A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 27

27th of a series

NAWAPA . . . and other wild ideas

“NAWAPA . . . is the most grandiose water-engineering project ever conceived for North America. It's both a monument to the ingenuity of America and a monument to the folly of the 20th century.”

- Peter Gleick

Even if we can desalinate sea water in the quantities required to continue our profligate ways, how do we then get that water to the desert and other dry lands? Over the years there have been any number of plans to move vast quantities of fresh water from places where it is plentiful to places where it is scarce. Although they were not the first, the Romans were building wondrous aqueducts three centuries before Christ.

Pont du Gard Aqueduct in France, built in the 1st century AD (Robert Harding Picture Library) Licensed under the GFDL by the author; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

But nothing, perhaps, has ever compared to NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, an idea the US Army Corps of Engineers gave birth to in the 1950s. It would take water from rivers in Alaska and Canada, send it to the U.S. through the Rocky Mountain Trench and elsewhere, recharge our aquifers and rivers, and eventually arrive in Mexico. Initially, the idea met with enthusiastic support, particularly among western politicians, but its considerable financial, energy, and environmental costs eventually doomed the project, although they did not kill the idea. “The main drawbacks,” Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert “are that it would largely destroy what is left of the natural West and it might require taking Canada by force.” Ultimately, the project died, wrote historian William duBuys, “a victim of its own grandiosity.”

There have been a myriad of other schemes, from towing icebergs from Antarctica to sending water in submersible plastic sausages to San Diego to recharging the Ogallala Aquifer with water from the Great Lakes. The latest idea is to build a desalination plant on the shores of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez and pipe the newly fresh water 200 miles to Arizona. It “will seem crazy and ambitious until it’s complete,” a state official told The New York Times, “And that’s our history in Arizona.” While most of these plans were ballyhooed and then dismissed as too expensive, too energy intensive, too environmentally destructive, one method endured: “you can ship [water] out in vessels,” said Great Lakes advocate Dave Dempsey, “it just has to be in bottles.”

For me, the underlying issue is simple: is clean fresh water a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace, a product that can be shipped thousands of miles and sold for a profit? Or, since no one can live without it, is it a basic right, not just for humans but for all living beings? In either case, what is the obligation of those who have plenty of water to those have very little? Should Canada, the “Saudi Arabia of fresh water,” share its good fortune with a thirsty world? And who should pay? Senator Joe Mancin has discussed selling West Virginia’s water to parched western states. “I don’t think we’d be quite as expensive as oil,” he said, “but we’d get a pretty penny for it.”

And finally, what of the streams and rivers themselves, whose own wellbeing – and therefore ours – depends on maintaining the health of their ecosystems? Who speaks for them ultimately speaks for us.