A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 25

25th of a series

“If you are against a dam, you are for a river. . . . Let the mountains talk, let the rivers run. Once more, and forever.”

- David Brower

“In the view of conservationists,” writes John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid, his wonderful three-part profile of David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth, “there is something special about dams, something . . . disproportionately and metaphysically sinister.

“The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force,” he continues, “and rivers are the ultimate metaphor of existence, and dams destroy rivers, humiliating nature.”

In “Part 3:The River,” McPhee joins Brower and Floyd Dominy, the equally-larger-than-life director of the Bureau of Reclamation, on a raft trip down the Colorado River. In a nation of huge dams, Dominy is their primary builder and most powerful cheerleader. Brower hates them.

“The Bureau of Reclamation engineers are like beavers,” he says. “They can’t stand the sight of running water.”

“Reclamation is the father of putting water to work for man,” Dominy counters, chewing on a gigantic cigar. “Irrigation, hydropower, flood control, recreation. Let’s use our environment. Nature changes the environment every day of our lives – why shouldn’t we change it. We’re part of nature.”

Their conversation, by turns combative and respectful – and always lively – epitomizes the two sides of a critical social and environmental dispute: the relative merits of a natural vs. an engineering approach to providing water to humans while also protecting its sources. The river itself frames the conversation: as their raft makes its way downstream, they pass through the Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and then on toward the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, and still one of the seven engineering wonders of the world.*

New York City’s water system represents an effort to combine the two approaches: an enormous infrastructure of reservoirs, pipes, dams, and aqueducts in a landscape kept undeveloped to protect the sources of the water. But it’s a stretch to think of the system as natural when you consider how much earth moving and heavy equipment it took to create it – until you compare it to other enormous engineering solutions, from dams to desalinations, whose primary aim is to overwhelm natural “obstacles.”

Dams are an interesting case. They have provided many benefits to humans, including hydropower, irrigation, flood control, and water storage. But a half century after their heyday, when Dominy was heralding them as the pathway to the future, we have learned much about the harm they cause, from sediment build-up to fish extinction to greenhouse gas emissions. “The environmental consequences of large dams are numerous and varied,” reports International Rivers “and include direct impacts to the biological, chemical and physical properties of rivers and riparian environments.” Here we are, back at Robin Vannote’s River Continuum Concept, which proposed that all riverine life is connected. “Fundamentally,” reported the state of Vermont, “the dam is a barrier that interrupts the natural river dynamics.”

In McPhee’s telling, Floyd Dominy is the P.T. Barnum of progress, David Brower the Cassandra of doom. Looking back over the years, as scientists have discovered more and more about the dynamics of streams and rivers, Brower, the curmudgeon trying to hold back the future, seems less and less a troglodyte and more and more prophetic.

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*Seven natural wonders of the world: Aurora Borealis; Harbor of Rio de Janeiro; Grand Canyon; Great Barrier Reef; Mount Everest; Victoria Falls; Parícutin, Mexico.

Seven engineering wonders of the world: International Space Station; Golden Gate Bridge; Channel Tunnel; Burj Khalifa, Dubai; Great Wall of China; Hoover Dam; Millau Viaduct, France.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 24

24th of a series

“Please, Sir, I want some more.”

- Oliver Twist (click here)

Although all of us need to use less water, changes in personal habits are not in themselves sufficient to reverse our current trajectory toward scarcity and pollution. Not when agriculture accounts for 70% of worldwide consumption and almost half of that is lost to evaporation and bad management. Not when thermoelectric power production and manufacturing directly withdraw almost 10 billion gallons a day from our aquifers. Not when the heavy metals required for batteries and other green energy infrastructure require enormous amounts of water – almost 600,000 gallons to produce a ton of lithium (which has also been linked to water contamination).

Of the countless ways for individuals and communities to use less water, two deserve special mention: tearing up our lawns and planting trees. In particular, years of research have shown that planting trees along a streamside has an unexpected double benefit for water health: it not only stops many pollutants from getting into the water, it puts the stream in a position to neutralize many that do. Diet matters, too: raising animals for meat and dairy products takes far more water than growing grains and vegetables – and over a third of the food we buy ends up in a landfill anyway. More efficient household appliances have also made a big difference.

On a more macro level, since farming is by far the most prolific user – and waster – of water, more efficient technologies, such as sprinkling systems and drip irrigation, make a big difference. As does recycling: almost half Israel’s agricultural water, for example, is treated wastewater.

Charging for water also increases efficiency. New York City didn’t get around to installing meters until the 1980s. Since then, per capita water use has declined by 94%. Cities can do many other things: reuse stormwater runoff, repair system leaks, and encourage water efficiency. Through a combination of innovations and fines, Las Vegas has reduced per capita water consumption by 48% since 2002.

And that brings us face to face with two ethical issues:

1. As an old friend once said to me: “I know how much is enough. . . .Just a little bit more than I have right now” – a sentiment that has driven economic growth for a very long time. Questioned about their endless thirst for more water, too many industries (i.e., National Association of Homebuilders) and governments (e.g., Arizona) say they are simply responding to the demands of consumers and the marketplace. Moreover, Chris Neel of Oklahoma Water Resources Board told the Times, that just the act of publishing data on declining water tables can immediately depress property values. So even as we work to reduce water use, the mantra seems to have become: we need to use less so we can keep on using more.

2. The second issue is one of social justice. It’s fine to talk about charging prices that will encourage water conservation. But what about the billions of people who are already forced conservers, either because they live in water-stressed parts of the world, or the water they have access to is contaminated, or they are poor? What is our obligation to provide water to them?

And that brings up the most fundamental question of all: Is water a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace or is it a basic human right?

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This seemingly endless series (which I am really enjoying) will continue after the New Year. In the meantime, let us pray for work for peace and justice. Happy Holidays to all.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 23

23rd  of a series

"That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It sometimes puzzles me that humankind made it to the top of the food chain.”

