22 August 2006

Water, Water, Everywhere

by Jason Godesky

“Water, water everywhere,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” bemoans, “Nor any drop to drink.” This is World Water Week, and though more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered in water, 97.2% of it is contained in five oceans of salt water. 90% of all the earth’s fresh water is locked in the Antarctic ice sheet. Global warming has caused droughts, the loss of glaciers, the evaporation of whole lakes, and ultimately, a global water shortage.

The result of such shortages, of course, would be water wars. This is no hypothetical possibility; Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon was fought for access to the Litani. Israel is not alone in its dire need for water; the whole Middle East, Africa and Sri Lanka are in the same dire straits. Even wealthy nations are beginning to feel the pressure. China, India and even the United States’ own Colorado River are becoming serious concerns. In last week’s Guardian, John Vidal offered this possibility:

By 2010, 22 megacities with populations larger than 10 million face major water and sewerage problems. The situation is gravest in China, where 550 of the country’s 600 largest cities are running short. Growing demand for water by industry leads to serious over-exploitaion with less and less water available for consumers and farmers. This leads to a fall in Chinese food production, which in turn leads to more imports and impacts on other countries. Friction and unrest grow worldwide as the middle classes struggle to pay bills. Businesses are exposed to charges of moral culpability and litigation over water use. Waves of immigrants flood in to Europe from increasingly drought-torn Africa.

Vidal’s article includes predictions for the complete breakdown of China’s economy by 2015, due to water problems.

Of course, there are always those waiting to cash in. Jon Markman suggests investing “in the coming global water shortage.” He also points to a report from the Christian Science Monitor on an emerging cartel controlling drinking water, comparable to OPEC. Meanwhile, water privatization and emerging “Water Barons” have led to conflicts from Los Angeles to Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Providing for basic needs—like water—is why people submit to complex societies. When they prove incapable of delivering those needs, complexity is abandoned. John Robb’s application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to state failure is stating exactly this. Complex societies face a number of emerging threats in a very short window of time. Water shortages, ultimately a result of global climate change, is just one more of those crises that civlization’s diminishing marginal returns on complexity will find increasingly difficult to answer.

World Water Week 2006 Articles

  • “Melting Away,” Global warming, the melting of many of the world’s tropical glaciers, and what that means for freshwater drinking supplies around the world.
  • “China’s Water Crisis,” The world’s most populous country faces a major water crisis, created by bureacratic mismanagement, industrial pollution, and the sheer economic toll of overpopulation. The result is the imminent collapse of the Middle Kingdom.
  • “Going the Way of the Anasazi,” The American southwest is not the first civilization to be built on the Colorado River, but shortages in the southwest highlight that the current civilization there is already heading on the same course—towards collapse.

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  1. […] Civilization, as a whole, must also provide for basic needs: food, water, air, and so forth. As we have seen—particularly, this week, with regards to water—civilization faces major crises in the near future for all of these needs. Unfortunately, most people are helpless without civilization; even those who understand, in theory, how to provide for their basic needs without civilization, are often mentally incapable of making the leap to do so. Much of this has to do with the fact that food, water, air, and other physiological needs are not the only ones that civilization provides us with. It provides us with a sense of safety and security, and it does provide us with a social context of esteem, as difficult as that context can be to navigate. As civilization lurches towards destruction through its inability to provide for our basic needs, we must make sure that the societies we begin to grow to take its place do not neglect our needs. This application of Maslow’s hierarchy does not only highlight the crisis of civilization and its loss of legitimacy; it also highlights the needs that our own, neo-tribal societies, must fulfill. Primitive skills can provide for basic, physiological needs, but this is not sufficient in itself. Our societies must also provide for our need for safety and security, belonging, and esteem. In other words, primitive skills are invaluable as a foundation, but they are not sufficient without a culture built on top of them. […]

    Pingback by The Hierarchy of Needs (The Anthropik Network) — 23 August 2006 @ 5:26 PM

