Like the Nile, the Indus is badly overdrawn through trying to keep pace with rising Pakistani food demand. So much water is diverted upstream that the river carries no freshwater at all for its last 80 miles; its once-fertile, creek-filled delta of rice paddies, fisheries, and wildlife has become a desolate wasteland overrun by salty Arabian Sea water for want of outflow. Despite its growing scarcity, Pakistan's water is poorly managed-much is allocated to growing water-thirsty crops to support local industries like cotton textiles and to politically favored regions and is delivered through infrastructure that is inadequate to the nation's needs. The Indus basin's storage buffer is alarmingly precarious-a scant thirty days' capacity protects its crops against the caprice of a drought. At the same time, the extensively dammed and irrigated Punjab faces some of the worst soil salinization in the world. Starting in the 1960s with liberal financial aid from the United States that viewed it as a key strategic partner, Pakistan began sinking thousands of tube wells to pump out fresh irrigation water and lower water tables that threatened to salinize crop roots. When financial aid dried up in the 1990s, however, salinization began destroying huge swathes of Punjabi cropland, which is now in dire need of a modernized drainage system.
Water scarcity is also one of the big political forces rending Pakistan apart internally. As water runs short, the southern Sindhis are bitterly complaining that the traditional political and military Punjabi establishment is robbing an unfair share of the scarce water resources for irrigation schemes in the Punjab. Water scarcity and contamination is so acute in the southern port city of Karachi that residents routinely boil their water; water rioting, and deaths, are unexceptional. The water divisions are reflected in the internal ethnic strife and national political party divides, with the aggrieved Sindhi south being the stronghold of the party represented by the late Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007. As Pakistan's available freshwater fails to keep up with the demands of its burgeoning population, it is not at all evident that the tumultuous state will not start to fissure and fail. Indeed, in April 2009 Taliban militants broke out of rugged, northwest Pakistan and overran the pivotal Buner district-putting them less than 25 miles away from gaining control over the giant Tarbela Dam on the Indus, and with it, a strategic chokehold over central Pakistan's electricity and irrigation waters.
As Pakistan's water-scarcity problems intensify, the Indus is again becoming a rising source of potential confrontation with India. The original international boundaries of the postwar divorce between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India had sliced through the Indus river basin with no regard for its organic hydrological unity-a common problem in many shared international watersheds formerly under European colonial rule. Conflicts over the main tributary rivers of the basin broke out immediately. In 1948, the two states came to the brink of war when India's East Punjab halted the flow of water through two large canals that fed crops on Pakistan's side of the border in a bid to demonstrate its sovereignty over the river. Protracted diplomacy by the World Bank, which then held the key to vital international finance, finally produced the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. Yet the treaty was a minimalist compromise-each side got privileged water rights over three of the six Indus tributaries-rather than the sort of joint basin management agreement that could increase overall water resources through mutual, cooperative development. Although the treaty has held for half a century, including through subsequent Indo-Pakistani wars, a close call in 1999, and ongoing violence in Kashmir, the Indus remains a contentious fuse that can easily ignite again.
With India's population expected to swell by another third to 1.5 billion by 2050, Indian leaders know they need to act swiftly to avert an imminent water crisis. Two main policy paths beckon in the nation's race between economic growth and environmental sustainability: On the one side, India can strive to improve the efficient use of its existing water supply by undertaking the politically painstaking reform of the underdeveloped three-quarters of its economy through gradual elimination of distorting subsidies, rooting out bureaucratic corruption, and introducing new incentives to build small-scale, local storage and other water facilities whose benefits will accrete slowly. Given the political difficulty, and possible explosiveness, of such reforms, and the high uncertainty of success, it is not surprising that many Indian leaders are tempted by the second path of pursuing a grandiose water project that promises to deliver massive new water resources at once. A favored scheme is to build a nationwide plumbing network that interlinks all the nation's main rivers. At the single turn of a few valves by water technocrats all of India's seasonal and regional water disparities, all its extremes between flood and drought, and all the fierce court battles between federal states over water supplies, can be rationally evened out-at least in theory. Environmentalists have decried the idea as another facile, gargantuan, hard-technology folly of oversold benefits and underestimated deleterious ecosystem and human impacts. Yet even if it can be built and does work as advertised, at best it merely buys time for an uncertain, more lasting technological miracle, like Prime Minister Singh's wished-for new Green Revolution, to bail India out from not facing up to the underlying structural causes of its impending water crisis.