- Julie Dietrich

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith posed the “diamond-water paradox,” in which the price of water, which is essential to human life, is a fraction of the price of diamonds, which  are not. In Smith’s words, “Nothing is more useful than water: but it will scarcely purchase anything; barely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce value in use;* but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”

And so, modern economic theory began with a conundrum that stumped its own founder. Several theories have since sought to resolve this paradox.

• The “Labor theory of value,” which Smith conceived and Karl Marx enshrined, holds that the value of something is based on the cost of the labor to produce it. Obviously, diamonds are harder to get than water. Or at least they used to be. Or are they? Consider some of the vast projects humans have built to store water or to move it from one place to another.

The construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, required “enough steel to build 63 Eifel Towers.”

Moreover, a diamond is only hard to get when it is dug up and refined. As one economist asked and answered, if a hiker happens upon a perfectly cut diamond by the side of the trail, is it less valuable because the only labor he added was bending down to pick it up? “Clearly not.”

• “Marginal utility,” which argues that because water is so plentiful, the additional satisfaction of consuming a bit more is low, while the opposite is true of diamonds. Tell that to Meliyio Tompoi, a 35-year-old Kenyan mother of six who walks six hours every day to fetch water for her family. They need 40 liters a day, but Meliyio can only carry half that (which weighs about 40 pounds), which means that the family never has enough water for its basic needs. Does her marginal utility for water not exceed that for diamonds?

• “Conspicuous Consumption.” Thorstein Veblen would undoubtedly have considered diamonds the epitome of conspicuous consumption, which, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, he defined as buying things you don’t need as a public display of your wealth and status. “Such “useless activities,” he wrote, “[provide] a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”

Adam Smith did add a few wrinkles, such as the fable of the thirsty merchant in the Arabian desert, whose predicament makes him realize the true value of water and who is probably quite willing to exchange all his diamonds for a cup of the stuff.

But the real paradox is not one of economic theory; it is an evolutionary enigma: we are surely the only species on the planet dumb enough to consider diamonds more valuable than water. And the consequence is that, while we are not running out of diamonds, we are running perilously short of potable water.

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*Particularly before the industrial and information revolutions discovered new uses for diamonds.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Parts 21 and 22

21st and 22nd of a series

“New York City’s water is treated like gold, and for all the right reasons.”

- Marissa Morton, Sydney High School, age 17

“I can still here Jeriel saying, ‘I’m going to tell my mom to stop buying bottled water.”

- Christina Medved#

Today’s post is a link to Kent Garrett and d.b. Roderick’s film, “Mountaintop to Tap”, which also features local musicians Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, composers of the tenderly relevant “Ashokan Farewell”.*

Because Kent and d.b. had only a couple of days lead time, they were unable to film the entire trek. One of the days they missed included the trekkers’ visit with an elderly woman named Margaret Smith Dolan, whose family had been evicted when New York City took their home by eminent domain. Its site now sits at the bottom of the Ashokan Reservoir. Margaret was not – or at least is no longer – bitter about what she called “the price of progress.” But the kids were deeply moved by her story, and it was at that point that they began to understand the larger story of New York’s water in a wholly new light.

In my mind, the film is enchanting, warm spirited, and, both poignant and filled with hope . . . documenting one of the most positive stories I know about bringing diverse people together to understand and protect their collective sources of fresh water, even in the shadow of a history of removal and displacement. Because the film is 37 minutes long, it will be both posts this week.

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* Built between 1907 and 1915, the Ashokan Reservoir submerged thousands of acres of farmland, destroyed 12 communities, and displaced 2,000 people.  

# So many people worked really hard to make the trek happen, but no one worked harder, longer, or more warmheartedly than Christina Medved, Education Programs Manager at the Stroud Center, a special person.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 20

20th of a series

“I saw the stars last night. We don’t have stars in Brooklyn. We have streetlights.”

- From the journal of Sean Soto, New York Harbor School, age 14

Mountaintop ➡ Tap

A 3-week Trek Across the New York City Water Supply System

July 7-28, 2007

As I wrote earlier, 90% of New York City’s drinking water comes from streams that feed into large reservoirs in the Catskill  mountains. To protect its water the city has asserted broad powers over those distant watersheds, including fencing off the reservoirs and having the New York Police Department patrol the area. Once-thriving villages lie beneath these huge reservoirs, and upstate animosities remain strong. On the other hand, most New Yorkers have no idea where their water comes from. Many think it comes from the Hudson River; one of the Brooklyn trek students told me, looking at me as if I were some kind of bumpkin, “from the tap”.

Part of the Stroud Center’s six-year New York mandate was to educate people up and down the watershed to understand: (1) the sources of their water; (2) the importance of protecting those sources; and (3) the critical connection between the upstream watersheds and the city. And so, in the summer of 2007, we brought together six students from the New York Harbor School in inner-city Brooklyn and six from Sidney High School in rural Delaware County for a three-week trek, dubbed “Mountaintop ➡ Tap.”

Part Outward Bound course, part scientific laboratory, and part community outreach, the trek was physically, intellectually, and emotionally challenging. “It was,” said one of the students, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But they did it. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment was learning to trust each other, as one group of students had grown up in an upstate farming community, while each of the urban kids had been born on a different island in the Caribbean. The oldest was 17, the youngest 13.

At the most basic level, the students had a unique wilderness and educational experience. They traveled the length of the water system on foot, by canoe and inner tube, and in rowboats, carrying their belongings on their backs. Along the way, they assessed the quality of the water in streams, rivers, and reservoirs; documented their findings with photographs and journal entries; talked to public officials, scientists, conservationists, and park rangers; and hosted press conferences to share with the public what they were learning in the woods and waters.

Rowing on the Hudson River in a boat built by students at the New York Harbor School. The city’s drinking water actually travels to the city in pipes beneath the river.

In the end they became the representatives of all the people who live and work in the 2,000-square-mile watershed. They also became friends, highlighting in their own differences both the diversity and the community of the watershed’s nine million people, people who don’t know each other, trust each other, or understand their dependence on each other.

