A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Last of a series

Last of a series

“I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

- Langston Hughes

Quiz Answers

1.     Thames: Looking across Westminster Bridge to Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster, which has been the site of the Houses of Parliament since the 13th century.

2.     Ganges: “Bathing in the Ganges is not only a sacred tradition during Kumbh Mela, but also a daily ritual for about 2 million people. The Ganges River is considered the purest and holiest water in the world. Many believe that a quick dip in its waters can cure any ailment.” On the other hand, “swimming in the Ganges River can be dangerous for several reasons: The Ganges is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. It carries a high level of untreated sewage, industrial waste, and agricultural runoff.”

3.     Mississippi: At 630 feet high, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is the tallest monument in the United States. Although it looks like one of the rare McDonald‘s single arches, it was designed to symbolize the opening of the West. There are 32 states and two Canadian provinces in the Mississippi’s drainage basin.

4.     Amazon: The Meeting of Waters (Encontro das Águas) is the confluence between the dark Rio Negro and the sandy-colored Amazon at Manaus, Brazil, where the two rivers run side by side for the next six kilometers.

5.     Saint Lawrence: The Chateau Frontenac hotel overlooks the Saint Lawrence in Quebec City. Samuel de Champlain founded the city in 1608, giving a French twist to its Algonquin name.

6.     Loire: From its construction in 1535, the Chateau do Chenonceau in the valley of the Loire River has had a colorful history, Queen Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II, is said to have “managed France from her study, the Green Cabinet.”

7.     Euphrates: “Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, so that the way of the kings from the east might be prepared.” From the Book of Revelation, this is said to be one of the events that foretells the Second Coming.

8.     Rio Grande: Two thoughts: (1) the water in this river is “over-appropriated,” which is a big word for having more claims on the water than there is water in the river; and (2) this river may decide the 2024 presidential election.

9.     Mekong: (1) The world’s largest inland fishery, the Mekong provides 25% of the global freshwater catch and food for tens of millions of people; and (2) it still contains massive amounts of undetonated ordnance from barges that were sunk during the era of the Khmer Rouge and U.S. carpet bombing during the Vietnam War.

10.  Hudson: As an island, Manhattan is by definition surrounded by water. Of its three rivers, only one (the Hudson to the west) is actually a river. The East River is a saltwater tidal estuary, while the Harlem River to the north is a tidal strait. The Hudson River’s source is the wonderfully named “Lake Tear in the Clouds.”

11.  Danube: Listen here to the beautiful Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss II.

12.  Schuylkill: This is the famous “Boathouse Row,” a National Historic Landmark, whose 15 boathouses are the hub of U.S. rowing. Jack Kelly, father of Princess Grace who rowed out of the Vesper Boat Club, was the first oarsman to win three Olympic gold medals. A self-made millionaire in the bricklaying business, Kelly’s application to row in the Diamond Challenge Sculls at the Henley Royal Regatta was rejected because he had once worked as a “labourer.” His son, Jack, Jr., won the Challenge in 1947.

13.  Yangtze: The Yangtze is the longest river in the world whose flow is contained within a single country. Just below the river’s Three Gorges is the Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world.

14.  Nile: Either the longest or the second-longest river in the world (the Amazon is its competitor), the Nile’s two major tributaries, the Blue Nile and White Nile, meet at Khartoum, from which the river flows north until it reaches the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandria.

15.  Colorado: America’s most endangered river, the Colorado provides water to 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico. It has not regularly reached the Gulf of California since 1960.

16.  Columbia: “The Columbia River Gorge is a spectacular river canyon, 80 miles long and up to 4,000 feet deep, that meanders past cliffs, spires, and ridges set against nearby peaks of the Cascade Mountain Range.” In 1986 it became the second National Scenic Area in the U.S.

17.  Zambezi: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” asked Henry M. Stanley in 1871, after tracking down the Scottish physician, clergyman, and explorer who had been missing in Africa for over four years. David Livingstone was the first European to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders"), the world's largest sheet of falling water, which he more prosaically renamed Victoria Falls in honor of his queen. He eventually mapped most of the Zambezi in the belief that abolishing the African slave trade depended on the river’s development as a Christian commercial highway into the interior of the continent.

18.  Seine: In 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake and her ashes thrown into the Seine. In 1803 Robert Fulton first successfully tested his steamboat offshore from the Tuileries Garden. On Feb. 14, 1887, Le Temps published this protest: “We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection ... of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.”

19.  Volga: Mother Volga, as it is called in Russian folklore, is the longest river in Europe. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1926 film, The Volga Boatmen, Feodor, the heroic boatman was played by William Boyd, who became better known as Hopalong Cassidy in the long-running film, radio, and television series. The painting “Barge Haulers on the Volga,” portrays actual boatmen the artist. Ilya Repin, saw on his travels through Russia.

20.  Susquehanna: On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, PA, was site of the worst nuclear power plant accident in American history.

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Winners

Two perfect scores, Peter Willad and Harry Hull, were recorded on the rivers quiz. The median score was 15 correct, and the most missed rivers were the Amazon, the Yangtze, and the Volga. Thank you for playing.

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This concludes the series on rivers and water. Your feedback, suggestions, and comments immeasurably enriched this series. Thank you for staying the course. I am going to take some time off to attend to other things and to think about the future of the blog. I have enjoyed writing the two recent series, and I’m thinking of future ones on “Immigration” and “Individualism and Community.” I’m also considering other approaches. As always, I am grateful for your thoughts.

Jamie

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 44

44th of a series

“From history’s dawn to this morning’s, wells and streams, rivers and lakes, have meant life. Every great civilization has grown up around water. From the Ganges to the Mississippi, the Amazon to the Zaire, the history of rivers is the history of us. And there is no more unifying or naturally democratic force. Creeks formed in the highlands of every continent gather strength in their journeys to the sea. And as they flow, channeled by swerve of shore and bend of bay, they cleanse, nourish, and refresh all people – in metropolis and village, from the millionaire to the child who knows no other cup but the human hand. Today, this irreplaceable resource is in irrefutable danger. For too many, the liquid we cannot live without bears within it the cause of illness, even death. It doesn’t have to be.”

- U. S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Name that River

A Quiz: Many rivers are recognizable to us, either because of some familiar natural feature or, more likely, as a consequence of human intervention. Here are images of 20 well-known rivers, from the Amazon to the Zambezi, and a corresponding list of names. After all these weeks, see how many rivers you can identify. Answers and winners will be announced on Thursday.