India's dream of linking its river systems is already becoming a reality for its booming Asian neighbor, China. In 2001, China launched the first phase of an epic, national river plumbing scheme to try to cope with its own daunting water scarcity challenge. With one-fifth of mankind inhabiting its borders, China faces perhaps the world's most titanic clash between rapid economic modernization and environmental sustainability. Among its many severe environmental degradations, China is running perilously short of available clean freshwater. By about 2030 its supply will run out in vital regions of the country, and its national shortfall will be equal to its total usage in 2008. Increasingly, top leaders are acknowledging that the water scarcity crisis is a primary threat to China's breakneck drive for first world living standards and its capacity to maintain social and political order by fulfilling the elevated expectations of 1.3 billion Chinese.
China's freshwater scarcity is more distressed than its overall populationwater resource ratio suggests because much of its water is not easily accessible where or when it is most needed. Overall, China ranks a lowly 122nd among nations in per capita water use; the average Chinaman makes do with only about one-third the world average. Yet this masks China's hydrological mismatch between its wet south and its water-starved north, where Chinese citizens use a scant one-tenth of the world's average and face a steadily worsening water famine. A half century of intensive industrialization and urbanization, moreover, is also depleting the quality of available supply throughout the country with extreme water pollution. While China's economic consumption and waste levels are soaring toward first world levels, in short, its water ecosystem management and waste disposal infrastructure remain irredeemably third world.
After decades of increased agricultural output from the horrific low point of the 19591961 famines under state farm ownership in which 35 to 50 million died, China's grain production peaked out in the late 1990s and declined by 10 percent through 2005, forcing China to import large quantities of grain to rebuild its national reserve stocks. Without significantly more clean freshwater and improved land conditions, China is staring at the prospect of running critically short of grain and being compelled to use its growing wealth to outbid poorer, hungry nations for food exports grown in water surplus countries. Making matters worse is that Chinese water demand is soaring to feed the transition of newly prosperous Chinese from subsistence, low-water-consuming, vegetarian-based diets to high-water, meat-enriched ones. In the last quarter century, average individual meat consumption increased two and a half times-along with soaring water consumption to produce it. As Chinese prosperity continues to spread, so will the nation's soaring demand for water.
China's stupendous South-to-North Water Diversion Project to convey rivers of water across the breadth of China's vast landscape, is intended to alleviate northern China's immediate crisis. In effect, it is a modern iteration, writ bolder, of the historic Grand Canal: Yet whereas the Grand Canal of China's medieval golden age had bridged the nation's south-north hydrological divide and sustained water-distressed Beijing and the north with shipments of surplus southern rice-virtual water-the twenty-first-century challenge of meeting the needs of dense urban populations, giant factories, and intensively irrigated agriculture demands the direct delivery of indispensable freshwater itself.
