Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  ecosystem health of the Salton Sea: Kelly, n.p.

  Imperial Valley lost: Dean E. Murphy, “In a First, U.S. Officials Put Limits on California’s Thirst,” New York Times, January 5, 2003. Los Angeles’s water authority also lost water; California was forced to draw more from its reservoirs to make up the critical shortfalls.

  30 million acre-feet: San Diego County Water Authority, Water Mangement, “Quantification Settlement Agreement,” www.sdcwa.org/manage/mwd-QSA.phtml#overview. See also Imperial Irrigation District, “News Archive 2003,” November 10, 2003, http://www.iid.com/sub.php?build=view&idr=1264&page2=1&pid=761.

  “They should pay $800”: Mike Morgan, quoted in Kelly.

  large geothermal field: “Something Smells a Bit Fishy,” Economist, April 10, 2008. One caveat to exploiting the geothermal field was that existing environmental preservation plans for the Salton Sea had to be modified so its geothermal corner could be drained and exploited.

  desalinization plants in California in exchange for an extra draw: Gertner.

  Las Vegas: Las Vegas was also pursuing traditional hard infrastructure, such as controversial multibillion-dollar long-distance pipelines to carry groundwater pumped from land purchased in east-central Nevada, and building a new, deeper intake valve in Lake Mead.

  $500 an acre-foot: “Dust to Dust,” Economist, March 7, 2009, 39.

  court rulings and federal restoration: Under the groundbreaking federal Central Valley Project Improvement Act (1992), wildlife and ecosystem uses were given equal priority with long-favored irrigation; many farmers’ water rates had increased tenfold in the 1990s as a result.

  Orange County, California: Randal C. Archibold, “From Sewage, Added Water for Drinking,” New York Times, November 27, 2007.

  Desal costs in California had fallen: Peter H. Gleick, Heather Cooley, and Gary H. Wolff, “With a Grain of Salt: An Update on Seawater Desalinization,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 68. Coastal Florida, where groundwater supplies were badly overdrawn and plentiful brackish estuaries provided low-salt-content water that was cheaper to purify to drinking quality levels, and ever-thirsty California had long been America’s leading laboratories for desalinization experiments. Texas was also another leading player.

  7 percent of the entire state’s urban water use: Ibid., 65. That figure is based on usage in 2000. On the San Diego plant, see Felicity Barringer, “In California, Desalinization of Seawater as a Test Case,” New York Times, May 15, 2009.

  “If we could ever competitively”: John F. Kennedy, quoted in Economist staff, Economist Technology Quarterly, 24.

  Projections of market growth: Peter H. Gleick and Jason Morrison, “Water Risks That Face Business and Industry,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 161.

  New York City’s water network: Galusha, 265.

  reservoirs were chronically choked: Andrew C. Revkin, “A Billion-Dollar Plan to Clean the City’s Water at Its Source,” New York Times, August 31, 1997.

  1,500-page, three-volume agreement: Galusha, 258–259.

  New York City would spend $260 million: Winnie Hu, “To Protect Water Supply, City Acts as a Land Baron,” New York Times, August 9, 2004; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, “Watershed Protection Programs,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/region02/water/nycshed/protprs.htm. Some $200 million was allocated for upgrading treatment plants.

  $70 million for sundry infrastructure repairs: About $200 million in improvements to treatment of wastewater entering the reservoirs from sewage plants was also approved.

  complicated land swap: “A Watershed Agreement,” editorial, New York Times, September 10, 2007.

  Water to the Everglades: Damien Cave, “Everglades Deal Shrinks to Sale of Land, Not Assets,” New York Times, November 12, 2008.

  city would not need any additional water supply: Galusha, 229.

  last inspection in 1958: Andrew C. Revkin, “What’s That Swimming in the Water Supply? Robot Sub Inspects 45 Miles of a Leaky New York Aqueduct,” New York Times, June 7, 2003.

  team of deep-sea repair divers: New York City Department of Environmental Protection, “Preparation Underway to Fix Leak in Delaware Aqueduct,” press release, August 4, 2008. The high-pressure diving operation was not New York’s first underwater repair experience. During a weeklong exercise in December 2000, a team of divers was lowered by crane inside a diving bell into another portion of aqueduct and worked to seal off a coin-sized hole in an old bronze valve from which water was spewing at 80 miles per hour. The great nightmare of engineers would be a tunnel leak under the Hudson River, which would be very hard and perilous for divers to get to and repair.

  “Look, if one of those tunnels goes”: James Ryan, quoted in Grann, 91, 96, 102.

  took a seat at the mole’s controls: Sewell Chan, “Tunnelers Hit Something Big: A Milestone,” New York Times, August 10, 2006. The mole had been used in drilling the innovative Channel Tunnel linking England and France.

  one of New York’s most critical infrastructures: Grann, 97.

  America’s 700,000 miles of aging water pipes: Lavelle and Kurlantzick, 24.

  Global water infrastructure needs: Pearce, 304.

