Water Runs Uphill to Money

What people build when they get thirsty

We're running out of water.  Drought is coming, and so are water wars. At least that's what I just read in the paper.  Water is the new oil (and we all know what that means...)

As columnist Gary Mason notes, many parts of the United States are experiencing a "freshwater disaster": California is now in its worst drought in modern history, and the Ogallala aquifer that supplies the American Great Plains is being sucked dry, as water tables drop in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.  The political result, Mason explains, will be increasing pressure to ship water long distances, including across borders, especially from Canada to the United States.

What's interesting is the claim that this drought is mainly the product of natural scarcity (although accentuated by waste and climate change).  The implication is that the water crisis is an unprecedented novelty.

But it's not.  We can go back fifty years, and find cries of alarm over water every bit as ardent as those expressed today.  Back in the 1960s American politicians were writing books like The Water Crisis, and The Coming Water Famine.  To be considered a serious commentator, one had to agree that water shortages were real, and required an immediate response: ever-bigger dams and canals, to redirect North America's rivers like they were so much plumbing.  The result, as Mark Reisner, Don Worster, and other authors noted, was some of the biggest engineering projects in history, as well as the biggest proposal of all. 

Yet as one of the first objective accounts of the issue showed back in 1972, the "inevitable" water shortage of the 1960s simply evaporated once exposed to careful study.  What was left was the conclusion that the "whole field of water development, long viewed as the embodiment of man's mastery over nature for the good of society, [is] largely a story of political manipulation of mind-boggling proportions."  Water, it turns out, doesn't just run down to the sea, it runs uphill to money.

Perhaps there would be much the same outcome today, if there was a little more dispassionate analysis of the possibility of "water wars," and a little more awareness of the history of fear-mongering about drought.