Wil Lepkowski

C&EN Washington

What could be a more life-enhancing agenda at the brink of the new millennium than for science and technology, catalyzed by generous thinking, to provide enough clean water to meet every country's human and ecological needs? Sounds utopian, but people in the water field are beginning to work toward that vision, with 2050 seen as a reasonable target year.

Water policy is headed toward profound change in the next century, but it will be a long row upstream involving money and an unaccustomed common sense never really practiced on any large scale. Water quality and availability are at once highly local and notoriously geopolitical. When abundant, water is cheap and taken for granted. A water policy is less a set of government rules and laws than it is a consensus of thought and parsimony within the distribution system itself. Water, after all, is an interconnected network of flows, all leading to the same place—the sea, the source of the hydrological cycle. As rain, water is free. After that, it begins to cost. The control of water is an even more powerful political tool than the control of that more viscous liquid, oil.

Water is practical. Water is symbolic. Water, the medium in rites of passage, is spiritual. Water is so special that in the ancient creation stories, water preexisted—all that was created came out of it. Water's molecular shape is a miracle of design simplicity that imparts polarity and with it the capacity for hydrogen bonding. The effect is water's marvelous properties—liquidity at room temperature, a solid state less dense than a liquid state, and a powerful ability to dissolve solids.

Water is the medium of life. Without it, health is impossible to attain; food, impossible to obtain. For 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion people in the world, obtaining water is a grim matter indeed.

Millions are still exposed to arrays of water-conveyed diseases that countries and financial institutions lack the will and money to completely eradicate by simple sanitation—diseases such as cholera, dracunculosis (caused by the guinea worm), schistosomiasis, and trachoma. Crops in 70% of the world cannot grow without irrigation water—which in many parts of the world is either in short supply or wantonly wasted. Looming by the year 2025 is an additional 2.5 billion people who will live in regions already lacking sufficient water, much less clean water.

Sandra Postel, author of the recent book "Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?" (Washington, D.C.: World Watch Institute, 1999), says groundwater used for irrigation is declining everywhere—in central and northern China, northwest and southern India, part of Pakistan, much of the western U.S., North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula. "Groundwater overpumping," she says, "may now be the biggest threat to irrigated agriculture, exceeding even the buildup of salts in the soil."

The picture Postel paints is relentlessly bad, and it's all about stresses and improper solutions to already misperceived problems. Salinization, siltation, faltering aquatic ecosystems, mounting competition for water, growing imbalance between population and available water supplies, and global climate change—all are factors forcing a new order to irrigation practices. And, she says, the problems are "evolving simultaneously, which magnifies the constraints on future food production and heightens the risk that rising food prices or larger pockets of hunger will destabilize civil societies."

She blames industrial agriculture for not coming through for the sake of the future. "Virtually all of the most promising techniques for improving water productivity—from drip irrigation to the use of computerized weather and soil monitoring—remain vastly underused because water pricing and other 'rules of the game' do not encourage their adoption," she says.

The story of water is really two stories. Water for the rich and water for the poor. It is virtually a crime in the rich world to allow fecal matter into the water supply. In the poor world, it can hardly be avoided. In the rich world, water is treated and piped. The poor, on the other hand, get their water from wells if they are lucky, or from wherever it lies, or from vendors for extortionary sums.

In "The World's Water," a book published earlier this year by Island Press in Washington, D.C., Peter Gleick says that in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, households connected to a municipal system pay "around $1.00 per cubic meter, while unconnected consumers forced to purchase water from mobile vendors pay from $5.50 to as much as $16.50. In the U.S. cities, residents pay between 40 and 80 cents per cu m." Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment & Security, Oakland, Calif.

What would it cost to meet the minimal water needs of all the people in the world, including water for sanitation? Gleick reckons about $50 billion per year, and this would include advanced wastewater treatment. "This is still far below the actual societal costs of the failure to provide these services," he says. Current spending per year on water and sanitation in the developing countries, according to the World Bank, is $26 billion per year.