To take the quiz, please visit this link.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 43

43rd of a series

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

- Anonymous

And so, all these weeks later, we have come full circle, back to the idea that a river is the ultimate commons – owned by no one and used by everyone – with the unavoidable result being “ruin to all.” This, at least, is the message of Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons.”

Published 56 years ago, the essay has had an enormous influence on public thinking and policy making, ranging from resource allocation to social justice, from immigration to environmental protection to water.

Employing the image of a village’s communal grazing land in medieval England, Hardin’s tragedy is simply summarized:

1. The pasture is open to all.

2. It is to each herdsman’s benefit to graze as many cows as possible.

3. Therefore, the pasture must collapse from overgrazing.

We see examples of this everywhere, and nowhere more than in our streams and rivers, as we remove their water in unsustainable quantities and pollute much of what’s left. We know we can’t keep doing this forever, and yet, Hardin writes, we cannot do otherwise because “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited.” As we consider the future of water – or climate change or politics or war – how often do we feel powerless in the face of forces we can’t control?

But think for a moment. How can it possibly be in our self-interest to destroy the very thing on which our well-being depends? What is the “system” that locks us into inevitable ruin? Why do we have to advance helplessly toward our own destruction?

What if Hardin was wrong?

When historian Susan Jane Buck Cox looked at the history of medieval England, the commons she saw looked nothing like Hardin’s image. It actually worked well. The herdsmen seem to have figured out what would happen if they let everyone do what they wanted – and so, unencumbered by Hardin’s theory, they joined together to regulate their commons. “Perhaps what existed in fact,” Cox writes, “was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph.”

Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying how people around the world manage their communal and natural resources. From Asian forests to Maine “lobster gangs,” she recorded data and talked to participants. What she discovered was an almost endless variety of ways communities work together to ensure the long-term sustainability of their commons. Her method of letting the theory emerge from the facts, rather than the other way round, led to Ostrom’s law: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can also work in theory.” In 2009 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In the end, Hardin’s pasture is not a commons at all; it’s only some grass waiting to be exploited. Nor are his herdsmen members of a community; they’re proto capitalists trying to stick it to their neighbors. In the short run, this may be good for a few of them; it’s hard to see how it’s good for anyone in the long run. Far from the tragedy of the commons, Hardin has depicted the tragedy of unfettered capitalism, where the only motivation is short-term self-interest and the only value is economic. For too long that is how we have treated our rivers and their water. We need to stop.

We live in a nation where private property is enshrined in our Constitution and in our culture. It has no place in our commons. It's time to restate the argument:

1. The commons is open to all.

2. It is in everyone’s interest to protect it.

3. Therefore, ruin is not inevitable.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 42

42nd of a series

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

- Mark Twain

In recent years, scientists have developed the knowledge and tools to restore our waterways to more natural conditions. It will not be cheap. Who should pay?

Here are three ways of thinking about it.

1. Justice. There is nothing remotely equal about our access to the nations’ streams and rivers. A few large users extract most of the water and discharge most of the waste – and they spend billions on lobbyists and politicians for the privilege. We need to stop catering to the economic and political power of those who do the most harm and listen more to the voices of those who leave the smallest footprints and – not coincidentally – have the least power. It seems so simple: the largest users should pay the largest fees and the biggest polluters should pay the biggest fines. We need to penalize bad practices, but, just as importantly, we need to reward innovative methods and technologies that improve the health our rivers.

   We can do it. Shortly after 9/11, Kenneth Fineburg devised a method for distributing over $7 billion to the Victims Compensation Fund, and he has arbitrated other large and complicated cases. In “The Bargaining Problem,” a short essay published in 1950, a Princeton graduate student named John Nash, of “A Beautiful Mind” fame, described a process in which participants are able to reach an agreement on allocating costs in complex situations, a concept for which he would win the Nobel Prize in economics and one which is widely applied today.

2. Federal Support. Rivers are a critical part of our national infrastructure. Because they do not recognize state – or any other political – boundaries, the federal government has the legal and ethical responsibility to protect them in perpetuity and to ensure that everyone pays their fair share. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, writes legal scholar Richard Frank, “certain natural resources are held by the government in a special status – in ‘trust’ – for current and future generations . . . and government officials have an affirmative, ongoing duty to safeguard the long-term preservation of those resources for the benefit of the general public.” It’s an investment in future generation, one we have deferred for far too long. And it’s hardly a new role for the federal government, which has been effectively intervening to protect natural resources for all Americans at least since Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” in the early 20th century.

3. Local Initiatives. In the end, the most effective stewards of our water are ordinary citizens, often volunteers, working in their own watersheds. Right now, local groups across the country have removed hundreds of dams, restored thousands of miles of stream habitat, and planted millions of trees, in a web of efforts that resonate far beyond their own watersheds. Elinor Ostrom challenged the conventional view that people inevitably pursue their own self-interest at the expense of the common good. She discovered several instances of people working together to establish rules to protect both the economic and ecological sustainability of the commons – not out of altruism but out of mutual self-interest. For those insights, she became, in 2009, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

A river is not simply a collection of goods and services to be exploited by humans; it’s an ecosystem of which humans are a part. But there is also something deeper at work. There are no wildflowers in Garrett Hardin’s infamous pasture, and by treating the commons only as a resource to be exploited, we confine its benefits to their utilitarian value. But what of other values? What of beauty? A sense of peace? An awakening of wonder? What of all the people who do little damage to a river’s health and for whom the river’s importance cannot be measured in economic terms? What of the wildlife that also depend on the river? What of the river itself?

We don’t own the commons. We are only the stewards. The health of our rivers – and of ourselves – requires the reawakening of public stewardship.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 41

41st of a series

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

- Norman Maclean

Meredith Sadler designed and drafted the figure.

This image, which appeared in the second post of this series, was originally published in Waterkeeper magazine. It was part of an article by Bern Sweeney and me, much of which I will reproduce in this and the next post. In it, we tried to come up with a formula for allocating a river’s goods and services equitably and sustainably among its diverse users. By equitably, we mean that one person’s use of the river does not impair it for the use of others. By sustainably, we mean that we leave to future generations a river that is in the same or better condition than the one we inherited. 

Our premise is that, while almost everybody wants clean water, healthy wetlands, and unpolluted rivers, we depend on economies that have long despoiled all three. To stop, or even slow, the decline is really hard, but it pales in comparison to restoring a river to its more pristine past. At the core of the matter are its many human constituents, who resist cleaning up the messes they and their predecessors have made. For them, the commons is not a public trust. It is a public trough.

