Smolan & Erwitt continued From Front flap
Michael Malone, Bill McKibben Jeffrey Rothfeder, Michael Specter, Paul Hawken and Mike Cerre.
S THE ARAL SEA, once a glistening body of water, has lost two-thirds
S TAEKO TERAUCHI-LOUTITT runs along the Donau River in Vienna,
of its volume because its source rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation
Austria on June 18, 2007. Born in Tochigi, Japan, Taeko started running 16
during the Soviet era. Previously the fourth-largest lake in the world – the
years ago. Her selfless decision to run around the world had an unexpected
size of Southern California – much of it is now a dry graveyard of rusting
personal benefit when she fell in love with fellow runner Canadian Jason
shipwrecks. This desertification has produced toxic dust, resulting in
Louttit during the three month relay race.
Chris Emerick
respiratory diseases and cancers in communities downwind of the lake.
IN REGION AFTER REGION AROUND THE GLOBE, water — or put another way, control over
Gerd Ludwig
rapidly diminishing supplies of clean water — is at the heart of many of the world’s most Jin Zidell asked if we could meet because he wanted to do something to make a
raw geopolitical disputes, some of which have already rippled into dangerously destabilizing
difference in a world that appeared to be spinning out of control. Like Ashok, Jin had
conflicts.
lost a loved one, his wife, and had spent a long and profound period in mourning. To
Not surprisingly, among the hottest flashpoints is the Middle East, where water is at a
those of us who were his friends, his heartache seemed bottomless and immeasurable.
premium and disagreements are in abundance. Virtually every political, social and military
But on that day we met for lunch, Jin seemed different. He wanted to do something
strategy undertaken by Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and other nations in the area is
to honor Linda. What struck me as we spoke was the scope of Jin’s dreams. His eyes
driven by its impact on access to water. Consider the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during
were as big as his love for Linda. His grief had become resolve.
the Six-Day War in 1967. Formerly southwest Syria, this rugged plateau is home to headwaters
When Jin asked me to suggest a way he could make a real difference I suggested that
of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, two of Israel’s most essential sources of water.
he do something that was measurable, something that could change an individual’s life
Despite Syria’s saber rattling and widespread international condemnation for its occupation
in a single day, that he focus on a global problem that could be solved in a decade,
of this territory, Israel refuses to retreat from the Golan Heights because it fears that Syria would divert the water supply, as had been threatened in the early 1960s.
an endeavor that could actually push the needle with respect to improving peoples’
Similarly, the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war was fought primarily in southern
lives and the environment. He looked at me puzzled and asked, what would that be?
Lebanon, where tributaries of the Jordan River lie. Hezbollah
I knew of only one thing: water. Ninety minutes later, he left determined to find a way
has vowed to control the water resources for Lebanon, even if
to provide safe drinking water to 200 million people for the rest of their lives by 2027.
Israel has to do with less.
Since that day, Jin has never looked back.
50 percent
Five years later the Blue Planet Run Foundation has three major initiatives under way.
Meanwhile, in a mirror image of these disputes, the Palestinian rejection of peace accords in
The first is the Peer Water Exchange, which aims to enjoin thousands of
the late 1990s grew in large part out of concern that these pacts ensured that Israel could
non-governmental organizations to find, fund and share the best water projects around
determine how much water Palestinian areas receive. The Palestinians claim that Israel has
the world. The second is the extraordinary photography book you are holding in
capped their per capita water consumption at about 18 gallons of water per day, compared to
your hands, designed to bring home Jin’s belief that that pure water is a right, not a
about 92 gallons for the typical Israeli.
commodity.
It’s no wonder that soon after signing peace treaties with Israel, the late King Hussein of Jordan
The third initiative of the Blue Planet Run Foundation is the circumnavigation of the
and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt pointedly noted that only a quarrel over water could bring
globe by runners, symbolizing a circle in our hearts and minds, a closing of the loop
them back to war with Israel.
of love, care and responsibility that people share for each other. From June 1 through
In large or small ways, similar brinksmanship occurs with disturbing regularity in regions already
September 4, 2007, a team of 22 dedicated runners set aside their own lives for 95
tense with enmity that has evolved over generations:
days to carry a message to the entire planet that undrinkable water is unthinkable in
S In Southern Africa, the waters of the Okavango River basin are pulled in four directions
today’s world. If the Blue Planet Run Foundation can change the world to ensure that
by Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with hardly a cordial word spoken;
no child will ever be harmed by the water he or she drinks, then it will be one of the
The number of people who don’t have access to the quality of water available to the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago
S In the Indian-controlled territories of Kashmir, where headwaters of the Indus River
great miracles of the 21st century. And Jin’s dedication to the memory of the person he
basin reside, Pakistan has threatened to use nuclear weapons against India if any of its
loved most will have changed the world.
water supply is interrupted;
— PAUL HAWKEN
S
AN ARMED GUIDE walks on a cliff above the Nile River near Amarna, Egypt. The Nile flows
through 10 countries in eastern Africa, but by force of a nearly 80-year-old treaty, Egypt commands most of its waters, a source of dispute and strained relations for decades. Upstream countries, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, have proposed dams on the river to aid their own development. But these plans have been condemned by Egypt as it anticipates its population doubling over the next 50 years. 134
Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic, Getty Images
Blue Planet Run
1.1 billion
S In Sri Lanka, violent conflicts have broken out between government armies and a rebel group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who closed a provincial sluice gate in protest over government delays in improving the nation’s water system; S In Kenya, dozens were killed and thousands fled their homes when youths from the
The number of people worldwide — 1 in every 6 — without access to clean water
Maasai and Kikuyu tribal communities fought with machetes, spears, bows and arrows and clubs over water in the Rift Valley. The behavior is irrational, yet the motivation has an undeniable logic. Decades of poorly designed irrigation techniques, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and forest destruction, industrial pollution, residential sprawl, lack of conservation and misuse have taken a dire toll on global water resources, and clean fresh water is becoming scarcer in every corner of the planet. The worst conditions are in places like Haiti, Gambia, Cambodia and Mali, where residents subsist on an average of less than 2 gallons of water per day — fewer than three large bottles of bottled water and well below the 13 gallons per day considered the amount of water needed to meet a minimum quality of life. With less and less water to go around, the idea that people would begin to fight over what’s left — and over who determines who gets what remains — is anything but outlandish. And while richer countries like the United States have been hiding water shortages with engineering sleights of hand, this strategy is now backfiring. Southeast Florida, southern California, Atlanta and parts of Texas are all likely to be dry within 20 years if their growth patterns and management of water aren’t sharply altered. In the United States, the water wars are more often waged in court. For example, after 30 years and no end to the amount of money being spent on attorney fees, three states in the southeast are still feuding over the Chattahoochee River. Rising north of Atlanta, the Chattahoochee is the sole water supply for the sprawling city’s metropolitan area as well as a source of downstream water for two neighbor states, Alabama and Florida. Providing water for Atlanta’s uncontrolled population boom — the city has grown from 2.2 million people in 1980 to 3.7 million people in 2000 — severely taxes the Chattahoochee. The city’s largest treatment plant tapped 3.8 billion gallons a year of the river’s water when it opened in 1991; now it pumps nearly 20 billion gallons annually. If, as expected, Atlanta’s population reaches 5 million by 2025, the Chattahoochee won’t be able to handle the load.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
But that isn’t slowing Atlanta down. Instead, the city is aggressively making plans to squeeze more water out of the Chattahoochee by building a dozen additional dams and reservoirs on
KIBBUTZ HATZERIM gained a territorial foothold in Israel’s Negev Desert
the river. This, in turn, has raised the ire of Alabama and Florida, which claim that Georgia is stealing the river for itself. Farmers in southern Georgia are siding with Alabama and Florida against Atlanta, as their irrigation allotment falls. Depending on the outcome of the many
S WITH A POPULATION of 18 million growing by almost 400,000 every year, the water needs of
engineer Simcha Blass in 1965 to develop and mass-produce drip irrigation.