Can the rich lead the poor along a better path? Not quite yet, according to water expert and geographer Gilbert White, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, who delivered the 1999 Wolman lecture before the National Academy of Sciences last month. The U.S., he said, "still has not fashioned policy aims, operating criteria, and organizations that fully recognize the interdependence of the health of ecosystems and of social systems in efforts to achieve a sustainable quality of life through water management." The result, he says, "is ineffective and sometimes counterproductive measures in a number of sectors of resource management."

But that could be changing. River basin consciousness is back in the U.S. Every agency is pushing it. River basins mean connecting the health of ecosystems and of people in the way White describes. A new report by the U.S. Forest Service urges just that in its rediscovery that the function of the public forests is not so much to protect and supply timber resources as to preserve water. A September National Research Council report on New York City's water supply urges a "watershed management" plan to avoid treating its Catskills and Delaware River water supply.

Arsenic tragedy in Bangladesh

Let us get absolutely specific about water and go to a real place with a real problem: Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a sobering reminder to water planners that their utopian dreams for the 21st century are not going to be easy to fulfill. It also illustrates how chemistry and good science usually have to struggle to be part of official policy decisions.

Probably more so than in any other country, water determines the character of life in Bangladesh. If Bangladesh has too much water in one season (monsoons), it doesn't have enough in another (annual drought). It sorely needs to learn how to store and save clean water and at the same time ensure disposal of human wastes. In the end, it needs a workable and fundable national water plan that prepares the country for the inevitable yearly highs and lows. Progress was made toward that end in 1997, when Bangladesh finally won a treaty agreement with India, allowing sufficient release of Ganges River water from upstream dams to meet Bangladesh's agricultural needs.

A Bangladeshi village survey member paints an unsafe well red. [World Bank photo]

The arsenic problem began back in the 1970s when the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), with other aid agencies, began installing millions of wells in Bangladesh villages in an attempt to provide safe drinking water in that country. The program, which continued through the 1980s, was an early success. Instances of cholera, microbe-caused diarrhea, and other diseases dropped dramatically. But no one thought to assay the water, and soon the good news turned bad. By the early 1990s, villagers began breaking out with skin disorders and experiencing fatigue symptomatic of arsenicosis, or arsenic poisoning, from imbibing the water. As water rose through the wells, naturally occurring arsenic was released from underground sediments, yielding arsenic concentrations well above the World Health Organization (WHO) standard of 50 ppb.

Last February, the World Bank, alarmed at the extent of the crisis in Bangladesh, began administering a loan of about $32.5  million to establish an arsenic mitigation plan. Other international organizations also contributed. Most of the field work is being done by nongovernmental organizations such as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). But progress is slow, and the program is controversial among several dozen Bangladesh-born scientists now based in the U.S.

Hardened skin nodules typical of first stages of arsenicosis. [World Bank photo]

These researchers, members of the Bangladesh Chemical & Biological Society of North America (BCBSNA), believe the work of monitoring, measuring, and mitigating arsenic contamination can be done faster and more efficiently than the authorities in Bangladesh are demonstrating. Bangladesh's bureaucracy is impossibly huge and cumbersome and doesn't usually rely on scientific advice. The World Bank, which must monitor the loan and account for its disbursement, has succeeded in having a group of technical advisers appointed, but none is a member of BCBSNA. The Bank and UNICEF believe the program is on the right track, but they acknowledge that it will take years. Bangladesh lacks the capacity for any kind of a crash program.

The plan is multipronged, involving immediate treatment of the thousands of villagers already affected by arsenicosis, bringing fresh water to those whose conditions are still reversible, marking wells red for bad water and green for good water, establishing techniques for removing arsenic from contaminated water, and monitoring the water for arsenic levels. All these tasks are difficult because the problem is so vast and record keeping so difficult.