The result? Almost half of America’s streams and rivers are in poor condition, particularly the smaller watersheds that provide over 70 percent of the nation’s water. The cause, of course, is us. For centuries people have dammed and removed more water than our rivers can replenish and disposed of more waste, toxins, and detritus than they can process. No worries, we said, for everything goes downstream – until we discovered that everyone also lives downstream.

In Meredith Sadler’s image, you can see our efforts to identify a river’s primary consumers and polluters. It should not be surprising that the biggest consumers and polluters are also the most powerful players in the watershed. Way down at the bottom of the graphic are the passive users, who come to a river simply to enjoy its beauty and the peace it offers.

The significant improvements to stream health that came in the wake of the 1972 Clean Water Act confirm that, while watershed restoration is expensive and time-consuming, it can be done. The time has come to begin paying down the staggering debt we are leaving our children and our children’s children. To do that, we need a plan that is fair, sustainable, and enforceable, one that is grounded in science and economics, honors a river’s intangible qualities, and seeks to build partnerships among all the interests in the watershed.

The first step is for scientists to determine the scope of the problem, calculate the impacts of the various uses on a river’s ecosystem, and design a plan to return the nation’s watersheds to a healthy state. These days scientists can assess the damage to a watershed over time, isolate many of its causes, and suggest better practices going forward. The accelerating evolution of technology, which in the past was too often used to enable more efficient (and destructive) ways to extract and pollute water, has recently made possible cleaner technologies and innovative practices that cause less environmental damage, even as they improve the user’s bottom line. 

The second step is for economists to determine the total costs, which, needless to say, will be a very large number. But the costs of doing nothing are greater. It’s time to move beyond making minor changes to our lifestyles, hoping for a technological miracle, and kicking the can downstream. Indeed, if users had historically paid the real costs of using water, it would now be clean. 

The third step is to devise a system for fairly allocating those costs – with the ultimate goal being to ensure the health of our rivers and watersheds and to protect the communities and economies that depend on them.

Next post we’ll see if that is even possible.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 40

40th of a series

“The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes. . . .”

- William O. Douglas, Sierra Club v Morton (1972)

In 1972 Christopher Stone, a little-known faculty member at USC Law School, published an article titled “Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Stone’s thesis was that non-human natural things, such as trees and rivers, suffered real harm as a result of human activities but had no legal remedy to protect themselves. They did not, in the legal terminology, have standing – the ability to show that they have been directly or indirectly harmed by an action. It’s hard to argue that they haven’t been harmed, but lawsuits had never before taken their rights into account. Only an aggrieved human could sue.

When I first read this article decades ago, it seemed, well, far-fetched. Stone himself called it “unthinkable.” But he traced over time the extension of rights from encompassing only self and extended family to all humankind; and he described the law gradually expanding to include children, women, the enslaved. “The fact is,” he wrote, “that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of "us" – those who are holding rights at the time.”

Finally, he demonstrated that inanimate things – trusts, municipalities, nation-states, corporations – had been defined under the law as persons for a long time – long before the Supreme Court said so in 2020 in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.

In 1972, the idea that natural objects could have legal standing was not as far off the rails as it seemed. For in that year, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Sierra Club v Morton that is now best remembered for Justice Douglas’s powerful dissent. Called “the most liberal justice ever,” Douglas wrote widely about the wilderness, and it’s worth quoting from his dissent, in which he cited Stone’s article:

“The critical question of ‘standing’ would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. . . .The ordinary corporation is a ‘person’ for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”

In the ensuing 52 years, the idea of “rights of nature” has gone from the fringe to the forefront. Led by Pennsylvania attorney Thomas Linzey, many municipalities have drafted laws, the first being Pittsburgh in 2010; and several countries, starting with Ecuador in 2008, have written the rights of nature into their national constitutions, including New Zealand, India, and Mexico.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 39

39th of a series

“Most places don’t ever see people like this. Alaska gets a lot of them, I think. And we in the river towns get them, too.”

- McCullum (in Riverman: An American Odyssey)

Perhaps the two most memorable characters (other than Huck and Jim) – and certainly the most grotesque – in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are the Duke and the Dauphin, two grifters who travel up and down the Mississippi swindling the residents of the small river towns, often leaving one step ahead of the sheriff or tarred and feathered on a rail. Both Ernest Hemingway and H.L. Mencken considered Twain’s novel a tour de force of American letters. “All modern American literature,” wrote Hemingway, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” It is, said Mencken, “one of the great masterpieces of the world.

It's also one of the most consistently banned. A month after its publication in February 1885 librarians in Concord, Mass., deemed it “trash . . . suitable only for the slums.” It has been condemned ever since, from the left as racist, from the right for its intimate portrait of a while boy and a black slave, and from all sides for its language.

It is also the story of a river and the people who live on its banks – reminiscent, really, of John Kirkpatrick’s reflection in Southeast Asia that “all aspects of life revolve around the Mekong.”

So too do all kinds of people wash up in river towns.

Dick Conant spent more than 20 years paddling alone in his overstuffed red canoe, covering thousands of miles of America’s rivers. An eccentric, a loner, a pack rat, Conant affected the lives of thousands of people in river towns, large and small. He was open to everyone and to everything, awed equally by the wonders of nature and those of his fellow man. He had no agenda. He just paddled and stopped and talked. For a loner, he was the most outgoing man you will ever meet. He remembered, it seems, everyone he met, and he chronicled them in his copious journals. And everyone – everyone – remembered him.

He met a New Yorker writer named Ben McGrath in a chance encounter in a small town on the Hudson River, and when Conant’s red canoe was discovered upended in North Carolina and its occupant missing, McGrath set out to recapture Conant’s life, by tracing his journeys and contacting as many as possible of the people whose paths he had crossed and whose lives he had affected.

The result is Riverman: an American Odyssey, a book that offers us an America quite different from Twain’s or Mencken’s. In town after small town we encounter, not Twain’s swindlers nor Mencken’s “booboisie,” but people as open, generous, and curious as Conant himself. And while they do not travel America’s byways in a canoe, each is an individual and, yes, an eccentric in his or her own way. It’s an America, much of it downstream and backwater, that we don’t hear much about these days, a country where people welcome strangers and celebrate differences.

I like to think of rivers as making those places possible, of rivers as connectors not dividers, of rivers as waterways that transport people and goods and ideas to distant shores, of rivers as taking us on journeys, not into the heart of darkness, but into the light.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 38

38th of a Series

“Water is the true wealth in a dry land . . . .[I]f you control the water, you control the land. . . .”