Like the Grand Canal, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is a large expression of China's traditional Confucian outlook to harness and conquer nature to serve the sovereign vision of the public good. No nation in the postwar era has been as relentless as China in launching immense waterworks projects. Indeed, Mao Zedong's communist government and its market-reformist successors were uniformly super-Confucian in their determination to mold and transform nature with the powerful industrial technologies of the age. The extensive buildings they wrought were reminiscent of the stunning construction bursts of previous Chinese dynastic restorations. In only half a century, they erected 85,000 dams, one-fourth of them giants-over four dams every day-providing irrigation, flood control, hydroelectricity, and seasonal storage capacity across a country that had little. Rivers were pinched by long levees; projects on the Yellow River alone used enough concrete to build 13 Great Walls. Overall water use quintupled; urban water supplies multiplied a hundredfold. Irrigation intensified and spread to many poor, rain-fed regions for the first time. Industrial use likewise expanded at big water-using steel mills, petrochemical plants, smelters, paper factories, and coal mines, and for cooling fossil-fuel-powered electric plants that soon dotted its riversides and lakes. If the human costs seemed high-Chinese officials themselves estimated that 23 million people had been dislocated in the dam-building frenzy, while critics placed the true number at 40 to 60 million-it was culturally consistent with China's forced-labor traditions and facilitated China's remarkable social feat of more than doubling its population while unleashing, especially since its 1978 market-oriented reforms, one of world history's most spectacular bursts of wealth creation and increased standards of living.
Chairman Mao, emulating the role of China's founder, Yu the Great, had instilled the spirit of China's new water age when, upon climbing up a small earthen dam at the Yellow River during first full inspection of the country in 1952, he wondered suggestively how China could better harness the power of the great river for economic development. Within three years the Mother River that gave birth to Chinese civilization was being grandiosely replumbed according to a plan that featured a staircase of dams and 46 hydroelectric power plants. A 60-foot-tall statute of Yu stands approvingly near the giant dam at Sanmenxia in the heart of ancient China, on which is inscribed the old Chinese adage: "When the Yellow River is at peace, China is at peace."
Yet right from the start the silty, unpredictable Yellow River showed it was not going to easily submit its sobriquet "China's Sorrow" to the commands of modern engineers and central planners. The signature project that was to glorify the Maoist "people's victory" over the Yellow was the Sanmenxia Dam at Three Gate gorge, the last gorge in the plateau of soft, loess soil before the river enters the northern plain of China's wheat and millet breadbasket. Yet as soon as its giant reservoir began filling in 1960, the tragic flaw in the dam's design became evident. Thick silt filled it to the brim in only two years, flooding tributary rivers upstream and threatening a catastrophic cascade downstream if the rising waters toppled the dam. Fearing the obliteration of populous cities, and the young communist state's legitimacy with it, Mao indicated his readiness to destroy the dam by aerial bombardment if no other way to solve the siltation problem was found. Perseverant reengineering and a decade of hard reconstruction ultimately saved the dam. But in the end it was only a shadow of its intended magnificence-a reservoir only 5 percent of its original planned size, with corresponding limitations on its capacity to provide electricity and irrigation.
By that time, a new and even more alarming environmental side effect of China's massive hydraulic engineering of the Yellow became visible. The great, fickle river known for its devastating floods and drastic changes of course began to dry up. The phenomenon was first observed in the summer of 1972, when startled staff at a water measuring station near the river's mouth saw a dry, cracking riverbed that no longer carried any water to the Bo Hai gulf. The average length of the dry area grew steadily from about 80 miles in the 1970s to a peak of about 440 miles in 1995. In 1997 the river failed to reach the sea for seven and a half months, much of its last trickles disappearing into the river sand bed near the inland ancient capital of Kaifeng.
The river's failure to reach the important coastal farming province of Shandong during the growing season caused much of the region's wheat crop to shrivel and die. The alarmed Beijing government decided that, henceforth, diversions from the river would be rationed so that some water always flowed to the sea. Like America's Colorado and the Egyptian Nile, the Yellow had become a totally managed river, with electronic maps, real time hydrological readings, and political measurement of every withdrawal. From 1999, the Yellow River never ran dry. But its fundamental problem has not been solved: There is simply not enough water to serve all the competing interests-farms, factories, cities, and natural ecosystems-that depend upon it. The river has effectively tapped out. In 2000, a mini water war erupted in Shandong when thousands of farmers, irate over their inadequate allocation of Yellow River water, illegally tapped reservoir water earmarked for cities. One policeman died and hundreds of farmers were injured when the authorities moved in to cut off the illicit siphoning.
