that nourished humanity's stunning population surge. Modern industrial technologies also permitted man to mine the earth of water from its deep underground reservoirs as he had drilled oil, and to pump the water unprecedented distances over and beyond mountains in long-distance aqueducts. By the end of the twentieth century, an ocean fleet of intermodal supercontainers speedily delivering goods ordered from foreign factories from a nearly real-time information web to local markets across the planet served as the transport backbone of the new, integrated global economy.

With each major breakthrough, civilization had been transformed by the conversion of a key water obstacle into a source of greater economic power and political control; invariably its accessible water resources became more productively utilized and more voluminous in absolute supply. Time and again, the world order of the age was recast, elevating societies to preeminence that proved most adept at harnessing the new form of water's catalytic potency and pus.h.i.+ng the laggards toward decline. Today, man has arrived at the threshold of yet a new age. His technological prowess has reached the point that he possesses the power, literally, to alter nature's resources on a planetary scale, while soaring demand from swelling world population and individual levels of consumption among the newly prospering urgently impel him to use that prowess to extract as much water as he can. The alarming, early result is a worsening depletion of many of Earth's life-sustaining water ecosystems that, nonetheless, are not keeping pace with the growing global scarcity.

Until now, all history's water breakthroughs have fallen into four traditional categories of use-domestic needs, economic production, power generation, and transport or strategic advantage. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, civilization faces an imperative fifth category that defines the era's new water challenge: how to innovate new governing organizations and technical applications that make available sufficient supplies of freshwater for man's essential purposes in an environmentally sustainable manner and relieves the scarcity of an increasingly thirsty planet. No technological panacea that extracts more renewable water from nature is available or on the near-term horizon to answer the call. Some societies may borrow time by mining Earth's underground reservoirs or transferring freshwater from river basin to river basin until their total water reserves give out. For others, comprising many hundreds of millions of people, the day of reckoning has already arrived. For everyone sharing the planet, the destiny of human civilization as we know it hinges on the responses to this challenge. History suggests those societies that make big breakthroughs that maximize productive use of their renewable water resources and possibly usher in a turning point in practices and applications are the likeliest to be rewarded with rising economic wealth and international power.

The most obvious, environmentally sustainable large source of freshwater at hand to alleviate the crisis is simply to use the current supplies more efficiently. Tapping them, however, is more difficult than it seems at first glance. For starters, it requires major organizational changes in the way water is managed, politically and economically. Enormous inefficiencies, waste, and political favoritism have been built up in the government command systems that controlled water use in almost every society through the centuries-the true paradox of water is that despite its scarcity, it nearly everywhere remains the most shortsightedly and poorly governed critical resource. Reform can come in one of two main ways: by foresightful, effective, top-down political leaders.h.i.+p that uproots its own embedded systems and then makes wise choices about the governing technologies and methods to replace them; or by turning loose the proven reorganizing power of impersonal market forces within a properly regulated, governing framework to winnow out the inefficiencies and redeploy the existing water resources from less to more productive hands.

It is, of course, conceivable that uncommon leaders.h.i.+p might arise within a handful of governments around the world to implement the necessary internal reforms. Yet judging from history, it seems highly imprudent, even fanciful, to bet that such exceptional leaders.h.i.+p will arise across many continents at one time. Better-more pragmatic-odds of success almost surely lie with greater reliance upon the self-interested, profit motive of individuals organized by the politically indifferent market anch.o.r.ed 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. Those uneasy with the market system's history of yielding widely unequal wealth distribution patterns should be partially heartened by the fact that compet.i.tive, free markets' singular devotion to lucre has on its side the considerable merit of being one of history's most subversive and undiscriminating enemies of unfairly entrenched privilege and deserves credit as a prodigious creator of the wealth that necessarily precedes any debate about how to make its distribution more equitable.