- Wallace Stegner

Property rights and the public interest

In 2022, in the midst of California’s three-year drought, the Merced River went dry. The river, which arises in Yosemite National Park and flows through the Central Valley, is essential to the valley’s farmers who produce over half the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

Subsequent reporting by The New York Times focused my attention on three astonishing facts: (1) the farmers who depend on the river’s water were the very people who drained it; (2) the river had been dry for four months before the state’s water regulators learned about it; (3) nobody broke any laws.

The farmers were exercising their legal rights, some of which go back more than a century, to their shares of the water. Consequently, during the drought the total number of allocated shares remained unchanged; but the total amount of water did not, and so the river went dry.

In the United States, nobody owns the water in rivers, streams, and lakes. These “surface waters,” belong to the people collectively.* But individual landowners and corporations can acquire the right to “manage, divert, use, or sell the water.” I don’t know about you, but the right to sell something you don’t own seems a bit sketchy to me. The only comparable thing that comes to my mind is the stock market, where you can buy and sell shares and options you don’t own. But on Wall Street, they are not considered a public good. Somebody owns them. Otherwise, it’s called a Ponzi scheme.

As with the stock market, beliefs about natural resources are often as important as the underlying fundamentals. So as long as people believe there is plenty of water, few will worry too much about its allocation. But beware when the rains stop, and the people keep coming, and the demand for water exceeds its supply. 

In this country, there are basically two systems for allocating surface waters:

1. Riparian rights, under which landowners abutting a stream, river, or lake have the right to take its water for their own use.

2. Prior appropriation, under which the first to use and claim the water establishes a right in perpetuity (“first in time, first in right”).

Generally, the East, where water has historically been plentiful, operates under the riparian-rights doctrine, while in the drier West, prior appropriation dominates. No permit is required for the former, and the landowner’s rights are not contingent on “using” the water. Under the rules of prior appropriation, however, permits are generally required, and permit holders can lose their right if they fail to “use” the water. “The only requirement for holding on to this privileged status [is] to keep putting the water to work. In short, use it or lose it.”

And that’s exactly what happened to the Merced River.

*Unlike surface water, individual landowners, corporations, or the public at large can own groundwater, including that which has been stored for millennia in deep aquifers, although state laws generally determine its allocation. Needless to say, the matter of water rights is a tricky business.

For a succinct summary of the issue, see “Whose Water Is It Anyway? Comparing the Water Rights Frameworks of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida,” by M. D. Smolen, Aaron Mittelstet, and Bekki Harjo.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 37

37th of a series

Five Years Later: Three Weeks That Changed Their Lives

“He recognized something essential about moving water, which is not merely a conveyance but an equalizer – an urbanizing force on the prairie and a rural belt in the city.”

- Ben McGrath, Riverman: An American Odyssey

On July 7th, 2007, 12 high-school students set off from Belleayre Ski Resort in the Catskill Mountains on the journey of a lifetime. Three weeks later, exhausted, exhilarated, and malodorous, they walked into New York City’s Central Park to the applause of families, city officials, and startled onlookers.

They had hiked and paddled over 200 miles, through wooded wilderness, open water, and paved suburb, following the route of the city’s water from its sources in the Catskill Mountains to the reservoir in the center of Manhattan, from Mountaintop to Tap.

Five years later, we set out to find them and to ask them what impact the trek had had on their lives.

TREKKERS

Asha Armstrong, New York Harbor School

Asha in 2007

I am currently a senior enrolled in the semester-by-the-sea program at Stony Brook Southampton. I am also an environmental studies major with a marine science minor. I am engulfed in trek memories. The trek perked my interest in environmental studies. Before the trek, my goal in life was to become an oceanographer; I have changed my focus to environmental science with a focus on marine science. In addition, I would like to pursue a career in environmental education, primarily with youth, instead of oceanography.

Leydi Basilio, New York Harbor School

Leydi in 2007

I recently graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a bachelor’s in communications. The trek changed my perspective about NYC water completely. So many families lost everything for us to have water, and I think that, out of respect, the least we can do is conserve that precious resource before it disappears. I am thinking about going into education now, and for life after City Year, I will be applying to NYC Teaching Fellows and Teach for America.

Natalie Bloomfield, New York Harbor School

Natalie in 2007

I am currently a junior at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. My most memorable moment on the trek was the view of the valley from the top of Slide Mountain. It was breathtaking. I will also never forget Margaret Smith Dolan and the horrors she lived through as a child, as her home and those of other members of the Neversink Valley were taken by eminent domain to create a reservoir to supply NYC with clean drinking water. After five years, I still remember the early morning hikes and Asha’s huge heart! Every morning she started us off with a song to lift our spirits. Before this trek, I never once questioned where the water I drink came from; but after learning what so many people gave up in order for New Yorkers to have clean drinking water, I am so conscious of preserving water.

Robert Loibl, Sidney High School

Rob in 2007

Sometimes I catch myself thinking back and wondering, “Did I really do all that?” It’s just surreal. The trip definitely helped shape my opinions about the connection between both major parts of New York state. It also solidified my views on the environment and its conservation. One recommendation I would give to anyone reading this is to go out and experience where you live. I lived in upstate New York for most of my life, but I didn’t really experience it until I went to the Catskills to hike the mountains and to the Hudson to row down the river. . . .

Marissa Morton, Sidney High School

Marissa in 2007

My favorite memory was when we sat in the middle of the forest by ourselves, with no clocks or cell phones, and were asked to reflect on how we felt. I remember feeling so relaxed, and I knew right then that I was where I wanted to be. The thing that stands out the most, after five years, is the friendship I built with Leydi. It is amazing that two people who grew up in completely opposite environments can have so much in common. I will always carry a special bond with my fellow trekkers. The trek honestly changed my life. I still tell stories about when I got home and went to the doctor, both my feet were broken from the impact of walking on pavement and about how we got stuck in the pouring rain rowing down the Hudson, and I brag about how we were able to walk down into the old aqueducts.

Sarah Pate, Sidney High School

Sarah in 2007

I am currently studying psychology and neuroscience at SUNY Albany, working on my undergraduate thesis in psychology to graduate with honors. Quiet times hiking or resting at night caused me to notice the little things — to notice what the world has besides shopping malls and highways paved through the forests.