the residents of Mumbai, India, are staggering. Because water is prohibitively expensive, many slum
Netafim, the kibbutz’s irrigation business, now controls a large portion of the
dwellers rely on leaks found — or created — in the massive pipelines that carry water to more affluent
drip market, with $400 million in sales last year. Manager Naty Barak checks
neighborhoods. Mumbai’s have-nots avoid the garbage and human waste surrounding their dwellings by
receives less than 8 inches of rain annually.
Alexandra Boulat
Blue Planet Run provides readers with an extraordinary look at the water problems facing humanity and some of the hopeful solutions being pursued by large and small companies, by entrepreneurs and activists, and by nongovernmental organizations and foundations. By the end of the book, readers are left to form their own conclusions as to whether or how the human race is capable of taking the steps necessary to solve this global crisis before it is too late.
The number of people — two-thirds of the world’s population — who will suffer from water shortages by 2025
S SLUM DWELLERS scramble for water in Jai Hind Camp in the heart of Delhi, India. The camp is home to more than 4,000 migrant workers who are dependent on daily deliveries from public and private water trucks. Ironically, the middle class in India, which receives water via home faucets, pays a tenth of what the poor pay for their water delivered by truck. India has nearly 17 percent of the world’s population but only about 4 percent of its freshwater resources.
Stuart Freedman
ARMED MEMBERS of the rebel group MEND (Movement for
Emancipation of the Niger Delta) have destroyed oil facilities and forced the closure of a significant percentage of the area’s oil operations. They have turned to violence to protest the pollution of their country’s waterways and alleged degradation of the natural environment by foreign multinational corporations. On May 1, 2007 MEND caused Chevron to shut down some oil production when it reportedly attacked the company’s Oloibiri floating production, storage and offloading vessel off southern Bayelsa state. Michael Kamber
lawsuits and negotiations over water in the U.S. southeast, new residents of Atlanta may one day
more economical — and perhaps temper the water disputes — as the supply of water continues
soon turn on the tap to find it empty, southern Georgia farmlands could become permanently
to diminish and the price of water inexorably rises. Other solutions that could minimize the inevitable water wars require viewing water in a
While the global water crisis is growing ever more dangerous, there are nonetheless a few
different light — that is, as a shared resource that demands global cooperation to manage
potential winners — namely, those nations or individuals who have a surfeit of the precious
correctly. To that end, international funding agencies like the World Bank should use their
commodity or who develop new ways to produce and distribute it. With a population of only 30
financial leverage to direct that water development projects be initiated solely under regional
million and vast amounts of territory containing more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water,
umbrellas, jointly controlled by all of the nations in the area. And water mediation groups, such as
Canada stands to become the leader of an OPEC-like cartel as water takes its place next to oil
Green Cross International, founded by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, should
as a depleted essential resource. To ship this water from Canada, as well as places like Russia,
be backed by a United Nations mandate to fulfill the charter of, as GCI describes it, “preventing
Greenland and the northern reaches of China, barges with massive liquid-holding bladders and
and resolving conflicts arising from environmental degradation.”
streamlined piping systems for bulk water transfers are already on the drawing boards, while new, less expensive and more efficient desalination techniques to make saltwater fresh are close to completion. All of these inventions and new ones beyond our imagination will become more and
Christopher Brown, Redux
reported as high as 70 percent in some major cities.
5.3 billion
parched, or economic growth in Florida and Alabama could be significantly stunted.
walking on top of the pipelines. Around the world, losses of fresh water due to leakage are routinely
the kibbutz drip lines, which feed corn, cotton and tomato crops in an area that
None of this will be easy. Ultimately, conflict is less difficult than cooperation. But we really have no choice: The way we respond to the water crisis will determine whether we survive. – JEFFREY ROTHFEDER
Published by Earth Aware Editions 17 Paul Drive San Rafael, CA 94903 800.688.2218 Fax: 415.526.1394 www.earthawareeditions.com
Blue Planet Run is two books in one: First, it is about an extraordinary 15,000-mile relay race — the longest relay race in human history — in which 20 athletes spent 95 days running around the globe to spread awareness of the world’s water crisis. Secondly, it is a showcase of powerful, inspiring, disturbing and hopeful images captured by leading photojournalists around the world who documented the human face of the crisis and its possible solutions. The result of these two parallel projects is the book you hold in your hands. One hundred percent of the royalties from this book will be used to provide clean water to people around the world who desperately need it.
