A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 3
Third in a series
“No man can step into the same river twice.”
- Heraclitus (6th century BCE)
Question: What is a river?
One simple definition I found is: “a wide, natural stream of fresh water that flows into an ocean or other large body of water and is usually fed by smaller streams, called tributaries, that enter it along its course.”
On a more ethereal level, Herman Hesse describes Siddhartha sitting by a stream and discovering “one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed, and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” Or, as Heraclitus put it more succinctly over 2,500 years ago, “No man can step into the same river twice.”
That a river flows is hardly breaking news. But it’s precisely what distinguishes streams and rivers from other bodies of water and what underlies the science, history, politics, economics, and aesthetics of rivers that this series will consider.
Let’s look first at the science.*
Question: Is fresh water a renewable resource?
No. At least not in the sense that water molecules reproduce themselves. Water does recycle itself, but the total amount of water has not changed since Earth began – and 97 percent of it is salt water. Of the remaining three percent, three-quarters is locked in glaciers, which climate change is melting at unprecedented rates, or is in deep aquifers or too polluted to drink. That leaves only 0.5 percent for all the needs that all living beings – not just human beings – have for fresh water. Increasingly, there is not enough to go around. There are too many of us. We use too much of it. And we pollute it.
More questions:
Is fresh water a commodity to be bought and sold . . . or is access to clean fresh water a basic human right?
Who owns water?
These are critical questions, and the answers to them are not clear, even though the health of all of us and the survival of many of us depend on getting them right.
Question: Are we doomed?
Much of the world is looking to technological solutions, such as desalination. Certainly, we need to employ all the innovative technology we can. But as Bern Sweeney, my former colleague and scientific mentor, told me many years ago, desalination is not so much the solution as it is a manifestation of the problem.
But the significant and measurable improvements to stream health that came in the wake of the 1972 Clean Water Act show that watershed restoration is possible as well as necessary. We have made good progress over five decades reducing “point-source” pollution, which means we can identify its origin and entry points into a stream. We have done less well with “non-point source” pollution, which is difficult to track as it travels across the land in the form of run-off.
Perhaps no place offers more hope than New York City. Despite its growing population, the city has cut its overall water consumption by about 30% over the last 25 years, and it has put in place a system for monitoring the water at its sources, which has so far enabled it to forgo a billion-plus-dollar filtration system downstream.
The lesson is that, while restoring the commons is expensive and time-consuming, it can be done. Not to do so is to condemn future generations to fresh water that is both more scarce and less clean.
*For much of the scientific ideas that will follow, I am indebted to a small scientific research and education laboratory in rural Pennsylvania and those who work there. I am not a scientist, but I spent many years working in various capacities at the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, which has become, since its inception in 1967, perhaps the country’s foremost institution for understanding streams, rivers, and their watersheds. Its scientists taught me what little science I now know. I take full responsibility for the ignorance that remains.