To compensate for the growing scarcity of Yellow River water, northern Chinese intensified extraction of the only readily available alternative-the large aquifers lying under the north China plain. One aquifer is near the surface and replenishes with rainfall and seasonal runoff; the other lies in a vault of rock and sediment deep beneath it, and is comprised of nonrenewable, ancient fossil water like that in the Sahara and Ogallala aquifers. As Yellow River basin water resources dwindled from overuse, thirsty Chinese on the northern plain began punching through the shallow aquifer and drilling increasingly deeper into the fossil aquifer for water. Extending from the mountains around Beijing in the north, to the Yellow's central loess plateaus, the flat north China plain produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn and is as vital to the nation's food security as Iowa and Kansas farming is to the United States. Although the plain has little reliable rainfall, and is prone to harsh extremes of heat, cold, drought and winds, its fertile soil yields abundant crops when irrigated. Once rich in surface streams, swamps and springs, with fast replenishing, subsurface water deposits often found only eight feet underground, the north China plain ecosystem is drying out rapidly both from secular climate change and overuse by man. As in India, groundwater overpumping is causing the water tables across the plain to plunge. It is not uncommon for well pumps to have to go 200 feet to strike freshwater. Because contamination from urban, industrial, coal-mining, and farm waste has polluted three-quarters of the region's aquifers, metropolitan areas often have to drill three times deeper than that to obtain enough clean drinking water.
Around water-short Beijing, some wells reach half a mile deep into the fossil aquifer. The city's famous reservoir was declared unfit for drinking in 1997, while a large freshwater lake in the plains to the south shrank by two-fifths between the 1950s and 2000. Beijing is running so alarmingly short of water-the septupling of its population to 14 million in the postwar era has simply outstripped the capacity of its assiduously expanded water supply system-that officials have jocularly suggested the capital will eventually have to move to southern China where water is more plentiful.
In total, roughly half the accessible, nonrenewable water was pumped out of the north's huge aquifer in the second half of the twentieth century. Unless new supplies are found, or radical adjustments made, the bottom will be hit around 2035; some localities could run dry fifteen years before that. With four-fifths of China's wheat crop dependent on irrigation water, the nation's food bubble, and parallel bubbles in urban and industrial expansions that are being unsustainably inflated by overpumping, are in peril of popping.
China's impending water crisis could strike even sooner because north China's microenvironment is becoming gravely parched from other unintended side effects of Yellow River basin engineering. The loss of naturally restorative streamflow due to damming and irrigation diversions, extensive wetlands drainage, deforestation, and grasslands clearance for farming, proliferation of open pit coal mining from the 1990s, and the ravenous groundwater pumping, has combined to create one of the world's most acute crises of soil erosion-itself one of the greatest, though little publicized, water-related environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
Half the lakes and a third of the grasslands surrounding the Yellow River's source in the Tibetan plateau have vanished. In the severely deforested middle reaches of the Yellow River, some 70 percent of fertile loess plateau soil has eroded away. Desertification is invading north China. Besieging desert sands have replaced the ancient barbarian hordes as the chief menace at the perimeter of China's Great Wall. In a single decade from the mid-1990s some 15 percent of all the region's potential new cropland was destroyed. Mongolian Genghis Khan's memorial tomb, originally emplaced in a beautiful plateau landscape of lake-filled grasslands, now stands nakedly alone amid barren sands. Great dust storms, like those that ravaged America's High Plains in the 1930s, increasingly now choke the skies of Beijing and kill scores of Chinese-China's leaders have been replanting a "green wall" of trees to try to shield the capital. The precious topsoil that China needs to grow the food crops for its next generation is being swept away in whirlwinds and sprinkled eastward over Korea, Japan, and even across the Pacific Ocean on to western Canada. Often the dust mixes with thick clouds of sooty, polluted air that drifts hundreds of miles to drop black blotches on car windshields in Beijing when it rains. The desiccation of northern China, in turn, intensifies regional droughts. The net effect is a significant reduction in total moisture throughout the Yellow River basin and the peaking out of the grain harvest from the late 1990s.