Sarah Place, Sidney High School

Sarah in 2007

I am currently living in New Jersey and am almost finished with my B.S. in psychology. I remember most vividly hiking through the mountains in both cold misty rain and dreaded heat, having our tent flooded by a passing rainstorm while we slept, sailing down the Hudson feeling so incredible and free, staying the night by a shipyard and listening to the students at West Point chant from the other side of the river, making the most ridiculous concoctions for dinner and actually liking it, walking down abandoned train tracks, singing folk songs with Molly Mason and Jay Ungar, staying in the basement of a giant old house in the Bronx and swearing it was haunted, and finally arriving in Central Park where all our families and friends were waiting to see us. I can say with confidence that the trek changed my life. It taught me so much — from perseverance to teamwork to not taking myself too seriously. Now I have more courage to challenge myself and my limits, and if I ever have doubt, I many times find myself saying in my mind, “Hey, I climbed three mountains and rowed 40 miles; I can do this.”

Jeriel Stafford, New York Harbor School

Jeriel in 2007

Right now, I am in my senior year of college, pursuing a double major in applied math and statistics and economics. What stands out to me the most was that I got to experience a whole different world from what I was used to. Coming from the island of Grenada to living in the city of New York to living in the woods, all are different worlds, and I got to experience them all.

Trek Partners and Organizers: Stroud Water Research Center; New York Harbor School; Catskill Center for Conservation and Development; Riverkeeper; Catskill Mountainkeeper; New York City Department of Environmental Protection; New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 36

36th of a series

“We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.”

- Hernan Cortes (1485–1547)

The bus ride from Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incan empire, to Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon rain forest, takes over 10 hours, although the distance is not even 300 miles, and you can fly in under an hour. Such is the precipitous majesty of the Andes, where travel can feel like falling off a cliff and landing in a different ecosphere. Set among the peaks of the Vicabamba mountains, Cusco is 11,152 feet above sea level. Puerto Maldonado lies at the confluence of the wonderfully named Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers, near the western edge of the 2.7-million square-mile Amazon basin. Its elevation is 600 feet. Its rivers flow northeast for 2,700 miles, part of the Amazon River’s long journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Averaging nearly seven feet of rain a year, Puerto Maldonado is as hot and humid a place as I have ever been.

In the markets, the fish have an incandescent red color – not the vibrant, festive colors of the flowers and birds of the rainforest, the macaws and toucans, orchids and passion fruit flowers –  but the sickening color of stunted development and death. For this red is the sign of mercury in the food chain, the byproduct of thousands of gold mining operations in the rainforest and along the rivers’ banks.

When I was there, about 15 years ago, most travel occurred by boat, and you could hear the discordant sound of heavy machinery long before you rounded a bend in the river and came upon a group of people, often a family with the children waist deep in the water, as the machine sifted dirt in search of gold. Mercury is used to adhere to the tiny gold pieces, which are extracted by vaporizing the mercury, which then ends up in the water and soil, absorbed by the insects, the fish, and the workers’ lungs.

I have long thought that the most diabolical fate to come out of the Industrial Revolution was that of a chimney sweep in an English city. Boys (and some girls) were taken from that country’s plentiful poorhouses at the age of six or younger, and shoved up chimneys into which only they were small enough to fit.

“The fate of these people seems singularly hard,” wrote Percival Pott in Chirurgical Observations (1775). “In their early infancy, they are most frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger; they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies,  where they are bruised, burned, and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become peculiarly liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease”, namely cancer of the scrotum and testicles, from which they die. Thomas Hobbes did not need to look to a more primitive age to see human life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

What I witnessed on the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers was a world away from England’s dark, satanic mills. Here, 30-50,000 miners work in one of the planet’s most biodiverse areas, amid the breathtaking grandeur and vibrancy of nature. And yet their often illegal operations are destroying millions of acres of rainforest, polluting the vast Amazon river system, and poisoning the people too poor and vulnerable to escape.

Maybe the next time we’re tempted to buy gold, we should think of those children in the river and remember the words of Martin Luther (1483-1546), that “every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 35

35th 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

The Mekong: Letter from an Old Friend

Jamie,

Sara and I just returned from a three week trip to Vietnam (the area around Saigon – which they still call it) and Cambodia. 

It included a boat cruise on the Mekong River from Vietnam up to Siem Reap in Cambodia, with numerous stops along the way to see and experience what life along the river looks and feels like.

As we made the trip, your words about how rivers define life along their banks came alive. It was truly fascinating to see, and the experience was just so different from that of the major rivers –  Susquehanna, Hudson, Delaware, etc. – that I know. 

All aspects of life revolve around the Mekong. I don’t say that lightly. Folks eat the fish and vegetation, irrigate their fields, swim to get away from the heat, gather socially, drink the water, wash their scooters, clean their clothes, use it as a highway, live on and next to it, and more.  It was almost totally true in the rural areas and remains true for many, even in places like Phnom Penh.

Photo by John Kirkpatrick

Despite its importance to daily life, the river clearly has a growing plastic pollution issue and a basic pollution problem (many people put allium salt in a container of water to get rid of the silt and then boil the water so they can drink it). Keeping the river clean is clearly not a priority for the governments of either Vietnam or Cambodia. In fact, in large parts of rural Cambodia there is no recycling or trash removal, so roadways and vacant land can be full of litter. 

It was a fascinating trip, and the river captured my almost constant attention. It was stunning to see, given how important the Mekong is to the lifeblood of the people and how taken for granted it is by seemingly everyone. 

A long way of saying again, your words came alive on this trip.

---

Editor’s note: The 3,050-mile Mekong has been called “the world’s most important river.” Arising in the Tibetan highlands, it runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before flowing into the South China Sea. It is second only to the Amazon in its biodiversity, and hundreds of millions of people depend on it for their survival, particularly on its fish. The Mekong produces one-fifth of the world’s annual freshwater catch and provides the entire protein consumption for 60 percent of the people of Laos and Cambodia.

Reinforcing John Kirkpatrick’s observations, Stefan Lovgren writes in Yale Environment 360, the Mekong is a “troubled” river. It “may look healthy on the surface but has grown increasingly sick from a wide range of problems, including dam building, overfishing, deforestation, plastic pollution, and the insidious impacts of a changing climate.”

The primary culprit, at least for the moment, is dams, primarily hydroelectric dams, with 13 on the Mekong’s main stem, 160 more on its tributaries, and hundreds more being planned. China, the country farthest upstream, has long been the worst offender, and its complete lack of concern over the impacts of its dams on the five downstream countries seems to have caught on in the rest of the neighborhood, where dam building is surging.