Bob Caputo, a long-time photographer, writer, and filmmaker for National Geographic, taught the students how to take pictures and turn them into a coherent story, and then helped them organize their photos for the exhibits. Kent Garrett and d. b. Roderick, who between them have won five Emmys and a Peabody award, produced a film of the trek for public television.

Stroud Water Research Center was the lead partner on the project. Other organizations included New York Harbor School (a public high school founded in 2003 by my friend Murray Fisher), Riverkeeper, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, and Catskill Mountainkeeper.

For more on the trek, visit: https://www.stroudcenter.org/education/nytrek2007/index.shtm

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 19

19th of a series

Sing me the legends of the river.

Tell me a story of the sky.

Because I want to grow.

Because I want to know.

Because I want to understand.

- Author Unknown

I answered the ringing phone.

“Is this Jamie Blaine,” a voice asked?

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

“My name is Kent Garrett. I’m a dairy farmer up in Delhi, New York, and I read in our local newspaper about the trek you are organizing.”

After discussing the project for a while, he said, “Sounds interesting. I’d like to film it.”

I scraped my face off the desk. I had spent well over a year putting together a three-week expedition that would bring together six students from inner-city Brooklyn and six from very rural Delaware County, of which Delhi is the county seat. Together, if they made it, they would follow the course of New York City’s water supply, from its source in Catskill mountain streams to its arrival in the city. They would travel on foot, by canoe, and in rowboats. They would carry their supplies on their backs, camp out along the way, and interview local officials, residents, and reporters. The idea was that these 12 high-school kids, from incredibly different backgrounds, would come to understand and embody the interconnectedness of the whole watershed.

Putting this project together had been way harder than I had anticipated. I’m not much for details, and this was all about details. When Kent called I was trying to resolve what I hoped was the last issue – one so complicated and so essential that I was astounded I hadn’t thought of it till just before go time: Insurance, all kinds of insurance. Insurance to protect the kids and insurance to protect people and places from the kids. Medical insurance, accident insurance, liability insurance, insurance on insurance, and on and on and on.

And now, a dairy farmer wants to tag along and film the project. This was a distraction I didn’t need.

We agreed to meet the next morning at the Bellayre Mountain resort in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other people there were two Black men talking quietly. Fewer than 200 African Americans then lived in Delhi, and it seemed improbable that one of them was an organic dairy farmer. After a while, the taller of the men approached me and asked if I was Jamie Blaine. I said I was. He said he was Kent Garrett.

It turns out that Kent Garrett was no ordinary dairy farmer . . . or filmmaker, for that matter. Born in the Brooklyn housing projects, he had made his way to Harvard, a story he tells in The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever: “In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented 18 ‘Negro’ boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later, they would graduate as African Americans.” From Harvard he had gone on to a career in film and television, first as a producer of the pioneering public television program, “Black Journal”, and later as a documentary filmmaker at NBC and CBS, where he won two Emmy Awards. In 1997, he left what he called “the rat race” to become a dairy farmer in upstate New York.

He was getting out of farming (“It’s a young man’s game”). He wanted to film our project . . . for free. He had called me out of the blue.

Some guys have all the luck.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 18

18th in a Series

“A river is more than an amenity,”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Although it is enclosed by three rivers – the East, Harlem, and Hudson – Manhattan Island has always suffered from a lack of fresh water. In fact, two of the three are not rivers at all: the East River is a saltwater estuary and the Harlem River is an eight-mile tidal straight. The Hudson is tidal almost as far upstream as Albany and too brackish to drink below Poughkeepsie. According to one chronicler of the city’s water history,* it was the island’s dearth of water that enabled the English to take New Amsterdam from its Dutch inhabitants in a “waterless coup” in 1664.

Continuing scarcity, exacerbated by exponential population and commercial growth in the early 19th century, drove New York to subsidize a series of mammoth engineering projects north of the city. By the time that system was completed in 1911, its 12 reservoirs and three controlled lakes were already inadequate to its needs. So, the city moved northwest, into the Catskill mountains and the Delaware River. Because New Jersey and Pennsylvania already took a lot of water from the Delaware, a 1931 Supreme Court decision was required to allocate distribution among the three claimants. “A river is more than an amenity,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “it is a treasure [that] offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

The cost of getting all this water to New York was enormous, both in dollars (billions) and in human disruption (dozens of communities flooded, thousands of people removed, hundreds of workers killed). That the land and homes were condemned through eminent domain enraged the upstate communities, and their animosity toward the city continues to this day.

Still, the city got its water – by 1980, 7.1 million people were using 1.5 billion gallons a day. Even though 90% of it was unfiltered, it was considered among the cleanest water of any city anywhere. But the EPA questioned New York’s ability to continue to provide clean water without filtration and threatened to make it install a plant that would cost billions to build and hundreds of millions to operate. The city didn’t have the money, and the upstream communities were in open revolt against any new watershed regulations, so the state convened all the stakeholders and eventually hammered out an agreement, which included everyone’s input and pleased no one. But it has held. In return for guarantees to protect the distant reservoirs, the city will fund sustainable economic development in the region. Part of that process involved a six-year agreement with the Stroud Water Research Center to analyze all the water sources with the goal of ensuring their future health.

Yet for all the expense, all the displacements, all the hardships, the story of New York’s water is in many ways one of hope.

• By protecting its upstream sources, the city continues to have some of the cleanest drinking water in the world without requiring a filtration plant.

• Through infrastructure improvements (including installing meters, which the city hadn’t bothered to do until the 1980s) and conservation efforts, New York has reduced its water consumption by 34%, even as its population grew by 20%.

• Most important is the recognition that the vast region is a single watershed in which everyone has a common interest. For years, the sheer size of the system and the geographic and demographic differences among its people blocked the development of a unified watershed community, which is the only way to protect both the city’s water and the upstream economies.

  *David Yeats-Thomas, “Mountain Water for a City”

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 17

17th in a Series

The Monster Frack

He did the frack, he did the monster frack,
The monster frack, drilled like a maniac.
He did the frack and made himself some jack.
He did the frack. . . until the earth did crack.