In their massive reengineering of the Yellow River, postwar China's master architects had not fully accounted for their own industrial age power to disturb the complex dynamics and restorative health needs of a total ecosystem. One of the more bizarre mutations of nature they created was that China's Mother River today flows through north China within hundreds of miles of flood dikes and embankments at an altitude of several yards above the surrounding landscape, like some kind of Roman aqueduct or elevated train trestle. Thanks to the ongoing accumulation of silt trapped within its dikes, the bed of the suspended river is rising by about three feet every decade and dikes have to be built higher and higher to keep it in its bed. A vigorous debate rages whether Chinese engineers have struck a Faustian bargain with nature to avert smaller, regular floods today in exchange for a potentially catastrophic, dike-smashing, super cascade caused by a sudden water-and-silt surge in the future.
China's second great river basin is the Yangtze in the rainy south, where the historical problem wasn't scarcity but water excess. It too has been massively reengineered by government central planners-and likewise is suffering serious degradations from the abuse of its ecosystem. As he had with the Yellow, Mao personally spurred the engineering boom when he inspected the river in 1953 and scolded water managers for the timidity of their plans to control the river's infamous floods. The building ultimately produced storage reservoirs with 13 times more capacity than on the Yellow and the world's largest-and most controversial-giant dam at Three Gorges. Building a dam at Three Gorges that could put an end once and for all to the terrible Yangtze floods had been a dream early in the century of China's modern founder, Sun Yat-sen. In his nationally celebrated 1956 poem "Swimming," Mao famously extolled his own vision for a dam that would "hold back Wushan Mountain's clouds and rain, till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges." Despite Mao's support, the Three Gorges Dam was much delayed, and in 1984 the project appeared to be shelved forever when a government review recommended against it. And but for China's massacre of prodemocracy Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, it might have stayed there.
China's stunning transformation into the world's fastest-growing large power had been launched with the successful 1978 reforms of post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping to enhance administrative efficiency and accelerate economic growth through controlled injection of market forces and some decentralization of political decision making. Many Westerners had hoped that Deng's liberalizing reforms would lead China toward a liberal, Western-style democracy-despite Deng's own disavowal of any such intentions. These hopes were violently crushed at Tiananmen Square. China's hard-line leaders took umbrage at the world's smoldering condemnations. To show their nationalistic defiance and unyielding commitment to China's authoritarian, state-managed market system, they soon resuscitated the Three Gorges project-and imprisoned the dam's domestic critics. Three Gorges was to stand not simply as a dam, but as a crowning showcase of the prowess, wealth, rising world-class status, and unalterable independence of the new China. They hailed it as their civilization's greatest engineering project since the Great Wall.
There had always been little doubt that Three Gorges would transform the Yangtze as thoroughly as the Aswan Dam reshaped the Nile and Egyptian society. Deng's 1978 reforms had done nothing to alter China's traditional attitude toward water management, and when the dam officially opened in 2006 its extraordinary effort to command nature was on full display: it was an impressive 600 feet high and a mile and a half across, with multitiered ship locks and a nearly 400-mile-long reservoir. If 1.4 million people had been involuntarily relocated in its building, its purported greater good to China was that it promised to control floods on the Yangtze, enhance navigation, generate more electricity than any other dam in the world, and serve as the linchpin for a dozen more hydropower megabases upriver that would begin to fulfill China's master plan to triple the nation's hydropower by 2020 and wean it away from its extreme dependency on nonrenewable, dirty coal.