George Mason University chemist Abul Hussam, a BCBSNA member who also runs an analytical chemistry lab in Bangladesh, is one of the critics. With others, he has criticized the Bangladesh government for failing to adopt effective procedures for measuring arsenic at the wells. A methyl bromide-based field kit—essentially a litmus paper procedure—is the screening method of choice. But it is accurate, they say, only to 100 ppb, and unreliably at that. But for something inexpensive and portable, there is nothing else so far. An Austrian firm, however, is developing a digital kit that it says detects concentrations down to around 10 ppb.

Hussam [Photo by Wil Lepkowski]

Hussam and colleagues also developed a filtration system that every village household can use for removing arsenic. He says the system can be assembled from native materials and assembly and operation can be easily taught. It consists of units of three clay pots, stacked upon one another, each containing successive layers of iron filings, coarse sand, charcoal, and fine sand. Filtration procedures must be faithfully followed, which means that the components must be washed regularly. Arsenic concentrations measured in the effluent can be below 10 ppb, Hussam claims. The filtered product is discolored and contains other minerals, but by Bangladesh standards it is potable, he says.

Greg Keast, who oversees the resolution of Bangladesh's arsenic problem for UNICEF, says he is aware of the criticisms but is encouraged by the way things are now going. He says UNICEF was acutely embarrassed by the turn of events with the wells and admits to being frustrated that the turnaround time will take years. He says, however, speed is secondary to making sure it is done well.

The program so far includes four so-called thanas—a thana is a subdistrict consisting of about 250,000 people. The method of preference for testing the wells, he says, is the controversial methyl bromide litmus test. Keast says its sensitivity can be brought down to 50 ppb by doubling the sample size. About 10% of the tests are double-checked in labs that use more sensitive techniques.

Some people are thinking of lowering the Bangladesh standard to 10 ppb for arsenic. That would mean field kits would require sensitivities that low. "I think that's a crazy idea," Keast says. "We've only tested 5% of the 3 million wells that need to be tested. If we all of a sudden lower the standard to 10, we'd need a more sensitive test kit, which doesn't yet exist. It would slow everything down."

Communication with the villagers, he says, is difficult. "We initially told people that if they think there's arsenic in a well that they should find a well that's [marked] green or they should boil the surface water," Keast says.

"That's just not acceptable any more. First of all, there are virtually no trees left in Bangladesh. If we started boiling surface water, there wouldn't be any trees left at all. But the more serious thing is that it's difficult for people to understand the difference between groundwater and surface water. We found people would boil the arsenic-containing [well] water, thereby increasing the concentration of arsenic."

A Bangladeshi village survey member tests well water. [World Bank photo]

The bottom line is that a new communication strategy had to be developed, based on the results of testing. "It tells people the difference between a red well and a green well," he says. "If a village has a mixture of red and green wells, it tells the villagers to use the green wells for drinking and cooking and to use the red wells for everything else."

Keast says UNICEF is testing several filtration systems. But he says they have to be tested in the field. "It's a totally different story under field conditions," he says. "For instance, there's high iron concentration in the water. That tends to clog the filters. We agree that filtering is a good idea, but arsenic concentrations at the red wells vary greatly. That affects the frequency of changing the filters. If you tell the people their filter is good for three months and it's not, that's a very dangerous thing.

"Also, there's the problem of disposal. We have to come up with a system for collecting the spent filter materials and putting them in some sort of scaled pH-controlled landfill because the arsenic will leach back into the groundwater."

Toshiaki Keicho, who administers the World Bank loan from Washington, says another infusion of funds will be needed when the current loan runs out of funds in 2002. He says more money now would do little good because the country lacks the technical capability to spend it effectively.

Keicho says he is aware of the controversy over the methyl bromide field kit. "We are going into international competition to procure a better test kit. We're on the lookout for a better one," he says.

As for the complaints of bungling by the independent scientists, both Keast and Keicho say they recognize the problem. Essentially, each says he hopes some ways of communicating better will come about.