Dams on the main stem of the Mekong River, 2020

Still, “the Mekong is not dead,” says Sudeep Chandra, director of the University of Nevada’s Global Water Center. “We’ve seen huge environmental pressures causing the Mekong to dry up and fisheries to almost collapse. And yet we also see the incredible resilience of this river in the face of those threats.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 34

34th of a series

“I must compliment you on this series as the topic is of great interest and I am learning stuff as I read. Who knew we were selling our water to foreign governments? I also believe the Hudson is now a great deal cleaner than it was twenty years ago, although my friend who still swims in races under the George Washington bridge says it is not quite pristine yet!”

The Clean Water Act became law on Oct. 18th, 1972. Its impact has been extraordinary:

“Over the past half century, the Clean Water Act has brought our waters back to life – turning rivers and lakes from dumping grounds into productive, healthy waterways again,” wrote the National Wildlife Federation in a recent review of the EPA report, ‘Five Decades of Clean Water.’ “It keeps 700 billion pounds of pollutants out of our waters annually, has slowed the rate of wetland loss, and doubled the number of waters that are safe for fishing and swimming. Levels of metals like lead in our rivers have declined dramatically. Ultimately, the cost to clean our drinking water is lower because the entire system is healthier.”

In a political environment that now seems so long ago, the bill passed unanimously in the Senate and by a vote of 346-11 in the House. Richard Nixon, who gets so much posthumous credit for being an environmental visionary, promptly vetoed it. But later that same day, the Senate overrode his veto, 55-12. When the next day the House followed suit, 247-23, the bill became law.

So what’s the problem? Let me paint with a broad brush:

• The act regulated so-called “point-source” pollutants. These come from an identifiable source, mostly some kind of a pipe. That alone made a huge difference because industries and municipalities had long been discharging their sewage directly into our waterways. However, “non-point-source” pollutants, which materialize primarily as run-off across the land, are much harder to isolate and regulate. Agriculture, which was largely exempted from the original act, is the primary source of such pollution.

• What’s a river anyway? While the Hudsons, the Colorados, and the Mississippis get all the headlines, it’s the millions of small streams, many of them nameless and some even intermittent, that do most of the work, carrying the water into ever larger streams until they get to a big river and head for the ocean. More than 70 percent of our water is in those small streams, which remain largely unregulated.

• We have expanded our definition of pollution to include phosphorus and nitrogen, which cause nutrient overload that can quickly kill stream life. Agriculture annually discharges millions of tons of nutrients into streams in the form of runoff. This wasn’t contemplated in the original act.

• A lot of powerful interests have always loathed the Clean Water Act: business and industry; agriculture; developers; property-rights advocates, opponents of government regulation, and the list goes on. These groups use their money to buy a lot of things, including politicians.

• The Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of “the waters of the United States” several times, most recently last year in Sackett v EPA, and the current Republican party actively seeks to roll the regulations back.

In summary, the Clean Water Act clearly demonstrated that it’s possible to clean up our streams and rivers, that the benefits of doing so are universal, and that it pays enormous economic as well as environmental dividends.

We should be trying to strengthen the Act, not undo it.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 33

33rd of a series

Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

- James Carville

Homo economicus: is a hypothetical person who “behaves in exact accordance with their rational self-interest [by seeking] to maximize utility as a consumer and economic profit as a producer.” The concept, which dates back to John Stuart Mill and the Utilitarian school of philosophy in the 19th century, is the foundation of modern economic theory. In this view, humans are ascendant, economics holds the key to happiness, and nature is a treasure chest to be exploited by humans, for humans. It’s what drove the Industrial Revolution and what continues to drive both modern capitalism and modern politics.

But even if you measure the value of the earth’s natural resources solely in economic terms, shouldn’t you at least look at the whole picture? Yet how often have you seen a corporate balance sheet that accounts for the true worth of those resources – of the benefits they provide and of the costs our activities impose on the ecosystem? “That’s a staggering omission,” write Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken in A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. “The economy, after all, is embedded in the environment.”

How staggering? In their 1997 article, “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital,” Robert Costanza and his colleagues wrote, “The economies of the Earth would grind to a halt without the services of ecological life-support systems, so in one sense their total value to the economy is infinite.” The authors estimate the monetary value of these services is at least $33 trillion, which was almost twice the world’s gross domestic product. And that was 25 years ago.

Factoring in the real costs of these services would change literally everything. Over the last 50 years, the value of global GNP has increased dramatically – due largely to the “free” services nature provides. On the other hand, the value of the world’s total natural capital has declined significantly – due largely to the overuse, extraction, and pollution of the “free” goods nature provides.

For millennia human have turned to technology in an effort both to insulate themselves from the arbitrary forces of nature and to control those forces. But it’s hard to escape from an essentially closed system in which technology ultimately depends on the ecosystems it also degrades. Because of the pressures of both economic and population growth, we now annually “lose three to five trillion dollars’ worth of natural capital, roughly equivalent to the amount of money we lost in the financial crisis of 2008–2009.”

 “Unfortunately,” note the Lovins and Hawken, “the cost of destroying ecosystem services becomes apparent only when the services start to break down. . . .What’s more, for most of these services, there is no known substitute at any price, and we can’t live without them.” Most of all, these resources belong to all of us – and to every living being whose life depends on them. Yet we continue to allow individuals, corporations, and governments to dig up the earth, pollute the air, and dam the rivers. Where did some of us get the power to divvy up and pass around the global commons that belongs to all of us?

Finally, while there are many reasons – from the ecological to the aesthetic – to protect nature and preserve the earth, the argument in this post is not about hugging trees or communing with druids. It is about the hard science of economics, appealing not to our altruism, but solely to our self-interest.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 32

32nd of a Series

“[The removal of the Klamath River dams] is historic and life changing. And it means that the Yurok people have a future. It means the river has a future; the salmon have a future.”

- Amy Cordalis

“If you build it, he will come,” the disembodied voice tells Joe Kinsella in an Iowa cornfield in “Field of Dreams.” What river restoration people across the country are increasingly discovering is that if you unbuild a dam, the fish will come back – fish that have been unable to return to their spawning grounds for generations.

The latest and most spectacular example is the Klamath River in the Pacific Northwest, where the last of four dams will soon be removed, and the river will flow free for the first time in more than a century. It is the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

On the other side of the country, dam removal has been going on for over 25 years in the state of Maine, and its “rivers are experiencing an incredible comeback.”

The first to go was the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River on July 1, 1999. According to a timeline from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the river was first dammed in 1837, just “below the head of tide” in Augusta – even though residents had already spent three years protesting against the proposed dam’s impact on the state’s fisheries. In the 1990s NRCM assembled a diverse and unlikely coalition of environmental groups, Indigenous tribes, state and federal agencies, and even energy producers to form the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which, after long and difficult negotiations, hammered out an agreement to remove the 162-year-old dam.