Apologies to Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt Kickers (click here and sing along)

In “Uncharted Waters,” The New York Times’ meticulous and eye-opening investigative series on the threats to the nation’s groundwater, I was introduced to “the monster frack” – enormous hydraulic fracturing operations that have “transformed the global energy landscape, turning America into the world’s largest oil and gas producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia.” (For those of us who lived through the “oil crisis” years of the 1970s, this is an incredible sentence to read.)

Extracting massive amounts of fossil fuels from deep under the ground costs a lot of money. It also requires a lot of water – millions of gallons for each new well, according to the Times’ research. Across the country, fracking has used almost 1.5 trillion (that’s 11 zeros after the 5) gallons since 2011. The industry claims that much of the water it uses is either brackish or recycled. Let’s hope so, but their water use is mostly unregulated, unpermitted, and unmonitored.

Moreover, unlike stream and river water, which is owned by the public, in many places the water in aquifers is owned outright by the landowner. “In Texas,” said Bill Martin, rancher and water conservation district member, “if you own the surface, you own everything to the center of the earth.” Perhaps a Chinese farmer owns from the center out the other way.

Anyway, since you own it, you can sell it, and in parts of Texas landowners pump as much water on their property as they like, even if it’s coming from under someone else’s land. And “if you’ve got water to sell,” Bruce Frasier, an onion farmer who sells groundwater to a fracking company, told the Times, “you’re making a fortune.”

That water is coming from the same vulnerable aquifers that everyone else is trying to tap into – water that has been in the ground for thousands of years and which replenishes itself very slowly. And it isn’t only an issue in the West.

“Most of the water we’re pulling out of the ground is thousands of years old,” Jason Groth, deputy director of planning and growth management in Charles County, Maryland, told the Times. “It’s not like it rains on Monday, and by Saturday it’s in the aquifer.” He predicts that, with the massive growth in suburban Washington, D.C. draining its aqueducts, the county won’t have enough water in ten years.

When you start thinking about water as little more than drinkable oil, the next step is to drill massively for it and send it through pipelines to places that are willing to pay for it. Actually, that has been going on for years. Right now, an Israeli company has proposed a $5-billion project to build a desalination plant near the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and pump the “fresh” water 200 miles to Phoenix. The city of Sonora will also get some much-needed fresh water and Mexico some money. The Sea of Cortez will get the industrial waste.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 16

16th of a series

“We admire the rivers as images of constant change and renewal; and as great Sacred Beings.

- Nature Evolutionaries

Readers respond to last week’s Mayfly post.

1. “Streams that have been polluted by acid look beautiful and pristine – precisely because there are no living organisms in them. What an irony.”

2. “Mayflies in the news today!!”

   Bangor Daily News, Nov. 16, 2023

Have a great Thanksgiving. See you next week.

Jamie

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 15

15th in a series

“Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”

- Carl Sagan

“The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.”

- George Carlin

I remember the first time I waded into a shallow stream with an entomologist many years ago. He scrambled about, looking under rocks, picking up bunches of dead leaves, and examining logs – enthusiastically identifying for me the bugs and other tiny organisms that seemed to be everywhere. He told me that by analyzing the numbers and species of what he called “macroinvertebrates,” he could learn much about the health of the water.

He showed me a mayfly, which lives in larval form for up to a year or more in the streambed, until it becomes an adult and flies off in search of a mate. The life span of an adult female is rarely more than 24 hours, and one species lives fewer than five minutes.

Thankfully, their value to scientists is not tied to their longevity. Mayflies are extremely sensitive to pollution. If a stream has a lot of them in larval form, it’s a sign the water is clean. In fact, he continued, we can evaluate a stream’s health by the relative abundance of different kinds of these microscopic organisms. Some bugs – sow bugs, water striders, beetles – live happily in polluted waters. But others – mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies – live only in healthy streams.

This was astonishing to me. Clean water? With all those bugs in it? That’s not how I ordinarily drink it.

A stream with no living things in it, he said, is a dead stream.

In states – such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia – where coal mining was a major industry for decades, even centuries, there are a lot of dead streams. The reason is acid mine drainage, the toxic runoff of highly acidic water and heavy metals from abandoned mines, which has left more than 7,000 miles of Pennsylvania’s streams biologically dead. It is, notes the Department of Environmental Protection, “the number one water pollution problem in Pennsylvania.”

“You can walk in it and not even slip,” said Katie Semelsberger, Land Manager of the Altoona, Pennsylvania, Water Authority, about the Kittanning Run, “There is nothing that grows in it.” Kittanning Run meanders across the Allegheny Plateau as it makes its way into the Susquehanna River and eventually Chesapeake Bay, which annually receives over 100 million pounds of acid discharges and sediments that are contaminated with heavy metals from the abandoned mines.

This is one more reminder that a stream is an ecosystem; it is not a pipe. As Robin Vannote and his colleagues noted in the River Continuum Concept, biological communities are continually adjusting to changes in the physical, chemical, and biological conditions as the stream flows from its headwaters to its mouth. One of the astonishing results of this is that a stream can actually clean its own water – if we will let it. This is part of the “ecosystem services” streams provide, services that can save consumers and taxpayers billions of dollars. Just think of the value to all of us of a stream that is teeming with fish, as opposed to a stream that has no fish at all. It's amazing what Mother Nature can do all by herself.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 14

14th of a series

It’s the same the wide world over,

It’s the poor what cops the blame,

While the rich, he ‘as his pleasure,

Isn’t it a bloomin’ shame?

-Traditional English Tavern Song

“Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires,” reports The New York Times in its major series, “Uncharted Waters”. “But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.”

As we discussed in an earlier post, the total amount of the earth’s water hasn’t changed since the world began. But everything else has – in particular, us . . . and our enormous impact on the rest of creation. Earth’s human population is approaching 8 billion, a fourfold increase since 1900. The World Resources Institute recently released a doomsday scenario that forecasts unsustainable population growth in many of the world’s poorest and most water-stressed regions, places that climate change is already making even drier.

