The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009

Pissing Away Our Future

Unquenchable, by Robert Glennon.

By Peter Koch

Water is a precious, life sustaining and finite resource. Yet Americans undervalue it. We pay next to nothing for it, and literally flush it down the toilet every day. This paradox is central to Robert Glennon’s Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It. If we don’t fundamentally change our relationship to water, he argues, we’ll continue pissing it away until each and every one of us—not just those in the arid West—is left high and dry.

Glennon believes that the water crisis has already begun. With Unquenchable, he details how we, living in one of the most water-rich nations on Earth, have mismanaged this most precious resource, and outlines how we might change our habits and reverse the crisis. Through dozens of vividly recounted stories, Glennon invites us to witness, firsthand, water abuse and its costly consequences. See how dried-out salmon runs cancelled the Pacific coast’s $400 million per year commercial salmon fishing season. Inadequate water supplies forced regulators in Idaho, Arizona and Montana to deny permits for new coal-fired power plants. Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater body, has grown too shallow to float fully loaded cargo ships.

So how are Americans responding to the crisis? Poorly, if Unquenchable is any indication. Georgia’s Lake Lanier—the freshwater supply for five million Metro Atlanta residents—came within 90 days of evaporating in the winter of 2008, prompting the government to ban watering lawns, washing cars and filling swimming pools. Rain, coupled with a 15 percent reduction of water usage, raised the lake level two feet over the course of three months. Governor Perdue, who’d held a public prayer vigil for rain only months earlier, eased the restrictions. Nine months later, the lake was back down to emergency levels. Glennon writes: “The evidence is everywhere—though if it is noticed it’s washed away with the next drenching rain.”

Elsewhere, poor policy decisions promise to exacerbate the problem. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, for instance, requires that 7.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol supplement our national gasoline supply by 2012. But corn is the thirstiest of all domestic crops, and it requires between 1,700 and 2,500 gallons of water to grow enough corn to produce a single gallon of ethanol. All said, it’ll take 13 to 19 trillion gallons of water to satisfy the 2012 ethanol quota. One ethanol plant in Minnesota, “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” has already dried up scores of neighboring wells.

With Unquenchable, Glennon is joining a tradition that began with Marc Reisner’s 1986 classic Cadillac Desert. Subtitled “The American West and Its Disappearing Water,” it was the first detailed history of how development-driven policies and engineering feats aimed at bringing water to the otherwise uninhabitable, bone-dry West have threatened delicate desert ecosystems, and limited future water resource development. Twenty-three years later, Glennon tells us, the crisis has spread to the rest of the country. The Ipswich River in Massachusetts has dried up in each of the last seven years. Huge sinkholes have opened up north of Tampa due to overzealous groundwater pumping. The Tennessee town of Orme ran plumb out of water in 2008, so they trucked it in from Alabama.

Glennon is a law professor at University of Arizona, where he first got involved with water policy through interdisciplinary work—researching water law—with the university’s hydrology department. This background asserts itself when Glennon offers legislation-driven solutions to the crisis. Sure, he promotes creative conservation techniques. But the bulk of the work—quantifying and managing groundwater supplies and usage, overhauling sewage systems that combine storm water with domestic sewage, removing barriers to water transfers and overseeing those transfers—he says needs to be achieved via federal legislation and a single, unified water policy.

In the past Congress has deferred to states regarding water policy with disastrous effect. At least 35 states are currently embroiled in battles with their neighbors over water rights. The majority of states manage their water using outdated policies developed before hydrology existed as a field. One example is the “right of capture” doctrine. If you manage to pump it out of the ground, you can use as much water as you want for whatever you want. It’s a classic “Tragedy of the Commons” scenario, Glennon writes, giving limitless access to a limited supply.

One of the factors that makes Unquenchable so effective is its narrow focus on the United States. Several books have been published recently addressing the global water crisis, but none has offered such in-depth analysis. If formulating an outline for a comprehensive domestic water policy is a huge task, then creating a world water policy and squeezing it into a single book is next to impossible.

Not to worry, though. Only two months ago, the United Nations released a report, Water in a Changing World that operates as a companion piece to Unquenchable, detailing the crisis on the world stage and offering some first steps towards a wetter future.

Although Glennon’s proposed reforms run the gamut from composting toilets to taxing water, none of them will have any teeth if we don’t learn the true value of water. The average American pays only one-quarter of a cent per gallon for water, and hundreds of thousands of private wells pump it out of the ground absolutely free of charge. Until we recognize water as our most important natural resource—more important, even, than fossil fuels—there will never be the political will to make sweeping policy changes. Benjamin Franklin once observed, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.” Let’s hope that he’s wrong, and we understand water’s worth before it’s gone. ♦

Printer Friendly