A second obstacle is that the precondition for any effective organizational innovation, either market-based or government-imposed, is adequate water infrastructure and control for basic delivery, protection against shocks, waste removal, and measurement of use. In vast swathes of the world this precondition is in shocking deficit. The dearth of infrastructure is central, for example, to the deplorable failure to achieve the most elementary, universally sought goal of providing at least 13 gallons, or 50 liters, to meet the minimum basic daily domestic and sanitary needs for each individual. This is a minuscule drop-the equivalent of eight low-flow toilet flushes-that even the water poorest societies have enough supply to provide. Any legitimate government would readily strive to do so. Moreover, many nongovernmental and official international inst.i.tutions have been trying to a.s.sist countries to achieve it and other very basic water needs. Prominent water experts are campaigning for this tiny amount to be recognized as a universal human right to water. Yet it is unachieved for two-fifths of mankind for one overriding, simple reason-the deficit of existing infrastructure and competent, inst.i.tutional governance.

Finally, there is no one-size-fits-all remedy for the global crisis of water scarcity. Each society's hydrological reality and challenges, like its political, economic and social conditions, are unique. Some societies have to cope with monsoonal seasonality, others with perennial rainfall, and some with almost none at all. Some entire regions, such as Africa, have scarcely tapped their hydroelectric power development and irrigation water storage potential; while in America and Europe, additional giant damming has mostly yielded environmentally counterproductive and diminis.h.i.+ng economic returns. Investing local, mostly poor stake-holders who have historically been dispossessed by large waterworks in the success of a new water project is a paramount challenge in many developing countries but almost nonexistent in leading industrial democracies with responsive governing structures. Some nations' most urgent need is to resurrect and expand traditional small-scale, low-tech methods for water storage and terracing, while for others it is to apply modern water technologies on a large scale as rapidly as possible. Pragmatism, not universality or bias of principle, is what is called for: It is, quite frankly, hypocritical and even morally obscene, to witness activists and officials from water-Have nations whose material benefits-albeit often gained with ugly social, economic, and environmental side effects-have been so visibly aggrandized by giant dams to use their international clout to reflexively oppose virtually all similar development in water poor ones. In short, the world water crisis is a multidimensional crisis. It requires myriad responses targeted at each specific layer and situation, much trial and error adaptation of what works elsewhere, vast capital investment in infrastructure, relentless hard work governed by a pragmatic intelligence and a few, flexible guiding principles. The world has no previous model or inst.i.tutional framework for coping with it. Everything has to be invented on the fly.

Every society in the age of scarcity faces its own particular version of the era's defining water challenge. How each copes with its challenges, and which societies make the most dynamic breakthroughs, will partly dictate the winners and losers in a century where water's role is of increasingly paramount importance. History is agnostic as to whether a water rich society is likeliest to seize upon its opportunity to exploit its initial water resource advantage in a dynamic new way or whether its relative comfort instead will make it a complacent onlooker while some water indigent society, driven to innovation by the dire necessity of survival, makes the pathbreaking innovations that unlock a new, hidden aspect of water's extraordinary, catalytic properties and transforms the obstacle of scarcity into a propellant of expansion toward wealth and possible global leaders.h.i.+p. Whether in the end it is a Western liberal democracy, China's authoritarian, state-directed market system, a resurgent totalitarian, command economy state like antiquity's hydraulic societies and the industrialized twentieth century's n.a.z.i Germany or Soviet Union, or a nation rising on some other new model, which proves most adept at making the breakthrough responses, will influence the type of governing model that prevails in this round of history's endlessly s.h.i.+fting contest between political economies.

