Two and a half centuries ago Benjamin Franklin quoted an old proverb: "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." A lot of wells have gone dry since Ben's time, but most people in the developed world still don't know the worth of water. Unless we are threatened or rationed, or cut off like the farmers in Klamath Valley, water is just there, like the air we breath. We use it and waste it as a divine right, then fight over it when it becomes a local issue such as it has in Payson, Arizona and countless other places in the nation and the world.
But political leaders and the media have not yet seen fit to make the world's water supply and quality the high profile issue of national and international relevance it should be, a topic for discussion and debate in public, along with say, education, or whether or not to extract oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or whether Congressman Condit had anything to do with the disappearance of Chandra Levy.
As former senator Paul Simon aptly pointed out, it is safe to assume that 10,000 times more media attention was devoted to the O.J. Simpson trial than has ever been given to the numerous water crises taking shape around the world.
National Geographic, in a special issue on water published a few years ago, predicted that we will soon change the way we "use, see and think about water." We will be forced to. This series of articles composed of information compiled from many different sources will first present facts about global water conditions as they are known to date, then the ideas that can bring about the changes expressed by the National Geographic:
First, we are not running out of fresh water. There is the same amount cycling from the atmosphere to the earth's surface and back to the atmosphere again that there was when the planet was first formed. Its availability to support life on earth is determined by human water management and the efficiency of water cycles which are affected by both natural and unnatural influences (to be discussed later in the series). Three quarters of the earth's surface is covered by water, but 97 percent of that resource is seawater and two thirds of the remainder is icebergs and snow.
Between 1900 and 1995 the population of the world has grown from 1.6 billion to over 6 billion people. During that period, per capita use of water has increased sevenfold as has the world's groundwater withdrawals. In most places withdrawals exceed replenishment capability. For example, the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest discrete (isolated) aquifer in the world which lies beneath the Midwest farm belt is estimated to be one quarter depleted, half depleted in parts under New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. Substantial groundwater depletion is also ocurring in Mexico, India and China, particularly around Beijing. Closer to home, consider the case of Tucson, Arizona, which uses (a few years ago) 200,000 acre-feet of water a year from an aquifer which is replenished by only 50,000 acre-feet annually. (An acre-foot is one acre of water one foot deep). Mideast depletion, discussed further on in the article, is even more critical. Meanwhile, the demand for water worldwide continues to soar, tripling between 1950 and 1990 and doubling in the last two decades.
One half of the world's people lack basic sanitation and 1.5 billion lack potable drinking water. That number is rising in many parts of the world. Two thirds of the world's population have to go outside their homes to fetch drinking water.
Eighty percent of the world's diseases are waterborne. According to the United Nations, 9,500 children a day die either because of lack of water, or more frequently, because of diseases caused by polluted water. For example, Poland's share of river water for drinking has dropped from 32 percent to five percent in two decades. Three-quarters of its river water is too polluted even for industrial use.
At least eighty nations now have severe enough water shortages to greatly retard or prevent agricultural production.
The Middle East, where populations are growing dramatically, is a case in point. The World Bank says per capita renewable supplies there have fallen from an annual 3,430 cubic meters to 667 cubic meters. (A cubic meter equals 264 gallons.) Bethlehem water taps often contain nothing but warm air. Residents of Jericho frequently have drinking water only once a week. Because of quantity and quality water problems, Israelis drink less water than Americans and as a result are nine times more likely to have kidney problems. Israel has by far the highest water quality standards in the Middle East, but the allowable nitrate level is still almost twice that of the United States.
Iraq is 75 percent desert, Saudi Arabia is 95 percent desert. Egypt, almost 100 percent desert, has doubled in population in the last few decades to 60 million people. It it totally dependent on the Nile for water. The Nile is the longest river in the world and flows through nine nations battling over water rights, though the rest of the world hears little about it.
Water experts estimate that Middle East countries effectively ran out of water (became unable to feed their expanding populations) about 1972, relying on oil revenues to purchase "virtual" water in the form of food imports. Egypt imports half its food, including about 10 million tons of wheat a year. It takes 1,000 tons of water to grow one ton of grain, so that means Egypt imports an annual 10 billion tons of "virtual" water in wheat alone.
For perspective, consider that North America has a national annual renewable water supply of 5,150,000 gallons per person while Kuwait, Libya and Saudi Arabia have, respectively, 16,000 gallons, 56,000 gallons and 77,000 gallons. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia supplement their supplies with extensive (and expensive) desalination made possible only by oil income. Currently, the cost of raising a ton of wheat using desalinated water is seven times the world market price. You could say that the very life of those countries is dependent on their oil resources lasting and the continuance of America's insatiable demand for it.
But the Middle East is by no means the only area with water problems. The outlook is grim in much of Africa, Mexico and Asia where populations are soaring. More than 300 Chinese cities are short of water and 100 of them are very short. China has 22 percent of the world's population but only seven percent of the world's cropland and seven percent of its fresh water.
As for the United States.....well, we have our problems too, as more and more people are beginning to realize. We are blessed in our water supplies compared to a Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, but we are a large and climatically diverse country with water supplies distributed accordingly. For example, most of California, with a population of 32 million... more people than Canada and 161 other nations... receives about a fifth the amount of precipitation that falls on Eastern states. As Marc Reisner writes in his book Cadillac Desert, "Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel." In the near future California power problems may pale into significance compared to the tremendously costly challenge of moving even more water to the nation's most productive state. California is far more than Hollywood, golf courses and billionaire playboys. In addition to its importance as a manufacturing and technology center, its farmers produce half the fruits and vegetables that feed America.
Las Vegas, the play center of the nation is both the fastest growing and the driest city in America, receiving only about four inches of rain annually. At 338 gallons per day, a hundred gallons more than Phoenix, the desert capital of Arizona, per capita water consumption in Las Vegas is among the nation's greatest, the vast consumption attributed to tourism.
The complacency and abuse which have become the byproducts of our seeming plenty prevent the rational public education, discourse and actions needed to promote appropriate and practical water use, sustain and in all too many cases restore, the efficiently functioning water cycles upon which we all depend.
Rachel Carson, author of the 1960s book Silent Spring, would be amazed today at the extent to which her assessment of the modern world would be fulfilled:
"In an age where man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference."
As local water problems accelerate... particularly in the dry West where populations are surging we seem to take a series of jumps from complacency to demogoguery to hysteria to knee-jerk official tyranny.