Against All Odds PO Box 1189 Sausalito, CA 94966-1189 www.againstallodds.com
We call our planet Earth, but its surface is mainly water. We should call it Ocean. In the hollows of space, Earth abides as a sparkling oasis, afloat with jumbo islands, and always half hidden beneath a menagerie of clouds. In my upstate New York town, seven waterfalls tumble and spume in lofty dialects of water. Liquid scarves loop through glacier-carved gorges, and winter reminds us that light, airy bits of water can hurdle fences, collapse buildings and bring a burly city to its knees. In winter, ice forms a cataract on the eye of Lake Cayuga, but the lake never freezes solid. It can’t. Luckily for us. Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird bag of tricks. The litany of we’re-only-here-because begins with this chilling one: We’re only here because ice floats. Other liquids contract and sink when they freeze, but water alone expands, in the process growing minute triangular pyramids that clump to form spacious, holey designs that float free. If ice didn’t rise, the oceans would have frozen solid long ago, along with all the wells, springs and rivers. Without this presto-chango of water, an element that one moment slips like silk through the hands and the next collapses rooftops and chisels gorges, Earth would be barren. Since life bloomed in the seas, we need perpetual sips of fresh water to thrive. Become dehydrated, as I once did in Florida, and the brain’s salt flats dry out, mental life dulls, and only S THERE IS NO MORE or no less water available for human use now than there more than others. In Canada, where karst limestone cliffs line Death Lake in the Northwest Territories, a twentieth of the world’s population enjoys almost a tenth of the world’s fresh surface water.
Raymond Gehman, Getty Images
It will cost up to $1 trillion in the next 30 years to clean up contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States.
Blue Planet Run
Drinking Dinosaur Water
33
www.blueplanetrun.org
27
Drinking Dinosaur Water
The world’s major cities could save more than 40 percent of their annual water supplies by fixing leaks in water mains and pipes.
FOUL SMELLING WATER mixed with coal had been running from Kenny Stroud’s faucet for
more than a decade before clean tap water was finally provided by the city of Rawl, West Virginia, last March. For years, residents of the Appalachian coal-mining town had to rely on water trucks and bottled deliveries, a reality unknown to most citizens in the developed world. Their fight still continues in the courts against Massey Energy, a mountaintop coal-mining corporation, who they blame for pollution and illnesses disrupting their community.
Melissa Farlow
EVEN IN PROSPEROUS CITIES in India like New Delhi and Mumbai, city dwellers often have
water access for only a few hours a day. The public water distribution system is under so much stress that residents must rise at 3 or 4 a.m. to pump water into rooftop storage tanks. Here Vineela Bhardwaj vents her frustration to water authorities about frequent service failures. Battles over the water supply have become so common that Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, the Minister of Water Resources, sometimes describes himself as the “Minister of Water Conflicts.” Stuart Freedman
ALLISON COLE says the water in her well in Sheridan, Wyoming, turned into slurry after
gas drilling operations began nearby. The rolling plains of the Powder River Basin have been transformed by the drilling. Forty thousand wells and hundreds of miles of roads, pipelines and power lines now cover the landscape. To access the methane, companies pump millions of gallons of salty groundwater out from deep coal seams. Area residents have said the process pollutes their surface water and groundwater.
102
Blue Planet Run
Joel Sartore
We're All Downstream
US $45.00 ISBN-13: 978-1-60109-017-1 ISBN: 1-60109-017-X
9 781601 090171 32
electrolytes dripped into a vein keep death at bay. We are walking lagoons who quaff water
was at the dawn of humankind. But some areas of the planet have always had
5 4 5 00
103
THE RACE TO PROVIDE SAFE DRINKING WATER TO THE WORLD
Rick Smolan is a former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer best known as the creator of the Day in the Life book series. He and his partner, Jennifer Erwitt, are the principals of Against All Odds Productions, based in Sausalito, California. Fortune Magazine featured Against All Odds as “One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America.” Their global photography projects combine creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology. Many of their books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller lists and have been featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Fortune. Their books include America 24/7, One Digital Day, 24 Hours in Cyberspace, Passage to Vietnam, The Power to Heal and From Alice to Ocean. They live with their two children, Phoebe and Jesse, in Northern California.
and kicked off a global revolution in agriculture when it partnered with water
BLUE PLANET RUN
In keeping with the theme of the book, two trees will be planted for each tree used in the production of this book and 100% of all royalties will fund safe drinking water projects. For more information on how you can help, visit www.BluePlanetRun.org
Blue Planet Run www.blueplanetrun.org
US Price $45.00 ENVIRONMENT/PHOTOGRAPHY
It is estimated that one billion people across the planet now lack access to clean water. But, as the extraordinary images on the following pages show, there are solutions to the world’s fresh water crisis, and they are within reach. This book, ostensibly about a world crisis, is also a work of optimism and hope. The Blue Planet Run volume you are holding in your hands represents two extraordinary projects. The first is the result of a worldwide search for images and stories to capture the human face of the global water crisis. For one month, 40 talented photojournalists crossed the globe taking photographs to show the extent of the problem. At the same time, a team of researchers contacted photographers on every continent to identify existing bodies of work focused on this crucial issue. Simultaneously, 20 runners representing 13 nationalities embarked on a 95-day nonstop relay race around the globe, serving as messengers to raise awareness of the severity of the water crisis. The Blue Planet Run is designed to be a wake-up call to the world, sounding both a warning and a note of hope, letting us know that there is still time to solve this problem if we act now, before it is too late.
CREATED BY RICK SMOLAN And Jennifer ERwitt
The book also features insightful original essays from an extraordinary range of noted writers, environmentalists, inventors and journalists including Diane Ackerman, Fred Pearce, Dean Kamen, continued on back flap
Cover image: Robert Randall
This book was made possible by a generous grant from the Blue Planet Run foundation
  Scott Harrison
 Mark Laita
Earth Aware Editions/Against All Odds Productions 17 Paul Drive San Rafael, CA 94903 www.earthawareeditions.com 415-526-1370 Created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt Against All Odds Productions P.O. Box 1189 Sausalito, CA 94966 www.againstallodds.com Copyright © 2007 Against All Odds Productions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN: 1-60109-017-X ISBN-13: 978-1-60109-017-1
FOREWORD BY ROBERT REDFORD Introduction by Fred Pearce
REPLANTED PAPER
Essays by Diane Ackerman, Paul Hawken
Palace Press International, in association with Global ReLeaf, will plant two trees for each tree used in the manufacturing of this book. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign by American Forests, the nation’s oldest nonprofit conservation organization and a world leader in planting trees for environmental restoration.
Dean Kamen, Michael Malone, Bill McKibben Jeffrey Rothfeder and Michael Specter
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Korea by Palace Press International www.palacepress.com
Created by Rick Smolan & Jennifer Erwitt
against all odds productions For centuries, Brazil’s Pantanal, the largest freshwater wetland in the world, has been home to 3,500 species of plants, 400 kinds of fish, 650 bird species, 100 kinds of mammals and 80 different types of reptiles. At 68,000 square miles, roughly 10 times the size of the Everglades, the region has served as a natural water treatment plant, removing chemicals and other pollutants as water passes through its myriad winding channels. But today this delicate and remote environment is being affected by the rapid growth of industries, including gold mining and the demands of a thriving ranching culture.