Given the dam's legacy, activists in China's sprouting, broadly based environmental movement were astonished a year later, in September 2007, to hear the senior government official responsible for the dam break a long-standing taboo and not only confess, but publicly warn that Three Gorges posed "hidden dangers" that could cause a "huge disaster...if steps are not taken promptly." He added that China cannot win "economic prosperity at the cost of the environment." Speculation that he may have spoken out of turn was erased the next day when the government news agency itself covered the event with the headline "China Warns of Environmental 'Catastrophe' from Three Gorges Dam."
Among the litany of worries voiced by dam critics had been severe water pollution, landslides, riverbank collapses, larger earthquakes in a fragile, fault-prone region, flooding and shipping problems upstream, and crippled hydropower potential from heavy silt buildup in the reservoir. Indeed, the warning signs that things were amiss at the dam had been accruing as the reservoir started to fill. Rising water pressure and seepage had caused scores of landslides upstream and on tributaries, killing dozens of farmers and fishermen in mudslides and the 165-foot-high waves heaved up by the crashing mud. Upstream water quality also had deteriorated because the dam impeded the dispersal of industrial pollutants and urban sewage, contaminating the drinking water of tens of thousands and threatening to turn the dam's reservoir into a giant cesspool. Freshwater shortages turned up in Shanghai at the river's mouth because the decreased flow in the dammed river was no longer able to offset the force of the tidal inflows from the East China Sea; the metropolis's tap water became foul-smelling and yellowish with Yangtze pollution. Two weeks after the government warning about Three Gorges, it announced that an additional 3 to 4 million people would have to be relocated due to the pollution and landside threats. A few months later, dozens of ships became stranded in a stretch of Yangtze waterway as the river recorded its lowest level in a century and a half.
Even before the opening of Three Gorges Dam, China's engineers of the Yangtze had witnessed distressing side effects of their handiwork. Despite the river's reduced streamflow, terrible floods in 1998 had killed thousands. Deforestation, soil erosion and greater siltation upriver, and the draining of water-absorbing wetlands downriver had combined to create a new type of flood risk on the river. Their dreaded nightmare was a major earthquake in the active fault zone around Three Gorges-possibly made catastrophic by the sheer pressure from the water's weight in its own reservoir. The tragic, 7.9 magnitude quake of May 2008 in Sichuan province near Dujiangyan, site of Li Bing's famous third century BC Min River diversion and irrigation works, that killed 80,000, extensively damaged 400 dams and compelled the draining of the giant, 50-story-tall Zipingpu dam reservoir, only 3.5 miles from the quake's epicenter, might have been a catastrophe beyond imagining had it struck instead 350 miles west at Three Gorges. Indeed, many scientists contended that the anomalously extreme size of the 2008 quake itself may have been caused by geological pressure from the 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu reservoir-a charge strenuously denied by the government, which also blocked websites suggesting that ongoing giant reservoir-building in the region might be putting inhabitants in jeopardy.
The government's public warning about Three Gorges reflected a deepening concern among China's post-Tiananmen leaders of the severity of the environmental danger imperiling China's future-and their own credibility to govern as public anger boiled with each deadly ecological disaster. Just a few months earlier, in June 2007, some 10,000 middle-class environmental protesters had taken to the streets against the construction of a new chemical plant in the coastal city of Xiamen. This followed the angry national headlines in May that the nation's third largest lake and famous national beauty spot, Lake Tai, on the lower Yangtze delta near a branch of the Grand Canal, had suddenly erupted with fetid, fluorescent green toxic cynobacteria-pond scum-depriving more than 2 million local residents of potable drinking and cooking water.