Throughout history water has been a great uniter and a great divider, a barrier and a conveyance, but always a great transformer of civilization. As history's most critical natural resource, vital in virtually every aspect of human society, and one that interactively leverages food, energy, climate change, and other grave problems facing a world rising toward 9 billion souls, all striving for first world material standards, water also represents an early proxy test for human civilization's impending survival challenge of learning how to sustainably manage Earth's total planetary environment. Geographer Jared Diamond has grimly concluded that, on current trajectories, there are simply not enough planetary environmental resources, including accessible freshwater, to even come close to satisfying the aspirations of several billions to move up the development ladder to industrial-world levels of consumption and waste. As in previous eras, human population and available environmental resources are again widely out of balance. Famines, genocides, wars, disease, ma.s.s migrations, ecological disasters, and untold miseries are history's remorseless mechanisms for reequilibration. In the end all nations will be buffeted, if not engulfed, by the myriad feedback channels of water crises that originate elsewhere. How much tumult and suffering lies ahead depends in significant measure upon how well mankind manages the total global freshwater crisis on our shared planet. Looking farther ahead, the extraordinary, unique substance that gave life to man and shaped the destiny of human civilizations is still the indispensable, prerequisite stepping-stone to some day transplanting our species beyond Earth's sphere to colonize other orbs in the solar system.

There is one more special attribute about water that must inform any study of its role in history: The inextricable affinity between water and our own essential humanity-not merely with human life, but with a dignified human life. My visit to Kenya in the summer of 2004 set off a personal alarm of just how dehumanizing and economically crippling the lack of water for basic needs could be. It drove home the mind-numbing inequity that a majority of humanity still struggles to extract its meager material surplus from nature using obsolete and even ancient water technologies. In the semiarid, rural Chyulu Hills in southeast Kenya on the edge of the Great African Rift Valley congeries of otherwise vibrant, culturally robust communities live in literally dirt-poor subsistence for one overriding reason-insufficient freshwater.

It shocked my sense of common humanity to see the small group of men and women work so tenaciously with hand tools such as picks, shovels, and sisal sacks to perform the backbreaking manual labor of digging and carrying the reddish dirt week after week to reinforce the earthen dam they'd built nineteen years earlier-precisely like those built in ancient timesto trap the seasonal monsoonal rainwater through the dry season so that their cattle can survive, when they and I knew that one-day access to a simple bulldozer could do the job of a whole season, and a few days with a cement mixer could alleviate the task for years. In the nearby Machacos Hills, where low-tech terracing has improved water management and agricultural production, Kenyan farmers step up and down for hours each day on a treadle water pump-much as Chinese rice farmers did using bamboo tubes centuries ago and modern Westerners do at the gym on their exercise StairMasters-to lift water from a muddy creek up the hillside in plastic tubes to fill cans they use to hand water their crops.

More striking still is the ubiquitous sight of large numbers of women and children acting with their feet by marching two to three hours or more per day on dusty roads to fetch clean water from wells or other sources in large, yellow, plastic "jerry" cans, which they carry on their heads, on the ends of poles laid across their shoulders, and packed on bicycles or donkeys. A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy. There was genuine rejoicing when the two miles of piping our small, humanitarian group of American volunteers had financed, for a pittance in Western terms, was connected to the well pump and began to deliver water directly to a simple, plastic water tank located in one of the villages.

I will never forget the sense of disempowered injustice we felt when we met a thoughtful young man as enterprising, vivacious, and worthy of a fair opportunity as anyone his age in industrial America, Europe, or Asia who was studying on his own every night, in a home without electric lighting, for a high school equivalency exam on the remote chance that he could qualify for a special scholars.h.i.+p to attend the University of Nairobi; his family was too poor to pay the couple of hundred dollars for his formal high school education, and I knew that had the water pipes we financed arrived years earlier and been put to productive economic use for modest, gravity-fed irrigation as well as drinking and cleaning, this young man might well have gotten the professional chance he deserved and which my own daughters take for granted. His country would also have gained important human capital in its struggle for development. In Ethiopia, where my wife, a high school teacher, traveled in the summer of 2008, the situation was similar, and the poverty even more desperate. When she arrived in the beautiful, remote mountain highlands that provide the headwaters of the Blue Nile, she felt as if she had been dropped back into medieval times as she saw farmers scratching out meager livelihoods with oxen-pulled wooden plows.