No one really knew if, when, and in what numbers fish would return to spawn. They quickly found out – almost immediately fish were gathering at the river’s mouth. A decade later, “the river has totally come alive,” NRCM reported, “the water quality . . . has improved,  millions of fish are returning to long-lost spawning habitat, Osprey and eagles soar along the river, and Maine people and visitors paddle on what feels like a wilderness river.”

Before the removals, Atlantic salmon were on the brink of extinction, while herring swimming upstream to spawn numbered in the hundreds, sometimes the thousands. Last spring their number exceeded six million.

I can’t shake this image of fish – from eels to salmon – swimming around the Atlantic, trying desperately to find their way home. Millions die, but not all, and somehow, when a dam is removed, they know to come back. I‘m not the only one in awe: “I’ve already seen a river come back before my own eyes,” said Laura Rose Day, who led the project at NRCM and is now director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. “Just a day or two after the Edwards Dam came out, we had sturgeon swimming up the Kennebec River. The fish know what to do.”

The return of the fish resurrected the river’s ecosystem. “The lower Kennebec River is now teeming with life,” reports American Rivers, “including the largest restored river herring run in the U.S., the largest natural aggregation of bald eagles ever recorded in the East, leaping sturgeon and thousands of American shad in downtown Waterville.”

The impact is economic as well as environmental and esthetic, as groups ranging from the Penobscot nation to Maine’s lobstermen depend on the Kennebec’s fish for their livelihood.

Amid all the debates over the importance of technology and the power of artificial intelligence, I’m reminded by stories such as these that it is only life that is miraculous.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 31

31st of a series

Readers Weigh In, Part 2

“Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . .The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

- Henry David Thoreau

• Warren Cook, an old friend, recommended Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, Kerri Arsenault’s memoir of growing up in a small town on Maine’s Androscoggin River.

  Editor’s note: Here is what Robert Macfarlane, the author of Underland, wrote: “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” 
  And here is how the book itself begins: “Mexico, Maine, is a small paper mill town that lies in a valley, or ‘River Valley’ as we now call the area because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. . . .Rivers are living bodies that need oxygen, turn sick, can be wrecked by neglect like human bodies, which we often think of as separate, not belonging to the landscape that bore them out. They tell a story, these bodies. They are the story.”

• “I don't like Trump either,” wrote a reader about my post on “Wasting Water,” “but Biden has had four years to take action on the Colorado River. Sometimes I think liberals hold Trump responsible for all bad things in this country, but there is plenty of blame to go around.”

  Editor’s note: We need to think differently about rivers. We’ve had over 60 years to act since the Colorado first stopped flowing regularly to the ocean. In John McPhee’s portrayal of the encounter between Floyd Dominy and David Brower, Dominy was often the more compelling figure, and their intense rivalry was the beginning of Brower’s demise. But looking back, Brower was right. The issue isn’t about “fixing” the Colorado or any other river; it’s learning to think about rivers differently. My takeaway from the “River Continuum Concept” is that a river is not a funnel for water to be used, extracted, mined, and sold; it’s an organism, just as our bodies are organisms, and it must be nurtured as such, for it is the foundation of life on earth, from microscopic life to human life.

• Finally, my daughter Annie turned me on to this story:

Editor’s note: You can read more about this, including a response from the owners, in The Guardian.

Here is a link to a map of the shipping route the ice takes, which includes a treacherous leg down the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden, which is currently the site of a hot war between Houthi rebels and western forces.

Of course, long before Greenlanders were shipping glacier cubes to the bars of Dubai, New Englanders were making fortunes selling ice to enslavers in the Caribbean. The first was Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor, who delivered still frozen water to Cuba and Martinique in 1806. In 1833, having improved insulation of the ice blocks through thicker coats of saw dust, he began shipping them to Calcutta, 14,000 miles and two equator crossings away. One source of the ice was Henry Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond.

The Greenland entrepreneurs may want to increase sales while they can because a study published last week in the journal Nature, determined that the island’s glaciers have lost 20 percent more ice than previously believed – 6,000 gigatons in all since 2,000 – enough, the report says, to cover all of Texas in a sheet of ice more than 30 feet high.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 30

30th of a series

Readers Weigh In, Part 1

“There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.”

- David Brower

• I love your columns on water,” wrote David Yeats-Thomas, “and to show you I read them to the very last paragraph, I’d like to refer to and comment on this end note in your last column (#28): 

It’s worth noting that Nirvana literally means “blowing out or becoming extinguished, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” Armageddon, on the other hand, refers to the “place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history.” I have to admit that the difference between the two is completely lost on me.

“The same Britannica definition you mentioned goes on to give a more nuanced and positive meaning. Buddhism’s ultimate goal is to end (extinguish) the state of suffering, which causes nirvana. ‘(Nirvana) is used to refer to the extinction of desire, hatred, and ignorance and, ultimately, of suffering and rebirth. Literally, it means “blowing out” or “becoming extinguished,” as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.’

Somehow I think the end of suffering and the extinction of desire, hatred and ignorance is definitely a better goal in life than Armageddon.

• In response to the post on John McPhee’s article (#25) about rafting the Colorado with David Brower and Floyd Dominy, Murray Fisher, founder of New York Harbor School and former Riverkeeper staff member, wrote:

“The Hudson River and New York City’s thirst for energy provide an interesting case study for this issue. Indian Point nuclear power plant is being phased out because of its negative environmental impacts and apparent threat to safety, etc. The effort to shut it down was led by Riverkeeper.

But what is replacing that energy generation?

A new hydroelectric dam being built on a river in Quebec on indigenous land. And then a 400-mile-long cable is being run underneath the Hudson River to NYC. 

“What's greener?

“There is no new ‘green economy,’ really. It’s a myth. Any production of energy has some cost to global ecology.”

• “I’m confused by your last post about water and rivers,” wrote a reader about last Thursday’s blog. “Why are Trump’s comments so far off base? Is it because he thinks the river should be diverted? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing to rivers all along? Is the point that we’ve been screwing around with rivers for so long, that we’re on the brink of their being almost extinct?”

Just after I opened that email, I read a New York Times article, “California Farms Dried up a River for Months. Nobody Stopped Them,” about the Merced River, which begins in Yosemite National Park and provides water to the state’s Central Valley. During the three-year drought of 2020-22, farmers continued to exercise their rights of withdrawal even as the Merced turned into “a series of intermittent pool.”