The Bangladesh situation demonstrates how much work remains in other parts of the world to obtain the safe water we take for granted. India, through the Ganges treaty, has assured Bangladesh of sufficient irrigation water for the dry seasons. But Bangladesh still lacks flood control and safe impoundments of fresh water. It still cannot keep human and animal excrement from infecting its waters, it cannot afford a system of freshwater impoundments, it is not using or generating indigenous scientific talent to the extent it needs, and it has no workable national water plan. As usual, it hangs on.

Water for the rich

Red- and green-dabbed wells in Bangladesh are in sharp contrast to the Environmental Protection Agency's grandly equipped National Environmental Effects Research Laboratory in Durham, N.C. But this year, a large area of North Carolina east of Durham experienced a bit of what Bangladesh goes through every year—a big, stinking, dirty flood. Hurricane Floyd sent waters laden with sewage, toxins, and sediment across farms and towns throughout the Carolina coastal plain and made thousands miserable for a few weeks. Unless global change is upsetting rainfall patterns, another flood of that sort won't happen again for 100 years. In Bangladesh, it happens almost every year.

Durham, however, did not suffer from the floods. It is in the Carolina Piedmont, in the upland middle part of the state. Durham is rich, and the EPA laboratory performs a critical service for the rich. It does research for the protection of the U.S.'s drinking water, which ranks only after Canada's as the best in the world. But many millions of health-conscious Americans don't trust their drinking water. They believe their drinking water, containing chlorine and who knows what mysterious substances, is a danger to their health. So they are buying filters for their water taps and carrying around bottles of unregulated, usually untested, springwater.

The Durham laboratory is doing important drinking water research. It is there to prevent the worst fears of the bottled-water set from happening and also keeping at bay possible real dangers to the country. These EPA researchers must provide the intellectual muscle behind one of the most complex environmental laws Congress ever passed—the 1996 amendments to the 25-year-old Safe Drinking Water Act. It is a thoroughly modern piece of legislation and mirrors the unpredictable complexities of industrial civilization.

What the researchers in Durham must do is supply the data that will enable EPA to set new drinking water standards and revise old ones over the next several years. It is a new chemical and biological order for drinking water research, and three of EPA's four priority areas—arsenic, microbial pathogens, and "disinfection by-products (DPBs)"—define that new order quite precisely. The fourth area, radon, is a carryover from the past and is important and controversial in its own right.

Arsenic is an especially controversial item. The current U.S. standard for arsenic is 50 ppb. But that is sure to go down, way down, to something even under WHO's recommended level of 10 ppb. Such a low standard would cost a lot of people a lot of money, especially rural dwellers who receive their water from a single pump. Will the family farm turn to ceramic-pot filtration devices now under trial in Bangladesh?

Hardly likely. EPA and U.S. manufacturers are working on arsenic filtering devices for the family farm and small towns. But as large water systems—mostly in the West, where arsenic deposits in rocks are higher—are faced with reducing arsenic levels to the likely new level, the cost of removing arsenic could generate intense public outcry. Westerners may have to begin paying for water what it's really worth. EPA is under orders to produce an arsenic rule this January and a final standard a year later.

As far as the pathogens go, the rules of the game in water treatment were changed in 1993 by a protozoan called cryptosporidium. Once obscure, cryptosporidium was made notorious and changed the priorities in drinking water research via the 1993 outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee. The epidemic, whose source was traced to human excrement, killed about 100 people and hospitalized several thousand.

DBPs are special critters in their own right and surely represent one of the inconvenient ravages of being rich. They are the products of reaction between the chlorine in chlorinated water and various natural and synthetic organic materials. Some DPBs interfere with reproduction in test animals and other organisms; some are suspected of being endocrine disruptors. Very little is known about them.

So in Durham, the researchers are working on ways of determining what these substances are and how dangerous they are to human health. Other laboratories, especially those of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and those elsewhere in the EPA system, are developing ways of monitoring, detecting, and removing these substances from the water.

