Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  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 competitiveness 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 Massachusetts 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 classic 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 municipal 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 canals, 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 competitiveness 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 institutional 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 leadership 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, canal craze, coal mining and iron casting boom, Britain’s growing imperial reach and the nation’s new capital accumulation and entrepreneurship-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 nourishing ecosystems. Clearing grasslands, rain forests, and wetlands for agriculture, meanwhile, worsens global warming on at least two counts—by adding greenhouse gasses 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 shipping 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 mass 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 flustered White House wanting her to reassure 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 diminishing drinking water supplies, irrigation, industrial operations, and shipping. 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 shipping 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 diminishing 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 massive 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-prone 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 Angeles–sized, 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 shorelines, 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 relationships 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 accumulation 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 municipal water consumption—with commensurately reduced energy costs—by one third. Water savings in profligate agriculture would be far greater.