But don’t blame the poor. Jesus told his disciples that they will always be with us, but he was vague on the numbers. Today, after two millennia of growth, modernization, and scientific and technological revolutions, about six billion people (or three quarters of the world’s population) live on less than $10 a day. As we look at images of teeming cities and streaming refugees, of rivers that seem little more than slowly moving sewage systems, of too many people fighting over too few resources, it’s all too easy to think that there are just too many poor people and to blame our problems on their misery.

This is not new. Almost 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift addressed a similar situation in his country. In “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” Dean Swift proposed a solution to the overpopulation and hunger then ravaging Ireland. The poor, he wrote, should sell their excess children to the rich, arguing that a “young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

It is true that every additional person, regardless of wealth, increases the stress on our water and other resources, but rich people are in a league of their own. By one account, they use 12 times more water per household than the poor. It’s not only swimming pools and rolling lawns, it’s the lifestyle, and, in particular, the much richer diet. It takes, for example, 1,799 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. Because the poor don’t eat a lot of steak, they are making a significant, if involuntary, contribution to protecting our water. This is something that zero population groups sometimes forget to tell their big donors – that it is not just people who stress the system, it’s money.

The Yamuna River begins in the Himalayas as a pure blue stream. By the time it reaches New Delhi, “[it] is essentially a running cesspool.” The Yamuna is the world’s 16th most polluted river. Our own Mississippi is number 5. Its high levels of fertilizer run-off create the 4,000-square-mile Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 13

13th of a series

“A huge hydroelectric dam was halted by a tiny stupid fish, environmental extremism, and deviated homo-socialists.”

- Rush Limbaugh

In 480 BCE, Xerxes I, emperor of Persia, assembled a massive army and navy in an attempt to conquer all of Greece. He decided to take his land force of several hundred thousand men through the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae, where the king of Sparta had gathered an army of 7,000 Greeks to block him. The Greeks held their ground for seven days, until a traitor showed the Persians a little-known path that enabled them to attack from the rear and overrun the outnumbered Greeks. Since then, Thermopylae has come to mean a courageous last stand against an overwhelming force.

And that brings us to the story of the Tellico Dam and one of history’s most famous fish. The Tennessee Valley Authority had begun planning for the Tellico Dam in 1936, but construction didn’t begin until 1967. It would be the sixth dam along the Little Tennessee River and the 49th and last dam to be built by the TVA.

Six years later, two events threw the dam plans into turmoil: (1) On August 12, 1973, University of Tennessee biologist David Etnier discovered the snail darter, in the river. (2) On December 28 of that year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act by a unanimous vote in the Senate and 355-4 (that is not a typo) in the House, and Richard Nixon signed it into law. Now there were two endangered species: the snail darter and the Tellico Dam.

Five years later, “Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill” landed in the U.S. Supreme Court. By a 6-3 vote, the justices ordered construction to stop, even though $100 million had already been spent and the dam was nearly finished. The reason, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, is that the dam will cause “the eradication of an endangered species.” Courts and administrative bodies tried to weigh the competing values of environmental and economic considerations, and surprisingly, the dam lost on both fronts. "I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for stopping a project that was ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place,” said Secretary of the Interior Frederick Dent.

But the politicians weren’t done. In 1979 Tennessee’s powerful Senator Howard Baker got a rider into the appropriations bill, ordering the TVA to finish the dam, and Jimmy Carter signed it into law. The project was completed that same year, 1979. It was the last dam the TVA ever built.

There were others who opposed the dam besides environmentalists. Unlike earlier TVA dams, the Tellico was built for economic development and tourism, rather than hydroelectric power and flood control. It required thousands of acres of farmland to be taken by eminent domain, many of which were subsequently sold to private developers long after the original residents had been relocated. By this time, also, people were awakening to the harm dams cause to river systems as well as to the displaced people.

Quotes by two eminent Americans best summarize the conflict between environmental protection and economic growth:

“In the midst of a national energy crisis,” said Howard Baker on the Senate floor, “the snail darter demands that we scuttle a project that would produce 200 million kilowatt hours of hydroelectric power and save an estimated 15 million gallons of oil.”

“The story of the snail darter and the TVA,” countered the legendary sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, “is the Thermopylae in the history of America’s conservation movement.”

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To see all of this and earlier series, please go to jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 12

12th of a series

Paint me a picture of the landscape.

Dance me the dance of the waves.

Sing me of the legends of the river.

Tell me the story of the sky.

- Author Unknown

In 2010 I published an article in Waterkeeper Magazine, which included paintings from a series of river landscapes in Southeast Asia by my friend Sarah Sutro. To me, they capture the calm beauty of quiet rivers. I will let you see for yourself.

North Shore, Sarah Sutro

North Shore Landscape, Sarah Sutro

Phnom Penh 6, Sarah Sutro

Bangkok River, Sarah Sutro

Phnom Penh 7, Sarah Sutro

In Bangladesh, Sarah Sutro

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 11

11th of a series

Weekly update: a new feature of related news, stories, and reader responses:

John Kirkpatrick:

“As I read the top of this latest chapter of “A River and Its Water …” I couldn’t help but think that it should be no surprise that the folks who willingly wiped out a chilling number of Native Americans would shun [John Wesley] Powell for his inconvenient observations.

“Additionally, I couldn’t help but stop at your note about Las Vegas. Sara and I were recently in Las Vegas — my first time there. It really was stunning to see the artificial excess that makes up the core of the city as well as the tremendous and unrelenting growth of the surrounding area. And you are correct about the disconnect between the growth and the reality of living in a desert. It was disconcerting. I don’t think we’ll be back. 

“I have had a very hard time reading this “Perspectives” around water. It isn’t because of your work, which has been extraordinary in detail, readability, importance, and understanding. It has been because of the unrelenting forces that make clean, accessible water in many places a dream rather than a priority. It is just so discouraging. 

“It also might be because it comes on top of our country’s incredible political/cultural dysfunction, our inability to invest in the future, all on top of the world spinning more and more out of control. 

“I am a happy and optimistic person. But increasingly I find I need to step back now and again to recharge from all that is swirling around us.”