The director of drinking water research for the Durham lab is Fred S. Hauchman, and he's under pressure. Congress is unhappy with the pace of research needed to establish the new standards, and its unhappiness was fueled by a September General Accounting Office (GAO) report that said EPA research in drinking water was underfunded and badly planned. EPA Research Director Norine E. Noonan testified in response to the report a month later and essentially told Congress it had little to worry about. EPA was moving right along in its research and would meet all deadlines. That is why Hauchman is under pressure.

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) was one of the sources of criticism in the GAO report. It also lobbied heavily in support of the tough 1996 amendments. Jack Sullivan, who heads the Washington, D.C., office of AWWA, says EPA is still behind the times in focusing mainly on chemicals; microorganisms, he says, are the likely dominant dangers in the future.

"For about a decade or more," Sullivan says, "we were like the lone voice in the wilderness. We kept saying, 'Hey, bugs are more important than those chemicals.' The reason we said that, and are still saying it, is that we don't know squat about bugs." For example, he says, "on the last contaminant candidate list there are 10 microbes and 40 chemicals. Of those 10, we have the ability to measure only one."

The list that Sullivan refers to is an issue the drinking water people at EPA are especially nervous about. The list is controversial and is being revamped with great hue and cry by EPA. The agency defines contaminant candidates as substances "that warrant regulation on the basis of their adverse health effects, their frequency of occurrence in public water systems, and the projected risk reduction to be achieved by regulating them." How they are picked is a problem to a lot of people who want EPA procedures opened up more.

"EPA needs to come into the sunshine a lot more here," Sullivan says. "The fact is that every decision made on environmental and public health issues is made by another ad hoc decision-making process. There are guidelines to do risk assessment, but risk assessment is only one little part of the decision-making process. The process needs to be well documented so that everyone understands the process. Right now, that's not the case."

Hauchman [Photos by Wil Lepkowski]

It is also not Hauchman's domain, and in discussions he sidesteps questions involving regulatory procedures. Hauchman does think the new act is "remarkable" for its policy innovations. "In this act," he says, "special consideration has to be made for small systems, for example. The act talks about source-water protection as well, which is at the interface between the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The two are hardly ever thought about as having much in common. That means the two laws are going to have to be coordinated better. One of the really remarkable things about this [drinking water] law is its very specific and technical research provisions.

"For example, Congress directed us to look at subpopulations at greater risk now and in the future," he says. "That means pregnant women, infants, the elderly, the immunocompromised—people with genetics differences. Imagine—legislation talking about the need to look at how contaminants affect biological mechanisms."

If the Safe Drinking Water Act is fully implemented and paid for, the U.S. will indeed become the world's water paradise.

Mixes and flows of water quality

In the U.S., water experts are using the overused term "new paradigm" to describe the new thinking about water and that trip to paradise. The new thinking is big thinking—looking at the waters of Earth as an interconnected whole.

The water chemists in Durham and the other EPA-related places do their water work in little, detailed ways because their job is to understand how an unwelcome substance in the waters might be damaging to life at the level of enzymes.

But there are other water chemists who get a great deal of their own joy in another way. These chemists study the dynamics of water flows and measure the origin, movement, interactions, and transformations of things in the waters.

This is the kind of work that maps the waters in all their three-dimensional complexities. Where do the nitrates show up in aquifers? What happens to them and where do they go? Where are pharmaceuticals in the water becoming a problem? Research leading toward an EPA rule couldn't do without such core data. EPA is water's regulator; USGS is its sentinel. EPA often makes enemies; USGS has almost nothing but fans.

If you want to know about the dynamics, for example, between groundwater and surface water or how the satellite-based Geographical Information Systems techniques spot changes in a river and its tributaries, USGS's water-quality people are the ones to ask. Among the knowledgeable are Janice R. Ward, director of water resource studies, and William G. Wilber, who is national synthesis coordinator for the National Water Quality Assessment Program.