Scott Warren, Aurora Photos
S a n R a fa e l , C A l ifo r n i a
1.1 billion
The number of people worldwide — 1 in every 6 — without access to clean water
With a population of 18 million growing by almost 400,000 every year, the water needs of the residents of Mumbai, India, are staggering. Because water is prohibitively expensive, many slum dwellers rely on leaks found — or created — in the massive pipelines that carry water to more affluent neighborhoods. Mumbai’s have-nots avoid the garbage and human waste surrounding their dwellings by walking on top of the pipelines. Around the world, losses of fresh water due to leakage are routinely reported as high as 70 percent in some major cities.
Christopher Brown, Redux
THe Aral Sea, once a glistening body of water, has lost two-thirds of its volume because its source rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation during the Soviet era. Previously the fourth-largest lake in the world – the size of Southern California – much of it is now a dry graveyard of rusting shipwrecks. This desertification has produced toxic dust, resulting in respiratory diseases and cancers in communities downwind of the lake. Gerd Ludwig
50 percent The number of people who don’t have access to the quality of water available to the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago
1.8 million The number of children who die every year from waterborne diseases – one every 15 seconds
These fifth-grade students in Beijing are quickly discovering that the environment is paying a steep price for their nation’s booming economy: China’s water and air are becoming increasingly toxic. Seventy percent of the country’s major rivers no longer support life, and 25 to 33 percent of the population — more than 300 million people — do not have access to safe drinking water.
Fritz Hoffmann
40 billion The number of hours spent each year in Africa due to the need to collect and haul water
Kenyan villagers on low-lying Pate Island gather brackish drinking water from small holes in the sand, less than 300 feet from the ocean. More than 2 billion people around the world rely on wells for their water. Clean water has become an increasingly scarce resource as water tables continue to drop at an alarming rate.
George Steinmetz
5.3 billion
The number of people — two-thirds of the world’s population — who will suffer from water shortages by 2025
Slum dwellers scramble for water in Jai Hind Camp in the heart of Delhi, India. The camp is home to more than 4,000 migrant workers who are dependent on daily deliveries from public and private water trucks. Ironically, the middle class in India, which receives water via home faucets, pays a tenth of what the poor pay for their water delivered by truck. India has nearly 17 percent of the world’s population but only about 4 percent of its freshwater resources.
Stuart Freedman
Foreword by Robert Redford 19 Introduction by Fred Pearce 20
Drinking Dinosaur Water 26
Essay by Diane Ackerman
Poisoning the Well 44
Essay by Bill McKibben
Water 2.0 80
Essay by Michael Malone
We’re All Downstream 90 Essay by Michael Specter
Water : The New Oil 134 Essay by Jeffrey Rothfeder
A Billion Slingshots 168 Essay by Dean Kamen
Blue Planet Run 212
Essays by Paul Hawken and Mike Cerre
Unlike millions of women in Africa who must walk an average of 4 miles to collect potable water every day, Violet Baloyi of South Africa is fortunate to get her drinking water directly from a tap. Thanks to the PlayPump water system, powered by the motion of children at play, Violet and other residents of Vuma Village have access to free and clean drinking water.
Samantha Reinders
s Boys play in polluted, oil-fouled water near Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The Niger Delta has been the scene of significant unrest in recent years as rebel groups have emerged to protest oil extraction by multinationals and the Nigerian government. In the delta’s urban communities, less than 50 percent of the people have access to safe drinking water; the number drops to less than 25 percent in rural areas.
Michael Kamber
Foreword by Robert Redford
You Are the Solution There are many myths about water. One is that we have an infinite supply, if we could just figure out how to liberate it — from the sea, from aquifers deep in the ground, from ice caps and glaciers. Another myth is that the cycle of evaporation and rain alone will continually provide us thirsty humans with clean water to drink. Yet another is that the rivers, streams and oceans are so vast, so deep, so plentiful that we tiny human beings can just keep dumping our trash, our waste and our chemicals into these waterways and nature will simply absorb it all and miraculously transform it back into clean drinking water. The final myth is the most disturbing. Many people in the developed world still assume the global water crisis has nothing to do with them — that it’s a crisis for “those poor people, over there.” The painful truth is the water crisis is now on every continent and in cities large and small. The water crisis affects every human being on the planet, but most of us just aren’t paying attention yet. The cost of our neglect can be seen in the disturbing images in this book. It is estimated that 1 billion people across the planet now lack access to clean water — and that number is growing by the day. This doesn’t have to happen. As the extraordinary images on the following pages show, there are solutions to the world’s freshwater crisis, and they are within reach. The idea of a billion people without access to clean water may seem too immense to ever be solved. And yet, we already know the solution for half of those people: Five hundred million of the world’s poorest people, particularly those living in rural areas, could obtain clean water for life for a cost of just $30 each by using such simple techniques as wells, boreholes, gravity-fed springs and rainwater harvesting. No fancy technologies, no big, expensive institutional projects — just pragmatic applications of low-tech solutions can get us halfway to our goal of clean water for every person on the planet. And we can do it right now. It is facts like these that make this book, ostensibly about a world crisis, also a work of optimism and hope. All that we need is the will to make that hope real; to make the emotional and financial commitment to get the job done. Water is life. As we share this Blue Planet, we must promise each other that no person will ever again have to live — or die — without clean, fresh water. Fulfilling that promise is within the reach of each of us.
Foreword 19
Introduction by Fred Pearce
Blue Revolution It begins with a few thin clouds in the clear blue sky over the Indian Ocean. The clouds are barely noticeable at first, as the wind picks up water vapor that has evaporated from the ocean and carries it north toward land. The vapor condenses to form droplets, and the droplets coalesce. The clouds grow and darken. Thunder claps, and the first giant raindrops fall on the southern tip of India. The monsoon, the planet’s greatest annual weather system, has begun its magic. The clouds sweep north across the subcontinent, enveloping the land in curtains of rain and bringing relief to a parched and overheated land. Life returns. The drenching is brief but complete. In about 100 hours, spread across 100 days, millions of villages across India receive virtually their only rain of the year. The rain swells rivers, floods low-lying land, fills reservoirs and irrigation canals, turns deserts green and brings crops to life. The water then percolates down through soils to fill the pores in rocks beneath.