Bruce Babbitt (via Tony Barclay):

“One factual error that does not affect his very powerful advocacy. His description of Butler Valley as a ‘reserve for storing water from the Colorado River’ is not quite right – it was designated as a reserve of the existing groundwater for future urban use in the Phoenix urban area.”

Bruce Babbitt and Robert Lane

“The notorious state lease that is giving away Butler Valley groundwater to grow and export alfalfa to Saudi Arabia will expire on Feb. 14 of this coming year. . .  .Will Arizona capitulate to lobbyists pressuring Governor Hobbs to renew the lease?

“All Arizonans should also urge Governor Hobbs to direct the State Land Commissioner to reject the lease application and to restore the Butler Valley as a designated groundwater reserve to be held in trust for Arizona’s future.”

Bruce Babbitt was governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987. Robert Lane was State Land Commissioner from 1982 to1987.

Tim Thomas:

The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2023 (part of the Times’ major series on water, “Uncharted Waters”

“When Maine lawmakers tried to rein in large-scale access to the state’s freshwater this year, the effort initially gained momentum. The state had just emerged from drought, and many Mainers were sympathetic to protecting their snow-fed lakes and streams.

“Then a Wall Street-backed giant called BlueTriton stepped in.

“BlueTriton isn’t a household name, but its products are. Americans today buy more bottled water than any other packaged drink, and BlueTriton owns many of the nation’s biggest brands, including Poland Spring, which is named after a natural spring in Maine that ran dry decades ago.

“Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 10

Tenth of a series

“They both listened to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming.”

- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Economics. Environment. Esthetics

Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which all life depends, and that dependence is not going to change. We can’t stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms.

For beyond economic – and even environmental – issues is a third dimension that is too often overlooked. Esthetics. As with science, beauty is rooted in the particular – the play of light on the water, the caddisfly in its tiny case, the sound of flowing water, the scent of riparian plants in the early spring. It leads us to enjoy the stream directly, as we walk along its banks, raft its reaches, and fish its pools, feeling at these moments the solace of solitude and the paradoxical sense that we are not alone.

“I came to the River for science,” wrote biologist David Campbell who spent 30 years studying the deep wilderness of the western Amazon basin, “but I stayed for the beauty. My memories of the species I found – each an invocation of sunlight and water and minerals – and of the play of light in the canopy, the night sounds, the aromas and textures of the forest, the time and space shared with friends on the frontier – make up a tapestry of experience so rich that now, years later and thousands of kilometers away, it imbues my papery life with dimension and perspective.”

In A Land of Ghosts Campbell found that knowledge enhanced his appreciation of beauty. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain found something else after he had achieved his childhood dream: becoming a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River:

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a ‘break’ that ripples above some deadly disease. . . . And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?”

A river is not just a collection of resources for humans to exploit, but a community of which we are members. Beauty pulls us out of our individual selves and connects us with a world of immeasurable – and infinitesimal – things.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 9

Ninth of a series

“How did their water get under our sand?”

Butler Valley is a sparsely populated area in the western Arizona desert. Situated about 125 miles northwest of Phoenix and 40 miles east of the Colorado River, the 315-square-mile valley has only one paved road. The state owns 99% of its land, which it holds in trust for the benefit of its public school children. In terms of annual rainfall, Butler Valley is one of the driest places in the United States, but beneath the surface it’s a different story altogether. For almost 40 years the valley has been a reserve for storing water from the Colorado River, and it currently holds more than 6 million acre-feet of water underground.

Enter Fondamente Arizona, a company that produces thousands of tons of alfalfa, a highly water-intensive crop, on land in Butler Valley that it leases from the state of Arizona. Don’t be fooled by its name: Fondamente Arizona is not a southwestern farming operation; it is a subsidiary of a Saudi company called Almarai, and the alfalfa it produces is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed the kingdom’s cattle.

Why? Because Saudi Arabia has banned large-scale production of alfalfa and other animal feed crops to protect its limited supply of water.

No such regulations exist in Arizona, and The Washington Post reported that a proposal just to measure the Saudi company’s water use was stonewalled by the state’s Republican government, with the help of heavy spending and lobbying by, surprise, Fondomonte Arizona.

According to U.S. Geological Survey studies, alfalfa in Butler Valley requires 6.4 acre-feet of water per acre of land. That means the company has likely been pumping 22,400 acre-feet of water each year for the last seven years. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep. One acre foot = 325,850 gallons. So 22,400 acre feet = just shy of 7.3 trillion gallons of water.)

And what has Arizona charged Fondamente for all this water?

Not one penny.

So, go figure. For the past 10 years we have been using massive amounts of water in drought-stricken Arizona to grow alfalfa, which is then shipped more than 8,000 miles to Saudi Arabia to enable that desert country to conserve its own scarce water resources.

Isn’t what they are doing to “our” water what we used to do to “their” oil?

Perhaps colonialism is alive and well; only now it’s working in reverse.

By far the biggest user of water on Earth is agriculture. Once upon a time we called it farming, but this is neither Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer nor Norman Rockwell’s family farm. This is industry, and it takes up more than a quarter of the world’s land to conduct its business. On most of that land it grows crops – like alfalfa – to feed animals, not humans.

Agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s annual water consumption. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. It takes one gallon of water to produce a single almond – and 1,900 gallons to produce a pound. Rising demand for food around the world, due to both population growth and richer diets, has led to fresh water being sucked from the ground in such massive quantities that the Earth’s tilt has shifted.

While the specific effects of climate change on these matters is still not fully clear in the short or the long run, I don’t think we should count on cosmic benevolence.

* Earlier this month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that she will cancel Fondomonte’s leases, saying she will do “everything in my power to protect Arizona’s water so we can continue to grow sustainably for generations to come.” This, of course, is a political response, not an ecological one. Will a politician, particularly in the very dry American West, ever question the possible incompatibility between limitless growth and healthy water?