As recently as the 1950s in early postwar France, my Bretagne mother-in-law was still was.h.i.+ng clothes with river water and carrying upstairs water buckets of captured rainwater with which to bathe her children and cook the family's food. It further ill.u.s.trates how much water history was everywhere a layered history: Ancient, medieval, and modern methods always coexist; yet, crucially, it is an unevenly unevenly layered history, imparting enormous-and easily overlooked-advantages to the comfortable water Haves and crippling disadvantages, starting with a life handicapped by malnutrition, ill health, and sacrifice of education to the daily search for water, to the world's water Have-Nots. The need for water trumps every human principle, social bond, and ideology. It is literally indispensable. With extreme water scarcity showing through as a root cause of many of the world's famines, genocides, diseases, and failing states, I am inclined to believe that if there can be a meaningful human right to any material thing, surely it starts with access to minimum clean freshwater. layered history, imparting enormous-and easily overlooked-advantages to the comfortable water Haves and crippling disadvantages, starting with a life handicapped by malnutrition, ill health, and sacrifice of education to the daily search for water, to the world's water Have-Nots. The need for water trumps every human principle, social bond, and ideology. It is literally indispensable. With extreme water scarcity showing through as a root cause of many of the world's famines, genocides, diseases, and failing states, I am inclined to believe that if there can be a meaningful human right to any material thing, surely it starts with access to minimum clean freshwater.

At the end of the day, how each member of the world community ultimately acts in response to the global freshwater crisis is not just a matter of economic and political history, but a judgment on our own humanity-and the ultimate fate of human civilization. As one scientist succinctly put it: "After all, we we are water." are water."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

In writing the history of water, I have had the intellectual pleasure of having been able to stand upon the broad, high shoulders of many first-rate thinkers and scholars who have written insightfully about the subject from the perspective of their own disciplines and times. I salute them, and the civilized enterprise of acc.u.mulating knowledge that hopefully helps human society to inch forward with better understanding and management of our shared world.

Many exceptional personal contributions have also informed my work. I have learned an immense amount from David Grey, who heads the World Bank's water group. David not only has an amazingly profound and broad understanding of the complexities of today's water issues, but he brings inspiring pa.s.sion, energy, intelligence, and an encyclopedic knowledge of water history to his work. At the outset of the project, Dr. Allan Hoffman of the U.S. Department of Energy and senior adviser to Winrock International's Clean Energy Group, impressed upon me the inextricable interconnectedness of water, energy, and climate change issues, and pointed me in fruitful directions. Many of my conceptual frameworks developed from stimulating conversation with Peter H. Gleick, president of Pacific Inst.i.tute, a fantastically useful, research-based NGO specializing in water issues, and with Professor J. A. "Tony" Allan of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Kings College London, who imparted his important idea of thinking of food as "virtual water" as we tackle the world's interrelated food and water problems.

Others who generously shared their time and minds were Jim McMahon at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Philip Duffy and Andy Thompson of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Amba.s.sador John McDonald of the Inst.i.tute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. They provided me with an educated start in understanding energy, climate change, hydrology, and global water diplomacy, respectively. One delightful experience was discussing the waters of Rome with Katherine Wentworth Rinne, whose interactive cartographic project, "Aquae Urbis Romae," at the University of Virginia tracing the evolution of the Eternal City's water development is exploring new boundaries in the use of online technology to study history. Professor Peter Aicher of the University of Southern Maine enthusiastically shared his extensive knowledge about Rome's aqueducts and water management. Veteran journalist Bill Kelly was a veritable Virgil in guiding me through the intricate underworld of California and Colorado River water politics and ever graciously answered my many follow-up questions. I'd also like to thank Bob Walsh of the Bureau of Reclamation office at Boulder City near the Hoover Dam for a warm and illuminating welcome to an una