  T. Boone Pickens: In Pickens’s case, the 250-mile pipeline from the Panhandle to Dallas was being developed imaginatively in conjunction with electrical power generated by the world’s largest wind farm.

  five giant global food and beverage corporations: J. P. Morgan calculated the amount to be 575 billion liters per year; cited in “Running Dry,” Economist, August 23, 2008, 53.

  water needed to produce one kilowatt-hour had plunged: U.S. Geological Survey, “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000.”

  modern mills using only six tons: Gleick, “Making Every Drop Count,” 44.

  Perrier Vittel: “Are You Being Served?” Economist, April 23, 2005, 77.

  water-conscious companies: Among those reporting corporate water use and setting future targets were Intel, IBM, and Sony in high tech/electronics, pharmaceutical/biotech producer Abbott, Nippon Steel, automotive giants Volkswagen, Toyota, and General Motors, forestry products maker Kimberly-Clark, and food and beverage companies Unilever, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola. Gleick and Morrison, 154–155.

  Brazilian tomato farmers: Ibid., 149.

  Anheuser-Busch: Among the companies engaging their supply chains were Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Unilever, Nestlé, Gap, Johnson & Johnson, and oil refiner Chevron. Coca-Cola experienced a bitter foretaste of water’s potential political risk when it was accused of abusing scarce groundwater resources in India. Although Coke was later exonerated in court, the negative publicity posed a reputational threat to its priceless brand name, as well as harming local market sales. To publicize its green commitment to treating all its wastewater by 2010, Coke began putting schools of fish in tanks filled with treated wastewater at its bottling plants across the world.

  by one-quarter roughly doubled: Wolff and Gleick, “Soft Path for Water,” 19. The calculation is based on 80 percent agricultural water use in the area.

  to sprinklers and microirrigation systems: According to the U.S. Geological Survey, irrigated acreage under sprinklers or microirrigation rose from 40 percent in 1985 to 52 percent in 2000. McGuire, “Water-Level Changes in the High Plains Aquifer, Predevelopment to 2002, 1980 to 2002, and 2001 to 2002.”

  American farm pollution: Europe’s farm pollution regulations were more muscular.

  biological dead zone without fish life: Bina Venkataraman, “Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean ‘Dead Zones,’” New York Times, August 15, 2008.

  Australia faces the industrialized world’s: Diamond, Collapse, 379–380, 384, 387, 409.

  southeastern Murray-Darling: “The Big Dry,” Economist, April 28, 2007, 81.

  facilitate independent water trading: Peet, 13–14.

  “transpiration credits”: “Are You Being Served?” Prices adjusted to higher-volume use and seasonal availab
ility, and including wastewater treatment in calculating water’s final price, lay ahead.

  decline in the Murray’s flow: “Big Dry,” 84.

  Australia’s agricultural land: Diamond, Collapse, 413.

  Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency: “Clearer Rules, Cleaner Waters,” editorial, New York Times, August 18, 2008.

  inextricably interdependent: Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat,” New York Times, February 8, 2008.

  20 percent of all California’s electricity: Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett, 252. Data is from a 2005 California Energy Commission report. See also Meena Palaniappan, Emily Lee, and Andrea Samulon, “Environmental Justice and Water,” in Gleick, World’s Water: 2006–2007, 151.

  northeastern U.S. power failure: Jane Campbell, interview with author, March 17, 2008.

  Italy’s severe drought in 2003: “Emergency Threat in Dry Italy,” BBC News, July 14, 2003, news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/Europe/3065977.stm; “The Parched Country,” Economist, October 26, 2007.

  carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: Kolbert, 201–203. In 2007, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that with almost total certainty planetary warming was man-made. Andrew Revkin, “On Climate Issue, Industry Ignored Its Scientists,” New York Times, April 24, 2009.

  Dutch have begun to pioneer: Smith, Man and Water, 28-33; Kolbert, 123–127.

  reduce California’s total municipal water consumption: Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett, 252.

  potential choke points: Simply trying to keep bands of Somali pirates from hijacking vessels off the lawless Horn of Africa enlisted the navies of more than a dozen nations—including China, India, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Turkey, England, France, and the United States—in 2008, without notable success.

  world’s abject water poor: United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, 13, 17.

  U.N. Millennium Development Goals: A more ambitious target of providing every person with access to safe, clean water and sanitation by 1990 had failed to be achieved as part of the U.N.’s International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981–1990; the new downscaled targets were set to coincide with the conclusion of the U.N.’s new, aspirational International Decade for Action “Water for Life” (2005–2015).

  Camdessus report: Nicholas L. Cain, “3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto Disappointment and Possibility,” in Gleick, World’s Water 2004–2005, 189–196.