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Weekly update: a new feature of related news and stories, often sent in by a reader:

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — The Negro River, the Amazon’s second largest tributary, on Monday reached its lowest level since official measurements began near Manaus 121 years ago. The record confirms that this part of the world´s largest rainforest is suffering its worst drought, just a little over two years after its most significant flooding.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 8

Eighth of a series

“Rain follows the plow.”

- Charles Dana Wilbur

Here is all you really need to know about the history of water in the western United States: This map, which appears on page 170 of Wallace Stegner’s 1954 book,

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, shows a line just east of the 100th meridian that divides America into a wet half and a dry half – a map that has remained essentially unchanged since white Americans began aggressively settling the west over 150 years ago.

Through a long history of damming, drilling, diversions, and water grabs, we have dried up the West’s rivers and extracted its groundwater at rates that are now – and have long been – unsustainable. Over the years, prophets have tried to tell us so – Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid(1977) and The Control of Nature (1989), and Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1993) – but we didn’t listen.

Before them, there was John Wesley Powell.

Despite having lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell made the first recorded expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers and through the Grand Canyon. Later, as director of the federal government’s U.S. Geological Survey and its Bureau of Ethnology, he argued that the West was far too dry for intensive development. That made him a lot of powerful enemies – from railroad moguls to homesteaders, from farmers to every real estate speculator in the land. “Fraud was never provable,” Stegner wrote of western land deals, “but it was estimated that 95% of the final title proofs were fraudulent, nonetheless.”

“It is good to be shifty in a new country,” said the fictional Captain Simon Suggs.

But Powell’s prescient words were drowned out (if you will pardon the expression) by Charles Dana Wilber’s crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.” Needless to say, Wilbur was a land speculator and booster of agricultural development in the West. His mantra, which maintained that agricultural production would actually lead to increased rainfall and greater prosperity, had a huge following in the late 19th century, not only in the West but also among the rich and powerful, and therefore, in the halls of Congress.

 “I tell you gentlemen,” Powell said to an irrigation conference in 1893, “you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” He quickly became a pariah.

“He told them,” wrote Stegner, “and they booed him.”

Forty years later, the Dust Bowl devastated land and ruined lives, primarily west of the 100th Meridian, just as Powell had warned them. The drought lasted for almost the entire 1930s. On April 2, 1935, desiccated western topsoil rose up in the wind and blew all the way to Washington, D.C., where the director of the Soil Erosion Service was testifying  before Congress in favor of a national soil conservation program. Powell had been dead for 33 years.

And so, in southeast Nevada, which gets 4.2 inches of rain a year, we built the sprawling city of Las Vegas, home to almost three million people and endless fountains – most famously, the “Fountains of Bellagio”, a 375,000 square-foot lake whose 1,214 “devices” keep 17,000 gallons of water in the air. In California, which is just now emerging (hopefully) from years of drought that threatened both water supplies and food production, we created “one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions” in the desert of the San Joaquin Valley . . . by extracting so much groundwater that the land itself is literally sinking. And today, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, California, and Idaho continue to extract more water each year than they replenish.

Average annual rainfall, 2000 – 2013. Compare with the  map at the top of the page.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 7

Seventh of a series

“[T]he West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”

- Marc Reisner

In the first season of the television series, “Yellowstone,” a California developer named Dan Jenkins reveals his plans to divert the Yellowstone River to provide water and power to the huge casino he intends to build in Paradise Valley. When the timid bankers voice skepticism, Jenkins replies, “On our land, it’s our river. This isn’t California, gentlemen. This is Montana. We can do whatever we want.”

Well, not quite. Jenkins’ dam was still on the drawing board when John Dutton dynamited both the valley and Jenkins’ plans, rerouting the river so that it now ran solely through the Dutton ranch. That took care of that problem.

A couple of articles have subsequently tried to spoil the fun. One noted that Jenkins seemed ignorant of Article IX Section 3.3 of Montana’s Constitution, which states: “All surface, underground, flood, and atmospheric waters within the boundaries of the state are the property of the state for the use of its people and are subject to appropriation for beneficial uses as provided by law.”  Montana allocates water rights through a system called “prior appropriation”, which basically means whoever gets there first gets the water (“first in time, first in right”). Because the Duttons came to the valley in 1883, “they didn’t need dynamite, they needed a decent water rights attorney. . . and a permit.” But that ain’t the way the Duttons do business.

Nor were the people of California – at least the old timers – the wimps whom Jenkins mocked. They were just more subtle.  At the beginning of the 20th century, when the power brokers in Los Angeles wanted water to build the city and enrich themselves, they stole it. All the way from the Owens Valley, 270 miles to the northeast, where they had surreptitiously bought up the land and built an aqueduct.

The original name of the Owens Valley was Payahǖǖnadǖ or “place of flowing water,” which is a bit ironic since it took Los Angeles only 13 years to empty the 100-square-mile lake completely, sending to the city four times as much water as it needed. Draining the lake put the local farmers out of business, and they did respond with dynamite – by trying to blow up the aqueduct on 17 separate occasions. Today, Los Angeles owns most of the land in the valley, and the empty lake’s dry bed has created serious air pollution issues for the inhabitants.

Several years ago, I went to the Owens Valley to spend a week without food and only a little water in the Inyo Mountains. Because the high Sierras on the west side of the valley suck up all the Pacific rains, it is the driest place I have ever been. Just to its east is Death Valley.

The story of the great water theft in the Owens Valley is told mythically in Roman Polanski’s film, “Chinatown,” and majestically in Marc Reisner’s book Cadillac Desert, while the Yellowstone story is told melodramatically in the eponymous television series. But the less electrifying historical and academic papers show that, while “water wars” did bring violence and fraud to the West, “armed water insurrections have been replaced by court fights and water rights sales.”

And that brings me to another truth the headlines often overlook: that rivers have at least as much ability to bring people together as to send them to the mattresses – and that the commons does not have to be the catastrophe that Garret Hardin makes it out to be.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 6

Sixth in a series

“Whisky is for drinkin’; water is for fightin’ over.”

- Mark Twain (reputedly)

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Who Owns Water?