Monsoon rituals are repeated all across Asia, and in modified form in communities around the world. Almost everywhere, the first rains are a time for celebration and thanksgiving. In Southeast Asia, fishermen and farmers wait for the first spring flows to revive the Mekong. In China, the Yangtze River brings waters that will feed more than 1 billion people. In the Americas, farmers watch the skies for the first hint of storms that have formed over the Caribbean. In Africa, there is a special nervousness: If the rains fail, it can mean famine and starvation. Water is our most fundamental natural resource. The stuff we drink today is the same water that the first fish swam in and that froze across much of the globe during the ice ages. Our planet probably has no more and no less water than it has ever had. And yet, in some places, we are beginning to run out of water. Underground reserves that farmers could once reach by dropping a bucket into a well only a few feet deep are now so low that a hole bored half a mile down still finds no water. The great rivers we first heard about in geography lessons — strong blue lines on our atlas maps stretching all the way from mountains to the oceans
Even though 70 percent of the planet is covered with water, Greenland's frozen landscape provides hard evidence that most of the world's fresh water is locked up in glaciers and ice, leaving less than one 20 Blue Planet Run
percent available for human consumption.
NASA-JSC, Getty Images
The seasonal runoff from glaciers provides drinking water for a sixth of the world’s population, more than 1 billion people. But with global warming expected to permanently melt one quarter of the world’s glaciers by 2050, these natural frozen reservoirs are beginning to disappear.
Sean Nolan
— are running dry. In the real world, the blue lines have sometimes given way to desert. The Nile in Egypt, the Ganges in India and Bangladesh, the Indus in Pakistan, the Yellow River in China and the Colorado in the United States are among the rivers that no longer always make it to the sea. Nature’s water cycle is not faltering. But our demands on it are increasing so much that, in some places at some times, we are exhausting our water sources. Few of us realize how much water it takes to get through the day. On average, we drink not much more than a gallon of the stuff. Even after washing and flushing the toilet we consume only about 40 or 50 gallons each. But that is just the start. It is only when we add in the water needed to grow what we eat and drink that the numbers really begin to soar. It takes between 250 and 650 gallons of water to grow a pound of rice. That is more water than many households use in a week. For just a bag of rice. It takes 130 gallons to grow a pound of wheat, and 65 gallons for a pound of potatoes. And when you start feeding grain to livestock for animal products like meat and milk, the numbers become yet more startling. It takes 3,000 gallons to grow the feed for enough cow to make one quarter-pound hamburger, and between 500 and 1,000 gallons for that cow to fill its udders with a quart of milk. Agriculture is easily the biggest user of water in the world today. Two-thirds of all the water that we take from nature ends up irrigating crops. Whenever you eat burgers made of meat from Central America, or clothes made from Pakistani cotton, you are influencing the hydrology of those countries — taking a share of the Indus River, the Mekong or the Costa Rican rains.
Take cotton, the poster child of water consumption. Cotton grows best in hot lands with virtually year-round sun. Deserts, in other words. But it needs huge volumes of water. In order to grow its cotton, Pakistan consumes almost a third of the flow of the Indus River — enough to prevent any water from reaching the Arabian Sea. Australia does much the same to the Murray River. In many places around the world, we are taking two, three or even four times more water from local rivers than we took a generation ago. And there is a surprising reason for this: It is the flip side of a great global success story — the green revolution. I am old enough to remember, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the great fear was that the world would not be able to feed itself. Population was expected to double in 30 years. And we asked ourselves, how on Earth could food production double to keep up? California biologist Paul Ehrlich announced: “The battle to feed the world is over…Billions will die in the 1980s.” But it didn’t happen. The world’s population did double. But so did food production. Scientists came to the rescue. They produced a new generation of high-yielding varieties of crops, like rice and corn and wheat, that kept the world fed. But it now turns out that those super-crops use much more water than those they replaced. So, while the world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, it takes three times more water to do it. We thought we were going to run out of land to grow food. Instead, we are running out of water. In India, the rivers are so dry that farmers have sunk more than 20 million tube wells into the Earth in the past decade to find water and irrigate their crops. But these farmers are essentially “mining” ancient water, and now even these underground reserves are running out.
Economists estimate that by 2025, with current water use patterns and the growing population, water scarcity will cut global food production by 350 million tons a year. That is rather more than the current U.S. grain harvest, and the equivalent of a loaf of bread every week for every person on the planet. For hundreds of millions of people, that disappearing loaf may be the only one they have. And if the current boom of growing crops to make biofuels continues, then the demand for water from the world’s farms will be even greater. If, say, the world converted a quarter of its fuels to biofuels, that would effectively double our water demand for crops. No wonder that in dozens of countries — Pakistan, Mexico, India, China and Indonesia among them — there have been water riots in recent years. And soon, nations may even go to war over water. In the Middle East, water is as big a source of conflict between Israel and its neighbors as politics and religion. There are no treaties for the sharing of some of the world’s greatest international rivers, upon which tens of millions of people depend for survival. It all sounds like bad news. Yet I remain optimistic. Access to water is widely regarded as a human right that no one can be denied. We need to come together over water. And to do that, two things need to happen. First, we need to use the water cycle better — for instance, by catching the rain where it falls. We need a modern version of the old water tank catching rainfall from the house roof. And it is starting to happen: In Asia, farmers are reviving ancient methods of capturing the rain as it falls on their fields, and then pouring it down their wells for storage underground. Whole villages join in, and the effects on their crop yields are often profound.
Second, there needs to be a revolution in the way we use water. We have to begin treating it like the scarce resource that it is. Municipalities need to reduce leaks in water mains — in most of the world’s cities, between a quarter and half of the water put into distribution networks never reaches homes because it simply leaks away. Similarly, we need to reduce the vast losses from evaporation at reservoirs. Did you know, for example, that more water evaporates from behind the Aswan High Dam on the Nile in Egypt than is delivered to homes and factories throughout Britain in a year? Meanwhile, much, much more wastewater should be recycled by humans a few times before we give it back to nature. We can do that in our homes. Changes to domestic plumbing would allow water from the shower to be used to flush the toilet, for instance. But the biggest water savings worldwide must be made by farmers, who are the biggest users of water, especially in the driest countries. Tens of millions of farmers around the planet still irrigate their crops by flooding their fields. It is an incredibly wasteful process: Most of the water evaporates and little, in practice, reaches the plants. But cheap, modern systems of drip irrigation — delivering water drop by drop close to the crop roots — can cut water demand by 40 or 50 percent, or in some soils even 70 or 80 percent. We need a “blue revolution” to breed crops that use water better and to train farmers to use water more sparingly. The simple truth is that we are abusing nature’s water cycle. To protect our rivers and assure water supplies in the future, we must use less water and leave more to nature. The days of seeing the stuff as a free resource, available in unlimited quantities as a guaranteed human right, are over.