  Epilogue

  not enough planetary environmental resources: Diamond, Collapse, 487–494, 495. Diamond estimates that the average Westerner consumes 32 times more resources than low-impact third world citizens and that the per capita effect of everyone attaining a high environmental-impact lifestyle would increase world resource consumption twelvefold—an unsustainable environmental burden on planetary resources based on today’s technologies and practices. Water strongly influenced almost every one of the 12 great problems Diamond concludes have to be solved for twenty-first-century civilization to adjust without great trauma. These include deforestation, collapse of fisheries, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, energy shortages, freshwater depletion, photosynthetic capacity, toxic chemical pollution, invasions by alien species, climate change, sheer population levels, higher impact levels of consumption, and waste by several billion more people.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This select bibliography reflects two contrasting challenges presented by the research. First, while water’s role in history per se has rarely been a central focus of previous books, many historians and scholars from diverse fields have insightfully treated its influential aspects in their own major works. Part of the bibliography, therefore, reflects my effort to pull these ideas together into a cohesive framework and narrative. Second, today’s world water crisis is producing an explosion of wide-ranging and substantive literature on current water issues that is far too extensive to comprehensively list. Regrettably, I have had to exclude all news and most other periodical articles from the bibliography; a few that are the source of cited facts are covered in the notes. I drew heavily from current events reporting from the New York Times, the Economist, and the Washington Post, as well as the BBC, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many magazines. I have omitted separate bibliographic entries for periodical and research articles that are included in listed compendiums; again, some of these works are cited in the notes. There is as well vast informative content—official, academic, reportorial, and eclectic—available on the Internet, which has provided rich background, but which is not referenced either in the select bibliography or the notes.

  Achenbach, Joel. “America’s River.” Washington Post Magazine, May 5, 2002.

  Aicher, Peter J. Guide to the Aqueducts of Ancient Rome. Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1995.

  Allan, J. A. The Middle East Water Question: Hydropolitics and the Global Economy. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002.

  Alley, Richard B. The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  Alwash, Azzam. “Water at War.” Natural History, November 2007.

  Amery, Hussein A., and Aaron T. Wolf. Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

  Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “How Muslims Made Europe.” New York Review of Books 55, no. 17 (November 6, 2008).

  Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.

  Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. New York: New Press, 2002.

  Barnes, Julian. “The Odd Couple.” New York Review of Books 54, no. 5 (March 29, 2007).

  Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

  Beasley, W. G. The Modern History of Japan. 7th ed. New York: Praeger, 1970.

  Belt, Don, ed. “The World of Islam.” National Geographic. Supplement, 2001.

  Bernstein, Peter L. The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession. New York: John Wiley, 2000.

  ———. Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

  Biddle, Wayne. A Field Guide to Germs. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

  Billington, David P., Donald C. Jackson, and Martin V. Melosi. The History of Large Federal Dams: Planning, Design, and Construction in the Era of Big Dams. Denver: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, 2005.

  Billington, Ray Allen. American Frontier Heritage. Reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

  Bleier, Ronald. “Will Nile Water Go to Israel?: North Sinai Pipelines and the Politics of Scarcity.” Middle East Policy, 5, no. 3 (September 1997), 113–124; http://desip.igc.org/willnile1.html.

  Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. New York: Random House, 1985.

  Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem. New York: Random House, 1997.

  Braudel, Fernand. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. 3rd ed. Translated by Patricia Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

  ———. A History of Civilizations. Translated by Richard Mayne. New York: Penguin, 1995.

  ———. Memory and the Mediterranean. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

  ———. The Perspective of the World. Vol. 3 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

  ———. The Structures of Everyday Life. Vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

  ———. The Wheels of Commerce. Vol. 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

  Brewer, John. “The Return of the Imperial Hero.” New York Review
of Books 52, no. 17 (November 3, 2005).

  Brindley, James. Power through the Ages. London: Blackie, 2002.

  Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

  Bronowski, Jacob, and Bruce Mazlish. The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

  Brown, Lester. “Aquifer Depletion.” Encyclopedia of Earth. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion (revised February 12, 2007).

  ———. “Grain Harvest Growth Slowing.” Earth Policy Institute. 2002. http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/indicator6.htm.

  ———. “Water Scarcity Spreading.” Earth Policy Institute. 2002. http://www.earthpolicy.org/Indicator7_print.htm.

  Bulloch, John, and Adel Darwish. Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East. London: Victor Gollancz, 1993.

  Butzer, K. W. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

  Byatt, Andrew, Alastair Fothergill, and Martha Homes. The Blue Planet: Seas of Life. Foreword by Sir David Attenborough. London: BBC Worldwide Limited, 2001.

  Cameron, Rondo. A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Hero’s Journey. 3rd ed. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003.

  Campbell-Green, Tim. “Outline the Nature of Irrigation and Water Management in Southern Mesopotamia in the 3rd Millennium.” Bulletin of Sumerian Agriculture 5 (1990). Irrigation and Cultivation, pt. 2, Cambridge. www.art.man.ac.uk/ARTHIST/EStates/Campbell.htm.

  Cantor, Norman F. Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

  ———. The Civilization of the Middle Ages. Rev. ed. New York, HarperCollins, 1994.

  Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

  Cary, M., and E. H. Warmington. The Ancient Explorers. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963.