What's the solution?
With seepage, often, farmers, being rather practical people, simply sink some drilling rigs into the ground, and stick a pump in and pump that water up again. So, they tend to recycle it. But evaporation is a real loss. I'm not quite sure what you do about it other than manage water more locally. One of the most heartening trends I've seen traveling around the world -- and I've seen it in China and India and in other places -- is the effort by farmers and villagers to harvest the rain as it falls. They don't let the water go into the rivers and run away to perhaps a large dam, or run away to the sea. They simply capture it locally, and even pour it back down their wells, creating a storage system so that they can pump it up later in the year. So, particularly in India where most of the rain falls in 100 hours over 100 days, you simply have to capture that and store it locally in ponds, or even underground in wells. That's a rather efficient way for a local community to manage its water supply. It's being very effectively applied in thousands of villages across India.
Are you optimistic that there will be a kind of "blue revolution" of innovative ways to conserve and capture water?
I'm an optimist, not a pessimist. I'm a pessimist in the sense that we use water so inefficiently and so carelessly now that it makes you despair, but I'm an optimist also because there is so much potential for doing things better. When you find that irrigation systems waste 60 or 70 percent of their water it does make you despair, but you realize that there is a huge potential to do things better. I find that given the chance farmers and local communities, and even towns and countries, will and can do a lot of things better.
Still, conserving water in one location can mean just donating it to someone else to squander.
Unlike many of the resources that we rely on, water does move -- down rivers and between countries -- in ways that we can't do much about. When water gets short, the conflicts that arise over water do get very complicated.
On the West Bank, for instance, the Israelis and the Palestinians are almost as much in conflict over water as they are over land. The Palestinians are very angry that they are not allowed to sink more wells and drill more boreholes on the West Bank region, because the Israelis say that the water is already fully used, when most of that water is in fact used by Israelis not only in their settlements, but also in Israel proper.
While we often see water as a kind of free resource, provided by nature, once it gets in short supply the powerful do have an ability to grab hold and keep water -- whether behind dams, or by sticking pumps into the ground. We haven't quite reached the situation where water wars are breaking out, but we're getting quite close in some parts of the world.
Where do you see potential for future water wars?
The River Nile is one, which is often talked about. The Egyptian government has said in the past that if a war is likely to be fought in their region, in North East Africa, it is almost certainly going to be about the River Nile. Egypt is absolutely and totally dependent on the Nile water to survive. The Nile flows through 10 countries before it reaches Egypt, which is very concerned that a country upstream, like Ethiopia, might start to build large dams, which would interrupt the flow of water down the Nile to Egypt.
People have also rattled their sabers over the Tigris and the Euphrates, both of which flow out of Turkey through Iraq on their way to the sea. In fact, during the first Gulf War, Turkey threatened to stop the flow of water down into Iraq as an act of war, using the dams it was building. It never did it, but it threatened to, and that caused a great deal of unease in that region.
India and Pakistan have a treaty over the River Indus, which flows through India. In fact, it collects most of its water in India, and then flows on into Pakistan, which is heavily dependent on that river for its survival. There is an agreement about who can have what water from that river, but if that treaty would break down then that again could be the basis for a very nasty water war. Of course, now you're talking about two countries that are both nuclear powers.
Is the American lifestyle more consumptive of water than other counties, as it is of energy resources, like oil and natural gas? And do you think the U.S. might end up importing water from Canada in the future?
It's an issue that keeps coming up. Canada has a great deal of water, particularly in the West, and America has quite a lot of demand for water, particularly in the West. So, you can imagine circumstances under which the U.S. would like to get its hands on Canadian water. Canadians are adamantly opposed to this, and I think that you'd have a great deal of difficulty getting any water out of them. They are prepared to use their rivers to generate hydroelectricity to sell electricity to the U.S., but they're not prepared to sell their water.
Domestically, American users are among the highest water users in the world, but you [Americans] stabilized your water consumption in recent years, principally by having more efficient toilets that use much less water in the flush. Canadians have not changed their toilets in the same way. They are probably now the No. 1 domestic users of water in individual homes. But neither the U.S. nor Canada reaches anything like the per capita water consumption of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Both of those use absolutely vast amounts of water to irrigate their cotton crops. It's a system set up by the Soviet Union, which has been carried on through today. They produce huge amounts of cotton grown using water taken out of the rivers in what is in many ways an arid region. The main consequence of that huge use of water is that they've dried up the Aral Sea, which was once the fourth biggest inland sea. It's sitting in Central Asia not far from the Caspian Sea, which is even bigger. They dried up the rivers that fed that sea, virtually no water reaches the sea anymore, and the sea has retreated fantastically.
I have been to see it, and you stand on the shoreline or what was the shoreline of the Aral Sea, and look out towards what once were waters where fishing boats got good catches, and all there is is desert. The water is over the horizon 60 miles away. It's one of the most extraordinary sights you'll see in the world -- how the Aral Sea has disappeared. People call it one of the great ecological catastrophes in the world, and I really think that's true. It has happened entirely as a result of misuse of water to pour the contents of what were large rivers onto fields to grow cotton, and it destroyed a sea in the process.
[Editor's note: A recent report in the New York Times found that the Aral Sea is being brought back in some places.]
Aside from rivers and seas, how is water disappearing that we can't so readily see, underground water?
As rivers are running dry, in many countries of the world, and I've seen this especially in India, farmers are beginning to rely more and more on pumping out underground water reserves. There is usually a lot of water underground one way or another, some of it recent from rainfall, some of it essentially fossil water that's been there for thousands of years. Farmers are pumping this water out, which is lowering the water table.
That is causing an emerging water crisis in a number of Asian countries, but India is probably the worst example. They call it a creeping anarchy because nobody has any control over what the farmers do. They simply get a private drilling rig. They drill down, and they stick a pump into the ground, and start pumping the water up.
In some parts of India where they're relying more and more on underground water, they're bringing up unexpected poisons, perfectly natural poisons, but ones which have lain in the rock beneath them undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years. The two big examples are fluoride and arsenic. Both of these turn out to be absorbed by underground water. Because there is no great tradition of using underground water, until recent years, nobody really knew. But as farmers and people start pumping this water up, they're finding that there are huge rates of poisoning -- especially in Bangladesh and in West Bengal in India.
What are some of the effects of those poisons?
Well, they kill ultimately. They're slow-acting poisons, so you can drink the water for a number of years and then you slowly start having effects. Scientists from the World Health Organization have said that they believe this is one of the world's worst poisoning epidemics ever seen, because it involves tens of millions of people in both Bangladesh and parts of eastern India.
What impact will climate change likely have on water supplies around the world?
Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen to rainfall under global warming. We're fairly certain that climate change will make most of the world warmer. There are uncertainties about how weather systems are going to change, but the bottom line probably is that the wet places will get wetter, and the places that are dry will get still drier.
About the writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon.
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