Both have seen many changes in ways the water-monitoring experts study the waters. "Ten years ago," Ward says, "we were dealing with single-point discharges—discharges of wastes mainly from industry and sewage treatment plants. More than $600 billion has been spent nationally on sewage treatment technology since the first major water pollution control act was passed in 1948. Now, we're recognizing that our streams are not necessarily better yet and that they have some new problems. The new problems come from what we call nonpoint sources—things like urban runoff, agricultural runoff, and lands having chemicals applied to them."

As examples of water stewardship problems today, Ward likes to contrast quality issues that surround Chesapeake Bay water quality with those of the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River. "Two-thirds of the [water in the] country drains into the gulf," she points out. "The big problem at the Mississippi River's outlet into the gulf is hypoxia [low oxygen levels that are killing aquatic life at the gulf bed. It's a huge problem there. When you compare that with the bay, which is in pretty good shape and almost a model of right policy, the scales are utterly different. If I were to hold up a model of procedures the country should be following, I would probably point out the bay."

The Chesapeake Bay is a national resource, renowned for its catches of oysters and crabs. It is a refuge for wildlife, a wintering ground for hundreds of thousands of Arctic fowl. Its major pollutant was once metallic wastes from a huge Bethlehem Steel plant near Baltimore. The plant is now essentially closed, and the bay's current problems are fertilizer runoff and wastes from cattle and chicken operations.

But the bay, Ward points out, is probably the best managed body of water in the country. "People living near the Chesapeake Bay," Ward says, "seem to understand the concepts of a watershed. In the Chesapeake Bay, the federal government and the states have worked with the agricultural community to get the message across."

Messages obviously have not gotten across where the Mississippi River watershed is concerned. Ward says a lot of the same issues of runoff affect the Mississippi but on a much, much larger scale. "A great many more farmers, political constituencies, and dollars are involved here," she says, "and much more food is being produced for the country. There are major debates going on all the time—politically, technically, and by all kinds of interest groups about what the problems really are. And because it's such a large basin and the land use is so diverse and you need so much data to point exactly to the problem, USGS has put a lot of money into collecting data from there."

Ward says the Mississippi River Basin isn't as thoroughly surveyed or as well understood as the Chesapeake. But she says scientists are beginning to understand the causes of the Gulf of Mexico hypoxia. With so many competing interests, progress comes slow in cleaning up the Mississippi. It may be odd and surprising in this environmental era to hear that many farmers still resist the idea that their practices affect life miles downstream. But that's the case in America's heartland. Ward says there's a lot of educating to do in the Mississippi River Basin.

Wilber's job with the National Water Quality Assessment Program is to see that information about the country's waters forms a sensible and usable database. The product is a running account of water-quality problems in such major areas as the San Joaquin-Tulare River Basin in California or the central Nebraska basins or the Hudson River. The program also prepares reports, such as on the status of arsenic contamination of the waters or trends in pesticide contamination of watersheds.

Ward

The program goes back to 1996, when Congress said it wanted to know whether the Clean Water Act was really having a positive impact on the waters. "We had nothing systematic back then that said the $600 billion in cleanup expenditures was money well spent," Wilber says. "So the program was started to document in a systematic way water-quality conditions, how they're changing, and the major factors that we believe are influencing current changes." The hope, he says, was to understand enough about existing pollution control regulations and land-use practices to determine what needs to be improved.

Wilber explains that the emerging issue concerns the amount of water-quality data."The biggest limiting factor," he says, "is that we don't know what it means. The issue we are going to be dealing with in the year 2000 and beyond is the effect of mixtures of these compounds that we are seeing and being exposed to.

"The benchmarks we use are contaminant-specific. One for lead, one for arsenic, and so forth. But you're never exposed to lead by itself. There are more and more of these mixtures because we are a complex society. And the concentrations aren't high. But the reality is that we don't know what the effect of low-level concentrations of these mixtures really are on human beings and on other organisms."