Clouds move toward Chicago above Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes, which together hold a fifth of the world’s — and 90 percent of U.S. — surface fresh water. Proposals to divert some of this water to fast growing cities in the United States have prompted border states and Canada to ban bulk water transfers out of the region. However, due to international trade agreements, like NAFTA, debate will continue over water’s classification as a commodity. Jon Lowenstein, Aurora Photos
We call our planet Earth, but its surface is mainly water. We should call it Ocean. In the hollows of space, Earth abides as a sparkling oasis, afloat with jumbo islands, and always half hidden beneath a menagerie of clouds. In my upstate New York town, seven waterfalls tumble and spume in lofty dialects of water. Liquid scarves loop through glacier-carved gorges, and winter reminds us that light, airy bits of water can hurdle fences, collapse buildings and bring a burly city to its knees. In winter, ice forms a cataract on the eye of Lake Cayuga, but the lake never freezes solid. It can’t. Luckily for us. Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird bag of tricks. The litany of we’re-only-here-because begins with this chilling one: We’re only here because ice floats. Other liquids contract and sink when they freeze, but water alone expands, in the process growing minute triangular pyramids that clump to form spacious, holey designs that float free. If ice didn’t rise, the oceans would have frozen solid long ago, along with all the wells, springs and rivers. Without this presto-chango of water, an element that one moment slips like silk through the hands and the next collapses rooftops and chisels gorges, Earth would be barren. Since life bloomed in the seas, we need perpetual sips of fresh water to thrive. Become dehydrated, as I once did in Florida, and the brain’s salt flats dry out, mental life dulls, and only There is no more or no less water available for human use now than there was at the dawn of humankind. But some areas of the planet have always had
electrolytes dripped into a vein keep death at bay. We are walking lagoons who quaff water
more than others. In Canada, where karst limestone cliffs line Death Lake in the Northwest Territories, a twentieth of the world’s population enjoys almost a tenth of the world’s fresh surface water.
Raymond Gehman, Getty Images
Drinking Dinosaur Water 27
Underground aquifers dozens of miles deep and hundreds of miles wide, are the Earth’s second-largest reserve of fresh water (after ice caps and glaciers). These vast underground repositories contain more than 100 times the amount of water held in rivers and lakes. Filled over billions of years, aquifers are today being drained at two to four times their natural recharge rate in order to supply a third of the world’s drinking and irrigation water. Here, a team of recreational spelunkers drops into the 160-foot-deep
and also bathe in it, irrigate with it, paddle through it, simmer with it and are rained on by it, so we rarely notice how magical water is. A natural insulator, it can cool overheated cars, mills or humans, and it can slowly change the air temperature, giving us the gradualness of seasons. Water can be solid, liquid, vapor, crystal. It can cascade or seep, be soothing or corrosive, act as mirror or lens, serve as a traffic lane or a roadblock or a sacrament. And though water often looks like glass, and in some brittle forms can shatter like glass, and in others flow thick and slow as glass, it’s not made of silica as glass is. But it does sponsor glass. The sandy skirts edging some oceans are a form of glass, crafted by water. We live in bondage to hydrogen, a small, common waif of an atom, and fat, combustible oxygen. When hydrogen cozies up to oxygen, the magnetic attraction is so fierce it’s hard to pry them apart. They always assume the same open-armed pose, the three atoms angling at precisely 104.5 degrees from each other. In portraits water looks animal: two hydrogen atoms form the ears, one plump oxygen atom the face. This makes it versatile, flexible, dynamic, its bonds continually breaking and reforging, and every puddle of water reacting as one electronic whole, a fellowship that may extend to entire oceans. A flowing thermos, water absorbs, holds and transports heat for long enough to create hospitable coastlands. The Gulf Stream, a wide river inside the ocean, every hour delivers millions of miles of warm water to northern shores. Rivers also churn through the air, as water evaporating from the tropics becomes water vapor that drives the winds. Endlessly levitating, falling and condensing, no water is new — all of it, every drop, is recycled from somewhere and somewhen else. The water in the stalk of celery I am eating right now may have fallen as rain in the Amazon last year, or it may have been slurped up by a dinosaur millions of years ago. We’ve learned how to catch and carry water, but 97 percent of Earth’s water lies in the oceans, 2 percent in snow; the rest falls to us for irrigation, drinking and survival. Covering half of the planet, clouds look collaged onto the sky, Rorschach-like nomads that collapse and fall as rain. Thousands of tons of water, millions of drops, they look serene but are unstable, jostling hordes. In one form or another 70 cubic miles of water falls to Earth every day, but not, alas, precisely where we may wish. Half of the world’s rain showers down on the Amazon, where it falls thick as rubber. That’s the only place I know where the air can hold 100 percent humidity without raining. Aerial water can’t compete with the oceans for sheer volume, of course, but snowmelt and rain replenish lakes and rivers, springs and wells, and abounding life forms, including 6 billion humans. Drinking, eating, excreting and thinking water, our tissues are marshes and estuaries,
Neversink Pit in Alabama.
George Steinmetz
The water cycle endlessly repeats itself. Every day, enough water to cover the planet’s surface a tenth of an inch deep falls from the sky. And roughly the same amount evaporates from the oceans and land. It stays in the air for about 10 days until it eventually condenses to form clouds before falling back to the Earth as rain.
Daniel Beltrá
our organs islands, our bloodstreams long rivers with creeks and feeders. Sloshing sacs of
Our food is mainly water. Water connects us to every other facet of life on Earth, in one
chemicals on the move, we leak from many orifices throughout our lives and still carry the salty
large flowing enterprise. Predator and prey share water holes, friends and foes share oases.
ocean in our blood, skin, sweat and tears. Menstrual periods mirror the tides. We need water
Without water, cultures founder and civilizations die.
to oil joints, digest food, build the smile-bright enamel on our teeth. We are water’s way of reflecting on the life it promotes.
