Peter Gleick: How We Can Avoid a World Without Water

By Tara Lohan, The Nation. Posted February 19, 2009.

TL: And maybe we'll start rethinking a lot of the biofuels stuff, too.

PG: Biofuels, like ethanol, are a great example of solving one problem and causing another -- and in this case, solving one problem and causing a lot more problems.

TL: We hear a lot these days about "peak oil," but you write about "peak water." What do you mean by this?

PG: Discussion of peak oil got us thinking about the idea of peak water. Rather than run out of water, what we're going to run out of is the ability of the planet to sustain the amount of water we use and the way we use it. Water is a renewable resource, mostly. After it is used, it just goes somewhere else in the hydrologic cycle, and it comes back. And so we are not literally running out of water, with some exceptions. For example, there are parts of the planet where we use groundwater faster than nature recharges it.

TL: Like the Ogallala under the Great Plains?

PG: Yes -- the Ogallala, the North China Plain, parts of California's Central Valley, parts of India. In that sense, it is very much like oil. And the idea of peak water very much applies in the way it does for oil. There comes a time when it is harder and more expensive to get, and so use drops off. And that is a problem in many parts of the world. A lot of our agriculture relies on non-sustainable groundwater use.

TL: Where are you seeing this the most?

PG: We see it in almost every ecosystem: the Everglades, the Aral Sea, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Yellow River, the Colorado River. There are, unfortunately, a distressingly large and growing number of places where the ecological consequences of our water use is significant and bad.

TL: So we have a new president now. What should we be pushing for at the national policy level?

PG: Without forgetting that there are important things to be done at the local level, with a new administration we have a new opportunity to change a lot of things. I think we need a new national water commission. The last national water commission was in 1970.

There are many suggestions that came out of that commission that are still perfectly relevant, but there are new things as well. They don't talk at all about climate change and it is a reality that we have to deal with. They don't talk about the role that water should be playing in our foreign policy. I think we can spend more money in some areas to help meet needs for water and sanitation.

We also need to talk about how at the international level we can play a role as a country in reducing the risks of conflicts over water. There are many parts of the world where water is a growing source of conflict and violence.

And another thing is that it is really time we rethought water quality at the federal level. We have two major laws, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, which we've had since the early '70s. They need to be brought into the twenty-first century by updating the kinds of things that we monitor, how we monitor, how we enforce our water quality laws, and the kinds of technologies we encourage to protect our water. We need to do a better job at protecting water quality than we're doing, and that should be done at the federal level.

Maybe we have that opportunity now.

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Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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