Wilber

Wilber and Ward clearly know about trends in the waters. To them water is a constant dynamic, a kind of molecular poetic, a medium of perpetual change, and something to care deeply about. Equally, though, they care about the science of it all. The Safe Drinking Water Act was an admonishment to EPA that the agency was not using "good science" and was too secretive about its rule-making procedures. With USGS, the focus is on the science and the unknowns. The work is often frustrating.

"We know," Wilber says, "that there are a lot of parameters out there that could be important but that we're not even capable of measuring. That includes the whole category of pharmaceuticals that we are seeing in many places. Then you have pesticide metabolites in the case of agriculture. But chemical companies do not measure a lot of the metabolites for the pesticides they use. We don't even have standard materials so we can know how to analyze for these things."

Commodification of water

One of the harshest criticisms of the world's lack of a true water policy—which is to say a policy that is based on an appreciation of water's interconnectedness with all of life—is a report issued in June by the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based think tank that opposes big trade agreements. Its author is Maude Barlow, national chairman of Canada's dominant social and environmental activist organization, the Council of Canadians.

Barlow's report is titled "Blue Gold." Its basic message is that water has become "commodified," or regarded as just another commodity to be traded. Trade in water is sanctioned by, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it has all but gained acceptance by most international organizations and UN bodies. And that alarms Barlow because, she says, the commodification of water is a sure formula for wrecking one ecological system after another at an accelerating rate and depriving the poor of what she says is a God-given right. Her battle parallels the protest over the commodification of genetic material for the marketing of new agricultural crop species.

Water, she asserts is part of the "commons" and as such should not be owned by private interests. "Most governments," she says, "have very few laws or regulations regarding their water systems. Most haven't even begun to address the issues of privatization, commercialization, and trade in water. Yet, while they leave their water resources unprotected by legislation, they are actively negotiating and signing international trade and investment agreements that supersede national law. These treaties include trade in water; some explicitly grant water rights to the private sector."

Gleick doesn't believe Barlow's fears will come to pass. "I think the era of big projects is over," he says. "Ecologically and economically, it won't work. On the other hand, we do move water from one place to another. And I think we'll continue to see that. I think it's appropriate when the economics work out and when people really take interest in the environmental issues. One of the problems with the big projects in the past is that we ignored the environment. We can no longer afford to do that."

Gleick says there are risks in trading water and that it must be done carefully. One of the problems is that the institutions are not in place to control future large-scale trade, he says. "The World Trade Organization, for example, has not adequately thought about the complex implications of trade in water."

In any case, the World Bank's top water expert, John Briscoe, says water is too cheap to export long distances anyway. Egypt, he says, will never import water in watery form. It chooses to import what he calls "virtual water" in the form of grain.

"Egypt is importing about half of its food grains," Briscoe says. "What Egypt is actually importing in another way is water. For every ton of grain it imports, Egypt is importing 1,000 tons of water. It may sound odd my saying this, but if you look at trades in water, water remains an incredibly cheap commodity. A cubic meter of water weighs a ton and costs about a dollar. It's not very valuable. So transporting it over long distances is seldom going to be an economic proposition. And that's precisely why there is no pipeline from Canada to Egypt, except in grain."

Barlow undoubtedly has a rebuttal, for water is an inexhaustible topic. As an ethic, it demands answers. "Let all who thirst," goes the hymn, "let them come to the water."

If the planners are given what they need, the thirsty will. But as Gleick says, the establishment of that new ethic "will require fundamental changes in how we think about water, and such changes will come about slowly. Rather than endlessly trying to find the water to meet some projection of future desires, it is time to plan for meeting present and future human needs with the water that is available, to determine what desires can be satisfied within the limits of our resources, and to ensure that we preserve the natural ecological cycles that are so integral to human well-being."

[Science & Security]

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