  2. […] As World Water Week comes to a close, this should be a startling reminder that conflicts over water are not simply the concern of Third World or developing countries. Even in the most complex nation-state on the planet, there are water shortages that carry the threat of significant socio-political breakdown. Tensions over water will likely become flashpoints in decades to come, as cities continue to grow beyond the means to support themselves and states begin escalating their feuds against one another. As collapse progresses and more power is given to individual states, we may see the southwest torn apart by civil war as states fight for access to the river: just like the grisly warfare that wiped out the last of the Anasazi. When it is all over, what will remain in the southwest will be whatever that ecology can reasonably sustain. Predicting its precise details would be impossible, but we can guess what it will generally look like, regardless of who wins the intervening wars: it will look like the Hopi, or the Zuni, or the Taos, or the Acoma. […]

    Pingback by Going the Way of the Anasazi (The Anthropik Network) — 26 August 2006 @ 4:01 PM

  3. […] Read the rest of this post […]

    Pingback by Israel/Lebanon Conflict / Water, Water, Everywhere — 26 August 2006 @ 4:17 PM


Comments

  1. Hey –

    I don’t know if I would say that the water shortages are primarily a result of global warming. Certainly that is a factor, but I think the primary causes are pollution and ‘fossil water’ draw down.

    Janene

    Comment by janene — 22 August 2006 @ 10:27 AM

  2. There’s a decreasing water supply from pollution, and an increasing demand from the growing population, but I’d say what puts this into true crisis territory is primarily global warming: we’ve got some of the biggest freshwater lakes on the planet drying up, the disappearance of glaciers that provide a huge percentage of our drinking water, and just incredible droughts. I think these things are making problems like pollution pale in comparison.

    Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 August 2006 @ 10:33 AM

  3. Hey –

    But you ignored the other, perhaps even more important issue… draw down of aquifers. Not only can we not drill wells as easily, but I would think that ‘full’ aquifers probably play a huge role in natural spring formation.

    Besides, for every part of the planet that is receiving less rainfall, another is receiving more — places like mine and yours ;-)

    Janene

    Comment by janene — 22 August 2006 @ 1:41 PM

  4. I’m lucky in that the ANF is well-watered, and doesn’t seem to be in any danger of drying up, or flooding out. Most of the planet is not so lucky. Flood is shaping up to be as big a problem as drought: the water comes too quickly to be of any use for drinking, but instead washes everything away: buildings, people, and most important of all in the long term, top soil.

    Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 August 2006 @ 1:56 PM

  5. Comment by Mike Godesky — 22 August 2006 @ 3:43 PM

  6. Aye, a wonderful array of ecological conditions are coming to a head in this little old world of ours.

    Things may go the way of the Cree Prophecy.
    “Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

    Viva de freshwater!

    Comment by Bubba — 24 August 2006 @ 3:28 PM

  7. While it is true that the United States accounts for 17 percent of the global capacity of desalination, this is a figure that includes all forms of desalination. Our factsheet was solely about ocean water desalination. Mr. Leonard misses that on the very next page of the Pacific Institute’s report, it shows that the water treated in U.S. desalination plants is different in the rest of the world. The great majority of water we desalinate in the United States is river or brackish water, which uses less energy and is more cost-effective to desalinate. Only 7 percent of the U.S. installed capacity for desalination is seawater.

    Even this 7 percent figure is misleading. It measures installed capacity, or how much water could be produced through already-built seawater desalination plants — not the amount of water that is actually produced. So, counted in the figure is one of the largest plants proposed in the United States, the Tampa Bay plant, which, despite the more than $110 million price tag, has never produced drinking water commercially or even reliably. Also included is one of the largest plants built in California, the Santa Barbara, which also has never operated commercially.

    All this is to say that ocean water desalination is not a technology that has proven to be a viable or reliable alternative in the United States. The $110 to $173 million proposed plant in Marin should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The last thing that San Franciscans need is a boondoggle like the one in Tampa Bay or Santa Barbara.

    Moreover, the real point of our blog is that, even if the plant works, it will certainly undercut the Marin Water District’s first-in-the-nation commitment to reduce global warming pollution by more than tripling the water district’s energy use. The water board president has proposed that the desalination plant be powered by solar power or some other combination of renewable energy. While these technologies are worth exploring, their viability for producing the amount of energy needed to produce drinking water form ocean salt water is even less tried than conventional desalination.

    “In fact, ocean desalination does not work”

    Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 April 2007 @ 10:29 AM

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