Author Goes Beyond What Comes Out of Kitchen Tap

WATER WARS

Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst

By Diane Raines Ward

Riverhead Books

280 pages, $24.95

Water--the life-giving substance, available abundantly and inexpensively at the turn of a tap, at least in the urban U.S.--is becoming ever more precious. Drought makes scant and disease fouls drinking water in many parts of the world. An overload of water threatens the city of Venice, and is held at bay by massive engineering feats in the Netherlands. Water runs wild in the form of floods, destroying vast populated and agricultural areas, most recently in Germany, and over-irrigation has led to the creation of salted, virtually sterile land. (As water from irrigation evaporates on the land, an accumulation of salt is left behind, eventually disabling the land’s ability to produce crops.) In Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Mexico City, ground water has been so depleted that the land supporting those cities is collapsing.

When water is scarce, economic hardship, and sometimes violence, results. “As the supply of water fails, costs rise,” writes Diane Raines Ward in “Water Wars,” a solidly researched, eminently accessible book on the world’s water situation. In Nigeria, the poor spend almost 20% of their income on water, she points out, and water use was a key cause of the Middle East’s Six-Day War. Water remains a sticking point amid Middle East tensions and has been a crucial element in relations between India and Pakistan.

Wars have been fought over oil, a commodity without which motors will stop. “But if you stop the water supply,” says a Turkish minister whom she interviews, “life stops.” Ward travels to the hot spots of water concern: India, Pakistan, the Middle East, China, and many parts of the U.S., including California’s Imperial Valley and Las Vegas, to interview engineers, farmers, water experts, politicians and those who are just passionate about water.

She considers the details of massive engineering achievements (dams, canals, hydroelectric plants, etc.) that have improved water access and usage in some places and that have caused more harm than good in others. Meanwhile, she traces changes in the global climate and how they are speeding up what Ward terms “the water crisis.” Ultimately, Ward explores new methods--especially small, local ones--that allow for improved use and husbanding of water.

Historically, the human response to water (its lack and overabundance) has been in large-scale engineering. Dam the water, build canals, move the river, alter the natural resources to suit our needs. This blind faith in human maneuvers has not always proven beneficial. Especially in developing countries, where the water issue is so acute, reliance on engineering solutions alone has often been problematic. “It is comparatively easy to put up concrete buttresses and viaducts,” Ward writes. “But those cement structures disrupt natural systems with artificial conduits that need an amount of care, money, and good governmental management not usually figured into project plans.” At the heart of the issue, Ward suggests, is that those governments that build large irrigation systems “have generally failed to see irrigation for what it really is--a social contract.”

To whom does water belong? What are our responsibilities for shepherding this resource? These questions form the core of Ward’s book, in which she urges us to move beyond one-dimensional engineering strategies and view water not as a political issue, but as a vital social contract among everyone on the planet. Engineering may be part of the solution, but only a part. “Giant canals and dams are often built for reasons that a small investment in human trust and human community would have made unnecessary,” says an expert on the Pakistani water situation.

“Forty percent of the world’s population carry their water from wells, rivers, ponds or puddles outside of their homes,” Ward reminds us. “More significantly, many do not have enough--1.4 billion, [more than] twenty percent of those living on the planet, don’t have access to an adequate supply of clean water.” It’s easy to forget, here in California, where all the clean water we’d like is readily available, where your water comes from and all the convolutions that have taken place to bring you that magical tap of nonstop H2O. It’s easy to forget that things are radically different in much of the world and may become different here, as well.

If we work within and not against the balanced state of nature, Ward suggests, and cooperate with each other regardless of national borders, we may effect change.

We will be able to manage this vital dwindling resource--though ocean levels are rising because of global warming, supplies of fresh water are declining--if we pay attention. “It’s very difficult to get people interested in water as a global or even regional issue,” one expert tells her, “but if you bring it down to the kitchen sink, we all do get the general picture.” This book, which should be required reading for all of us living with lawns, sprinklers and pools in an arid climate, packs an important kitchen-sink punch.