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We will spend some time on this question in this series. Rivers and their waters have been the source of conflict throughout human history, and nations and states have devised all kinds of treaties, agreements, rights, and regulations to protect and allocate what they see as “their” waters. Too often, though, the matter comes down to one word: power.

Consider who owns these waters:

The Golan Heights

In 1967 and  again in 1973, Israel and various Arab States fought major wars over the Golan Heights. This was hardly new: Israelis and the people of Aram were fighting over Golan in the Old Testament.

Much is made of the Golan Heights’ strategic military value as the high ground in the region, but its even greater value lies in the fact that it feeds both the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee and is a major source of fresh water for Israel.

The Colorado River

The Colorado River begins in the Never Summer Mountains, flows southwest through Colorado and Utah, and enters Arizona, where it turns west through the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

There it turns south and flows along the Nevada and California border until it trickles into Mexico and ends its 1,450-mile journey in the Gulf of California. At least it used to. The river, which provides water to 40 million people and makes possible some of the most productive farmland in the world, rarely gets to the Gulf. The allocation of its water to seven US and two Mexican states involves a complicated set of calculations first laid out by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. There is no longer enough water to go around, and the Colorado has been called “a river in crisis” . . . if you can call something a crisis that we have seen coming for more than 60 years.

The Amazon

The Amazon is the world’s largest river, annually sending into the Atlantic Ocean about 20 percent of the world’s total freshwater discharges. Although two-thirds of the Amazon is in Brazil, the river begins in Peru and also flows through Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Its drainage basin is the size of Australia, and it is so critical to the planet’s climate as to be a global resource. But governmental, corporate, and private encouragement of agriculture, oil drilling, road development, population growth – all accomplished primarily through deforestation (and of course corruption) – are destroying the forest at exponential rates. Is it too late to slow or reverse the damage? Can the basin be protected? If so, how? If not, then what?

The Nile

“From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations,” writes Fred Pearce. “But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water.

Attribution: Sir Samuel Baker, 1875

“That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept. Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself — for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river — and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world — the wildlife-rich Sudd.” And to its upstream neighbors, Egypt has made it as clear as the headwaters of the Blue Nile that it will destroy any efforts to impede the river’s flow.

The Tigris and the Euphrates

“The massive Ilisu Dam under construction in Turkey,” said Ulrich Eichelmann of Riverwatch, ‘is an infrastructure project with a 1950s mindset: big, bigger, as big as possible.’. . .[E]xperts say the [dam’s] impacts will be felt hundreds of miles downstream across large parts of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, which includes Syria, Iraq, and Iran, exacerbating water shortages that will affect irrigation, biodiversity, fishing, drinking water, and transportation

‘But in a political context in which water is power, Turkey is not budging on its prerogative to dam ‘its rivers.’

“‘Turkey sees itself as completely sovereign in the management of its rivers and basically does whatever it wants, in terms of damming and discharging pollution,’ said Nicolas Bremer, author of a book on Turkey’s dams. ‘Turkey refuses to be bound by the international treaties and laws that exist.’” Paul Hockenos

New York City

The water that supplies the people of New York City with some of the world’s cleanest drinking water starts over 100 miles away in upstate streams, which then flow through tunnels into huge reservoirs on land the city acquired mostly between 1905 and 1967.

At the bottom of the reservoirs lie the remnants of 25 communities, which were condemned through the process of eminent domain and required the relocation of more than 5,000 people. Tensions between the upstate communities and the city have festered for years, primarily because New York grew to astonishing wealth and power despite a serious dearth of onsite water. Almost all the city’s water is delivered without the need for exorbitantly expensive filtration, which is a consequence of its unending efforts to protect the reservoirs from contamination and pollution. That has caused great conflict in the upstate watersheds, as New York City, perhaps the most urban and developed place on Earth, has for years used its economic power to preserve the rural nature of a poor region that is desperate for economic growth.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 5

Fifth in a series

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

- Pogo

A river is the ultimate commons. Its waters don’t belong to any one of us, but are held in common by all of us, for all of us. At least, that’s the theory. It has rarely been the reality. Moreover, throughout much of human history, “all of us” has meant, well, us humans. But we overlook, to our detriment, that our well-being depends on the health of literally trillions of other living organisms with whom we share the watershed.

Rivers are not simply pipes for delivering water from one place to another. They are complex and fragile ecosystems that provide a myriad of often-conflicting benefits to various claimants. Particularly over the past 60 years, scientific research has vastly expanded our understanding of rivers and their ecosystems – their hydrology and chemistry, their physical properties and biological communities. Perhaps the most profound result of this work has been to demonstrate empirically what people understood intuitively for millennia – that a stream is a dynamic system whose equilibrium depends on constant change, that it does not flow in a vacuum but is an integral part of the landscape it drains, that what happens throughout a river’s watershed determines the health of the stream, and that upstream activities determine downstream health. No part of the river’s ecosystem – not even a single organism – can be completely understood except in its relation to everything else.

Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which we depend – and our dependence on rivers is not going to change. We cannot stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms. It is both an environmental and an economic imperative to restore their place in the natural world so that they can both regenerate themselves and continue to provide their unique array of benefits and resources.

In place of the multi-faceted relationships people historically had with rivers, we have substituted a single determinant of their value: What can this river do for me? In our drive for economic growth, we have bent rivers to the human will. Across the globe there are now more than 50,000 large dams, which collectively have displaced 40 to 80 million people. From Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River to China’s Yangtze, we continue to impose ever-bigger engineering solutions on natural wonders we do not understand and have ceased to care much about. Nor are we safe from these solutions: In 1975 a dam in China collapsed and as many as 230,000 people died; and they will be accounting for the dead in Libya for a long time to come.

Rivers have provided us immeasurable benefits. But we are destroying them, and in doing so, we are imperiling our future. We need to step back from the brink and reconnect with our rivers. We need to understand them, not simply try to control them – to appreciate the whole of a river, not just those parts we find useful, to realize that a river is not merely a channel through which we can push water and waste, but a natural system of which we are a part. We need to awaken to the beauty of our rivers and to see clearly the forces that threaten them.