Like most of us in the Upper Valley, I take water for granted. My water comes from a well located roughly 15 yards from my backdoor, flows freely in all seasons of the year, and costs me nothing. Because it is free and readily available, I run the tap when I brush my teeth or shave, run the water while I wash the dishes, and freely water the vegetable garden. But based on a recent analysis of how water is used in the 17 drought-stricken states in the southwest who draw from the Colorado River, my profligacy is inconsequential.
A team of international researchers issued a report in Nature Sustainability on water use in the American west and determined that only 6% of the water in the Colorado River basin is used by homeowners for things like showering, toothbrushing, cooking, lawn care, and filling swimming pools. Another 8% is used commercially for everything from mining to office buildings, to shopping malls, to operating decorative fountains in front of hotels. The other 86% is used for agriculture, and much of it goes for crops that humans don’t eat. In all, 32% of the water used in the southwest goes to grow crops that feed cattle and at least 10% of that feed is exported to China, Japan, and the Middle East. The bottom line: water use by homeowners and businesses are not the primary reason reservoirs are draining and any meaningful solution to the overconsumption of drinking water requires a marked limitation on agricultural use. That, in turn, will require us to examine the choices we make in the food we eat. Given that Americans eat four times as much beef as the global average, one solution is clear: banning cheeseburgers would be far more beneficial to the water supply than banning swimming pools or converting lawns into hardscapes. But since a ban on meat consumption is clearly an impossibility, we will need to examine other solutions.
One short-term way to reduce the water used for irrigation is to pay farmers to leave their land fallow. A solution like this is in place in California, where the Palo Verde Water District offers a fee to farmers to not grow crops. There are clear downsides to this solution. The decreased use of feed, fertilizer and farm equipment has an adverse effect on local agri-businesses and the ultimately the price of beef will increase.
A more radical longer term solution solution is to let water flow freely by eliminating dams, reversing the development of wetlands, and accepting the damage done to property in floodplains and riversides. In “Water Always Wins,” a recent article in Psyche, Erica Gies describes how our current response to adverse weather conditions, fruitlessly attempting to control the flow of rivers with “bigger drains, longer aqueducts and higher levees,” only makes matters worse. As the title of her essay indicates, whenever man tries to control water, water always wins. Her idea is to allow water to expand its footprint which would “simultaneously support local water availability, flood control, natural carbon storage, and other-than-human life.” Instead of man trying to control nature, man would work with nature by allowing rivers to take their natural course.
In a similar vein. In a recent New York Times article Brown University professor Laurence Smith urges a reimagination of our relationship with rivers. He suggests that “small, low-impact hydropower technologies” could make it possible to generate “clean, renewable electricity” on a local level with “little environmental downside,” noting that in Europe alone there are over 30,000 potential sites for such projects. He describes how the Mississippi River, left to its own devices, could move tons of sediment downstream to help replace and protect disappearing wetlands in the delta region. He also cites examples of rivers in the Pacific Northwest where salmon have returned to their natural habitat once dams are removed.
And if the advice of environmentalists is too hard to swallow, it is possible the marketplace will see us through. In researching this article I got 659,000,000 results to the Google query “who is investing in water,” including this one from Fidelity touting a promising investment fund:
“The global water supply is finite and there is no new water,” says Janet Glazer, portfolio manager for the Fidelity® Water Sustainability Fund (FLOWX). The fund invests in companies that are helping drive greater efficiency, extending the lifecycle, improving infrastructure, and developing disruptive technologies.
Glazer envisions a future where governments will be competing against each other for a scarce and essential resource in the marketplace, which should result in the availability of funding for years to come, enough to yield “4-6% growth per year for a long time.”
We need water to sustain our species, and should we fail to find a way to allocate this resource fairly and equitably conflict is inevitable. Indeed, according to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, we are already witnessing an increase in violence over water resources. In a recent blog post he cited conflicts over water rights in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa and noted how Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine’s water supplies made the loss of access to water a weapon. His sobering synopsis: “Unless strategies for moving from water conflict to water cooperation are pursued and implemented, violence associated with freshwater resources seems likely to continue to increase. That’s not the path we want to be on.”
To avoid that path, we will need to give serious consideration to the recommendations of environmentalists. Limiting our collective use of water will require some changes in our behavior and some sacrifices. Those behavior changes and sacrifices are best made through thoughtful deliberation instead of armed conflict.
Gersen lives in Etna.