We may say and think humans walk, but what we really do is flow. When we lie down like spirit levels, our waters flatten, but they keep moving, sliding, gliding, renewing. Does life
The soul of water is change. Colorless, transparent, odorless, tasteless, water will dissolve
exist elsewhere in the universe? Look for water. Water allows even unrelated substances
almost anything on its travels through the ground and body, carrying sap and serum, minerals
to mix, tumble, blend and bark with electricity. Because water dissolves things, it’s easy to
and blood, tiny chem-labs to power thought, and at times abominations. It sponges up the world
pollute, and because water is persuadable, it’s easy to rule.
around it, absorbs new personas. And, then, for a while at least, it struts out of the shadows, takes the stage and becomes visible, seasoned, a creature of substance with a real personality.
Water, water everywhere. Insistent, incessant, in torrents, in teacups, water clings to cool rocks, wobbles prisms of dew, shapes pudgy fingers and eyes, inks the layout of cities and
For one bushel of wheat, farmers need 20,000 gallons of water. A tree is 75 percent water,
the love life of squids, reflects so poignantly we use the image to describe our mental world,
an apple 80 percent water, a fetus 97 percent water, an adult man 70 percent water, an adult
tempers the rain-guzzling cottonwoods and willows, pools below ground in the water table
woman 50 percent (more body fat). This means a 150-pound man is about 105 pounds of water.
where life dines, swirls on invisible winds across the sky, bubbles saliva at the sight of a ripe
Because we’re mostly water ourselves, surrounded by water, we go with the flow, water down proposals, spend money like water, have liquid assets, dilute drinks, take the plunge, booze until we’re pickled, go through baptisms of fire, try not to be bores or scoundrels of the first water. No one wants to be shallow. Past events we banish as water under the bridge.
apricot, oozes sweat during a dragon boat race, imbues even the driest dust with a smidge of damp, puffs up seed pods, supplies a bucket brigade of bees with coolant for summer hives, corrupts the face of cliffs, incises granite, incants as it trickles over pebbles (whose echo lives in the Aramaic word “poet”), excites the nutrients in broth, incubates life in womb-time, incurs the wrath of both neighbors and nations (the word “rival” originally meant to share
Gushing out alive after nine months afloat, we nonetheless fear death by water, fear getting in
the same stream), incites border wars, indents coastlines, invigorates farmlands, stiffens plant
over our heads, until we’re drowning in work, flooded by emotion and flailing just to keep our
stems, conducts traffic between empires, cools forges and whetstones, frets rock until it
head above water while we dissolve into tears. Unless we deep-six whatever was needling us.
leaches minerals, echoes with whale songs, crackles with fish talk, one moment shimmers
Water can be docile, too, and so easily influenced that the slightest breeze blowing on it, or
like a drape of shot silk and the next lies gray as pewter, twirls petticoats, hoists chemicals,
the tiniest pebble dropping into it, is enough to roll small waves across the surface. And so we
is easily indoctrinated or nimbly coaxed into silos, geysers up as life’s wellspring and, upon
picture laughter rippling around a table, or a few words setting off a froth of excitement.
reflection, heralds the beginning and end of all thirst.
On our planet at least, living plants and animals need to ferry nutrients and send messages.
So, protecting the planet’s fresh water becomes an act of self-preservation. Though we can’t
Both require a benign liquid. Life is opportunistic, it adapts, and it exploits what’s available. In
always see downstream from reckless events, we pay dearly for that short-sightedness. Not
one form or another, water greets us every day, from the liquid we splash on our faces to water
if, but when. The web of life trembles on such fragile threads. Listen, now, in the distance, a
locked inside the cells of nutritious heads of grain. We water our plants, our homes, our bodies.
calamity, can you hear it? Like thunder warnings before a summer storm. — Diane Ackerman
32 Blue Planet Run
Drinking Dinosaur Water 33
On average, no more than a third of the wastewater in developing countries is treated before being discharged into rivers, streams and lakes.
100 years ago, London, New York and Paris were centers of infectious waterborne disease, but today they boast some of the best public water systems in the world.
Shamans perform a soul-cleansing ritual at Peguche Falls in Ecuador during the Inti Raymi fiesta, an ancient Incan celebration of the sun. The water is believed to give a person power to work and courage to dance for the fiesta.
Ivan Kashinsky, WPN
Hindu pilgrims travel thousands of miles to collect a bottle of water from the headwaters
of the sacred Ganges River, and they proudly display the bottle in their homes for the rest of their lives. An important part of ritual purification in Hinduism is the bathing of the entire body, particularly in rivers considered holy.
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Qilai Shen, Panos Pictures
Drinking Dinosaur Water 35
Over the last three decades, the portion of India’s population with access to clean drinking water has grown from 17 percent to 86 percent.
Water plays a central role in many religions around the world.
In Varanasi, India, 60,000 Hindus bathe in the Ganges River every day. While the faithful believe that water cleans and purifies the body, the World Wildlife Fund considers the Ganges to be one of the world’s 10 most endangered rivers due to the over-extraction and pollution of its waters. Ami Vitale, Panos Pictures
Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem collect water from a mountain spring to be used to bake matzoh (unleavened bread) after the Mayim Shelanu ceremony, which involves letting water settle in a cool place overnight. Water is a source of increasing conflict in this region because Israel controls water supplies for both the West Bank and the Jordan River.
Menahem Kahama, Getty Images
Drinking Dinosaur Water 37
Frozen Assets Every day, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world
awaken in the fearful knowledge that, before anything else, they must find fresh water to survive. And in their single-minded pursuit, these multitudes often go to incredible — sometimes superhuman — lengths to find, gather, carry, store and sometimes even sell to their thirsty neighbors that precious fluid. In ways we can hardly imagine, their lives are defined by the scarcity of clean, fresh water. Take Baltasar Ushca, for example. Ushca, 64, is a hielero, an “ice man,” and every week for a half-century he has climbed to the very top of the world to collect that ice. Ushca spends four hours climbing to the summit of Mount Chimborazo, the farthest point from the center of the Earth, and uses his pickax to harvest as much glacier ice as his donkey can carry. The precious cargo is wrapped in paja, a plant found high in the Andes, and loaded onto the burdened animal. The two then trudge back down to the mountain to the village of Riobamba. There, he puts the ice into a covered hole to protect it from melting. On market day, Ushca delivers the ice blocks to anxious local vendors, who quickly chop the ice up to make hugely popular fruit drinks. Much of the appeal of the drinks lies in the belief by locals that the pure glacier water is especially good for their health. Within hours the ice is gone. Only then is Ushca paid $7 for his efforts. When the following week rolls around, the ice man and his long-suffering donkey once again embark on their climb to the top of the mountain. — Michael Malone
Ivan Kashinsky
Drinking Dinosaur Water 39
Baltasar Ushca starts the four-hour trip up the Mount Chimborazo on his quest to bring back ice from ancient glaciers.