“A dry river is a catastrophe,” said a spokesperson for Friends of the River in Sacramento.

It was once considered a contradiction in terms.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 29

29th of a series

Wasting water

“If you save one drop of water, you’ve saved the world.”

- Pete Seeger

On August 5, 2018, then-President Donald Trump tweeted: “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fire, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water. Nice! Fast Federal govt. approval.” That Tweet, said Brown, “doesn't merit a response." LeRoy Westerling, who studies wildfires and climatology, wrote that Trump’s tweet “boggles the mind,” noting that the real culprit is the huge moisture loss caused by climate change.

Several weeks ago, we began this series with a discussion of the Colorado River, which has not flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. This is pretty universally considered a problem of some magnitude. But in Trump’s worldview, this is perfect river management – the Colorado isn’t wasting a single drop. In fact, not only does the river not make it to the Sea of Cortez, it generally peters out before it even gets to the border, leaving Mexico with a dry bed and the polluted dregs of its 1,500-mile journey. Surely, in Trump’s mind, this is an added benefit. After all, why should Mexico be entitled to our water?

All this is a bit hard to square with American Rivers’ designation of the Colorado as the most endangered river in the United States. It is, the organization declared, “on the brink of collapse.”

What’s at issue here is the definition of “wasting water”. Particularly in the East, where water was historically plentiful, we have associated waste with overconsumption, and so we take steps to cut back, from turning off the tap while brushing our teeth to installing meters to encourage conservation. In the West by contrast, where water has always been scarce, waste is allowing even a single drop to escape to the ocean. One side focuses on the efficient use of water to protect its sources, both for ourselves and for the ecosystem. The other believes that water unused is water wasted.

The plight of the Colorado, and almost all of the world’s rivers, demonstrates the utter folly of the latter approach. We know – or at least, we should – “the importance of natural flow for ecosystems.”

But don’t take my word for it. Read what Jacob Dreyer, a native of Muynak, Uzbekistan, wrote last November in The New York Times:

“Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. . . .[as] over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth-largest inland body of water – which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan – gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways.”

Rusting boats in the sand in Muynak, Uzbekistan. Muynak was once a thriving port on the Aral Sea but is now a desert town since the sea disappeared. Credit: Carolyn Drake/Magnum

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 28

28th of a series

“Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called rain.”

- Mike McAlary

In the last post we discussed scarcity. Today we consider abundance, specifically the possibility of producing much more fresh water. There is a lot of water in the ocean – 352 quintillion gallons (352,000,000,000,000,000,000) more or less. All we have to do is remove the salt.

Humans have been doing that on a small scale for a long time. The Ottoman Empire began providing desalinated water to Mecca pilgrims in the 1890s; and in 1951, Kuwait, which has no – zero – rivers and almost no groundwater, built the world’s first distillation plant; today Kuwaitis get 90% of their drinking water from desalination. Saudi Arabia, as the story goes, was actually drilling for water when it discovered the massive Abqaiq oil reserves in 1939. While that’s a fable, Saudi oil is critically connected to Saudi water. It has enabled the dry desert kingdom to desalinate so much water that it now trails only the U.S. and Canada (which has ironically been dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of fresh water”) in per-capita water consumption.

Today, desalination is a big and ever-growing business. Some countries rely on it almost entirely for fresh water; others, including the U.S., are ratcheting up their efforts. Yet it accounts for just 1% of the world’s freshwater consumption. Why?

1. Cost: the process is very expensive – and essentially unaffordable for poor countries, where almost no desalination is occurring.

2. Energy: much of the cost is due to the massive amounts of energy required to produce it. Saudi Arabia uses 15% of its oil production (down from 25% a decade ago) to desalinate its water.

3. Environmental concerns: most of the required energy comes from fossil fuels. The brine that is the waste byproduct of desalination is twice as salty as seawater, contains toxic chemicals used in its treatment, and is destructive to marine ecosystems. To produce one gallon of fresh water results in 1.5 gallons of brine.

Twenty-five years ago, Bern Sweeney, who taught me pretty much all I know about the science of rivers and water, told me that, for him, desalination represented less a solution to the problem than a manifestation of it. But it’s clear now that desalination is here to stay. And  with public promises to reduce costs, switch from fossil fuels to green energy, and develop constructive uses for brine, it is going to get much bigger. It will need to, the argument goes, because so are the earth’s water shortages.

Amid the debates about desalination’s environmental impact – and about whether technology is the solution to every human problem – the fact is that we don’t know what the future holds. So, at least for now, the debate is less about science than it is about personal philosophy. Ultimately, I believe it’s a theological debate. Will progress, at least as we have defined it in the West, lead to Nirvana or to Armageddon?* Should we embrace technology as the means to subdue nature? Or should we recognize ourselves as an integral part of the natural world? Immanence or transcendence? Control or balance? More or less?

Like Pascal’s Wager on the existence of God and Einstein’s faith that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, this is a cosmic bet. Its outcome may determine our future.

---

*It’s worth noting that Nirvana literally means “blowing out or becoming extinguished, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” Armageddon, on the other hand, refers to the “place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history.” I have to admit that the difference between the two is completely lost on me. 

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.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 26

26th of a series

Readers respond.

“The destruction of my own paradise is what made me think we need a revolution.”

- Konglian Yu

1. “Just as WWII was upramping, my father was part of a navy team that had been created in response to the capture of Nazi intruders crossing into upstate New York, supported by Nazi sympathizers in New York City. It was well known in the intelligence community that the city drew untreated water from upstate reservoirs that were essentially unguarded and thus could be poisoned by Axis saboteurs. My father’s team tried to calculate how much of the metro population would die if the first knowledge of poisoning didn’t come until its fatal effects were already in the city.

   “The consequences, it emerged, would be beyond catastrophic: simply alerting city residents NOT to use tap water or fountains far exceeded the city’s capabilities. Panic would be inevitable as millions tried to flee to wherever water was safe, overwhelming nearby cities and towns.

   “This was a very sobering study which, of course, was buried: too much info for German attack planners; too much fright for city dwellers; too much exposure of incompetent elected officials; and far too much cost to fix the problem.”

   Note: Stroud Center scientists were completing the first year of their six-year New York study when, without warning, the entire watershed was suddenly locked down, and everyone was kicked out. It was September 11, 2001.

2. Dev Devereux, who is also an architect, sent me this fascinating 4.5-minute video on the Chinese architect Konglian Yu, designer of “Sponge Cities:” https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzbonkWsHPO/