Water: The Next "Black Gold"

Water – The Next “Black Gold”

While U.S. politicians, pundits, and military leaders debate how both established and emerging industrialized nations can curb their thirst for oil, many others around the world are beginning to talk about the emerging scarcity of another valuable commodity: water.

The value of water was brought home to me, literally, this past month, as I vacationed in the south of Chile on my husband's family farm. No one living on the farm can remember such a drought in this part of Chile, but for two years in a row now the farm has exhausted its natural supply of water. The farm sits on the edge of a large lake near the town of Villarrica, and its climate usually resembles that of the Pacific Northwest. And yet, even in southern Chile, where summers seem to bring rain as often as sunshine, the mountain stream on the farm had dried up, and the family had to resort to a completely new method of getting water: pumping water from the lake.

While we were in Chile, relatives spoke of the severe drought and half-jokingly alluded to “global warming” as the cause. Others have pointed to a persistent “La Nina” phenomenon of cold water in the Pacific and high atmospheric pressure that prevents rain from reaching inland. According to one journalist the resulting drought has “over half the country dangling by a thread,” (Cecilia Vargas, “Chile: Drought Raises Likelihood of Energy Rationing,” Inter Press Service News Agency, February 15, 2008).

Whatever the proximate cause of the drought in Chile, around the world local communities are waking up to the fact that water resources they had come to count on, are slowly, or in some cases, quickly, drying up.

Scientists predict that recent increases in global temperatures will have their most severe impact on regions near the equator, but even at high altitudes in these “tropical” latitudes, climate change is having a visible impact. For example, in Bolivia one of the highest-altitude “tropical” glaciers, Zongo, near La Paz, has been melting so fast that it has lost twenty-nine feet of thickness just since 2006. A ski resort that once billed itself as the highest in world at 17,000 feet no longer exists (“Global Warming Hits Tropical Glaciers in the Andes,” Morning Edition, NPR, March 10, 2008).

Why should this melting of “tropical” ice concern us?

For one thing, “local” water problems are no longer so local.

Climatologists in the U.S. have discovered that the dust generated in China can affect snow packs as far away as the Colorado Rockies. In 2006, scientist Thomas Painter observed a dust storm in a Colorado mountain pass and pointed out that “the Alps receive dust from the Sahara and the Taklamakan in western China, and the Gobi deposits dust into the mountain ranges in northwest China and Mongolia.” That would be just an interesting footnote in studies of snow and ice, if it were not for the fact that such “dusty” or “pink” snow melts much faster and much earlier than normal snow packs affecting “billions of dollars in agriculture, hydroelectric and recreation,” “Dust Storms Threaten Snow Packs,” Morning Edition, NPR, May 30, 2006).

As water becomes an increasingly scarce commodity across the tropics and across the world, we will all need to learn new ways to conserve this precious resource and perhaps begin to use water in increasingly creative ways: from rooftop gardens that absorb rain water and prevent runoff to “grey water” systems that use waste water for irrigation, to the formerly unthinkable projects in southern California that seek now purify “waste water” to standards that make it fit for human consumption.

The United States and other world powers may also need to reclassify “water” as a resource worthy of being considered in terms of “national security.” As Tulane University law professor Eric Dannenmaier noted in 2001, “if a foreign plot threatened to poison a city's water supply or pollute an entire river, that nation's security forces would react quickly--but when a slower-moving but more predictable threat to environmental security is at work, governments are unlikely to bring the same force to bear,” (“Environmental Security and Governance in the Americas”).

Those government attitudes are beginning to change, at least in relation to global conflicts. In a Washington Post article of Monday, August 20, 2007 staff writer, Douglas Struck wrote that the “potential for conflict [over water] is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers...The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfur region...and the World Health Organization says 1 billion people lack access to potable water.”

British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett used her country's chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council in 2007 to convene the council's first debate on climate change as a security threat, citing drought as one of the threats brought about by global warming. "It requires a whole new approach to how we analyse and act on security," Mrs Beckett said. "'The threat to our climate security comes not from outside but from within: we are all our own enemies.'She compared the struggle to contain climate change to the cold war, which also had to be fought on diplomatic, economic, political and cultural fronts,” The Guardian, Friday, May 11, 2007.

While politicians and diplomats debate the political consequences of battles over the increasing scarcity of water, we can all work to conserve and preserve clean water in our own backyards. First of all, we can stop buying bottled water in plastic bottles, and install a home filtration system if our water tastes bad and if we are concerned about about contaminants. Second, we can stop fertilizing our lawns to prevent chemical runoff into local streams. If local ordinances allow, we can use“grey” water from showers or washing machines to irrigate our gardens. “If it's yellow, let it mellow.” There's no need to flush every time we use the toilet. We can keep a glass of water to rinse our toothbrushes rather than letting the faucet flow. And finally, if we can afford it, we can buy appliances that use less water and apply for the rebates that many local communities are offering to encourage conservation (See http://www.h2ouse.net/ and http://www.water.org/ for more ideas about ways to conserve and to promote the availability of clean water worldwide.)

Given the uncertainties of climate change, there is almost no corner of the globe where anyone can afford to take water for granted. The average American uses somewhere between 100 and 160 gallons a day, depending on what activities you include. In rural India a family might use as little as 30 gallons of water per person, (“Water Diaries,” Living on Earth, PRI, August 17, 2007). But what is more striking than the disparity in consumption is just how much effort those living in developing countries have to make to obtain clean water, while most of us just turn on the tap without thinking about the consequences. It's time we that began contemplating how to conserve water before we find out the hard way that water can be as scarce and as contentious a commodity as oil, our current “black gold.”