Ushca uses axes and spades to hack away chunks of glacial ice before he loads his donkey for the return trip.
40 Blue Planet Run
Ivan Kashinsky
Ivan Kashinsky
At the markets of Riobamba, Ushca lugs the ice, still wrapped in straw to minimize melting, to local drink vendors.
Ivan Kashinsky
Locals rave about the freshness of Maria Leonor Allauco’s fruit smoothies, which are blended with Ushca’s glacial ice.
Ivan Kashinsky
Drinking Dinosaur Water 41
According to the United Nations, children in the developed world consume 30 to 50 times as much water as they do in the developing world.
In July 2007, remote sensing experts at Boston University reported
the discovery of an enormous underground reservoir of water the size of Massachusetts beneath Darfur in western Sudan. While this vast Sub-Saharan region used to be among the most lush and fertile in the world, today it is one of the driest and most troubled places on Earth. In recent years, more than 200,000 people have died in Darfur, partly due to disputes over water and other natural resources. Humanitarian groups working to end the conflict in Darfur are optimistic that this “mega-lake” could help ease tensions in the region.
Michael Kamber In Iran, Sayed Shukrallah performs maintenance on a qanat, an ancient
subterranean water distribution system consisting of tunnels that can transport groundwater to settlements almost 40 miles away. These plasterlined tunnels, some as deep as 30 feet, are difficult to dig and require almost constant maintenance due to silt buildup. The arduous and dangerous work is traditionally left to boys; their fathers stand near the entry shafts in case a 42 Blue Planet Run
tunnel collapses and they have to rescue their children.
George Steinmetz
It’s common knowledge that you can survive for weeks without food. But without water? A few days, at the most. We are mostly water and our planet is mostly water — indeed it’s often called the ‘water planet,’ its blue seas and white cloudy mists forming the dominant features we see from space. Yet in many ways water is scarce. Ninety seven percent of the planet’s water is undrinkable sea water, most of the rest is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, or falls in places far from people. Even so, we’d have enough places, if we hadn’t figured out a staggering list of ways to pollute and squander our birthright. The most obvious examples loom large in our collective memory. Forty years ago America awoke one morning to discover that the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was on fire. When a river catches on fire, that gets our attention. One would think that billions of dead fish bobbing to the surface of ponds and lakes and rivers all over the world would be a clear sign that something was seriously wrong, but in most places those warnings are still being ignored. These are examples of our collective failure to see what is right before our eyes. But the subterranean, slow-moving and subtle water disasters — many of them occurring literally beneath our feet — should frighten us even more. Consider, for instance, the ways the United States has managed to overpump the invisible deep aquifers under its fields and cities. This might have been a warning to other nations, but greed and short-term gains have a curious ability to blind us to the bigger picture. Unfortunately, all of the major grain-producing countries adopted deep water pumping in the years right after World War II. The United States implemented this technology quicker, and thus encountered its problems first — but not by much, and by then, the rest of the world was already deeply committed. The result is that China, India and the United States, as well as scores of other countries, are all starting to pump their reservoirs dry at the same time, which is right now. Over the last decade the water table beneath the North China Plains and the Indian Punjab has been dropping by meters each year — in some places, tens of meters. These deep aquifers took millions of years to fill, and we are draining them in less than a century. This is not a resource that can be replenished overnight; it may take decades, if it’s even possible at this late date. And that’s only if we have the resolve to do it.
Wastewater gushes out of a pipe at the state-owned Lianhua factory in China. Lianhua, which means “Lotus Flower,” is the largest producer of MSG in China and the largest polluter in the Huai River Basin. Worldwide, it is estimated that half of all major rivers are seriously polluted or depleted.
Stephen Voss
Poisoning the Well 45
One result of this unconscionable and blind draining of humanity’s lifeblood is that a once-invisible disaster is
Take Bangladesh, home to 150 million people and one of the wettest places on earth. It’s the delta of the great
now suddenly surfacing. Just travel the countryside north of Beijing. You’ll meet scores of people who are in
sacred rivers of Asia — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra both reach the ocean here, finishing their descent from
despair because the same wells that their families had used for generations have suddenly run dry. China’s crisis
the high Himalayas in slow and stately fashion. One might think that water would be the least of the country’s
is so severe that the country is re-routing entire rivers in the south through thousands of miles of aqueduct in a
problems — indeed, Bangladesh has so much water that travel in many seasons is easier by ferry than by bus.
desperate attempt to serve the needs of the north.
But because Bangalesh’s water sits on the surface, it is vulnerable to many kinds of pollution — some from
But that diversion, in turn, is creating its own crisis. To deal with the water shortage, large regions of China are
industry, some from the spread of human waste. From the latter, for example, waterborne cholera has become
now switching from growing wheat, a notoriously thirsty grain, to corn, which uses less water but also produces
an endemic problem.
lower yields. The impact of that shift is, in turn, depressingly predictable: With smaller harvests, China has been forced for the first time to import grain from the West. In effect, China, for the very first time in its long history, is importing “virtual water” in the form of goods.
The United Nations thought it had a solution to the polluted surface water: Go underground. Mile-deep wells were dug across much of the nation, and people were urged to stop drinking surface water. Unfortunately, the U.N. forgot to check the underlying geology or to even test the underground water. Only when entire
The world has become too small in the 21st century for any nation to export its problems. And if you think these
communities of Bengalis fell sick did scientists determine that the new deep wells were bringing massive
problems are simply those of the developing world, then visit Las Vegas. Or Phoenix. Or…
quantities of arsenic to the surface, slowly poisoning the population.
This is just the beginning. When it comes to water, disasters cluster. Already, there are places on Earth where
Bangladesh is the canary in the coal mine for an impending water crisis that may well engulf us all: climate
water-based crises are mounting so fast that it is hard to know where to begin to solve them. The solution to
change. Mankind, without much forethought, has been conducting the largest and most extensive hydrological
one problem exacerbates another.
experiment in history — and, like the sinking cities and drying wells of the world, the disastrous results are only now beginning to reveal themselves.
Visitors are cautioned to stay away from the Las Vegas Wash, an artificial wetland that helps recycle wastewater from the fastest-growing city in the United States. Approximately 65 million gallons of treated water, including water from casinos, are returned to Lake Mead every day by the city’s Water Pollution Control Facility.
Tiffany Brown