The pollution outbreak at Lake Tai had been building for decades as irrigation and flood works reduced the lake's circulation of cleansing, oxygenating freshwater. From the 1980s, some 2,800 chemical plants also proliferated along the transport canals around the lake, which provided both the large volumes of water they needed for processing and discharge and for shipping the end products to the industrial port of Shanghai downstream. Local officials had encouraged the chemical plants to locate around the lake because their taxes provided four-fifths of local government revenue. Although reports of the extensive pollution they were causing had reached China's top leaders as early as 2001, local political resistance and chemical company cover-ups had kept the national inspectors at bay. A lone, dogged private environmental whistle-blower lost his job and in 2006, after further agitation, was arrested on dubious charges. He was still in prison-and became an instant national hero-when the toxic combination of chemical waste, untreated sewage, fertilizer runoff, and lack of rainfall finally exploded in the lake with oxygen-choking cynobacteria bloom. Within six months the central government enacted antipollution measures and promised to restore China's major lakes to their original pristine states by 2030.
By the early twenty-first century, pollution has reached epidemic proportions throughout China, and is seriously exacerbating the nation's natural water shortages. Over half the freshwater in the nation's major river systems and lakes, and a third of its groundwater, is unfit for human consumption. Two in three major cities suffer serious water shortages. Only one-fifth of wastewater is treated compared to about four-fifths in first world nations. Electricity generation at power plants is sometimes curtailed for want of adequate river volumes, which likewise forces temporary factory production halts at big water users like petrochemical plants, smelters, and paper mills. To keep up with demand, reliance on groundwater has doubled since 1970 to constitute one-fifth of the national supply. By the government's own admission, one-third of its land is severely degraded due to water loss, soil erosion, salinization, and desertification. In 2007, the World Bank concluded that some 750,000 Chinese were dying prematurely each year from the nation's water and air pollution, but acceded to Chinese official requests to excise that finding from the final report for fear that it might stir domestic unrest.
Upon ascending to power after 2000, in fact, China's post-Tiananmen leadership has tried to nudge the country's economic system toward a more environmentally sustainable path. One public initiative, launched in 2004 by President Hu Jintao, attempted to modify China's obsessive growth culture with a new Green GDP calculation that imputed the negative growth costs of environmental degradation in each province. Hu's Green GDP report, however, was issued just once. It met strong political resistance from provincial leaders, who had been empowered under the 1978 reforms and who resented both the conclusions that much of their province's celebrated economic achievement was being canceled by environmental damage and being called to account by central party leaders. Green GDP calculations continued to be made by others, however. The World Bank found that nearly 6 percent-over half-of China's national GDP growth should be canceled from air and water pollution damages to sustainable ecosystems and human health. The deputy minister of China's own, weak state environmental protection agency went further. He estimated the annual cost of environmental loss at 8 to 13 percent of GDP-negating all all China's vaunted economic growth. China's vaunted economic growth.
China's environmental challenge is reminiscent of the unsanitary, overcrowded conditions that hallmarked Britain's cities in the early Industrial Revolution-writ immensely larger and intensified by modern-scale technologies and much more concentrated, rapid development. Somewhere between 2025 and 2035, the clean freshwater may run out in its water-famished north and its promise to clean up its polluted lakes and rivers will fall due to a public that is increasingly restive about environmental hazards. China's conundrum is that it can ill afford to disappoint the soaring material expectations of its 1.5 billion citizens with remedies that might significantly hamper its dazzling economic growth; but its long-term growth may become unsustainable-and possibly suffer an abrupt, destabilizing environmental shock-if it doesn't move fast enough to reverse the systematic overexploitation of its freshwater resources. Its governing dictum thus far remains frozen: Growth first, clean up later.
As the failure of the Green GDP initiative illustrated, changing an entrenched political economic culture is difficult, even for authoritarian China. In the absence of a clear and present emergency, Chinese leaders are mainly sticking to traditional, Confucian approaches that have prevailed since the Han era. Although incremental new pollution regulations and reforestation programs have been issued, only modest steps have been made to encourage more efficient use of existing water supply through pricing that more fully reflects its total cost. As a result, even in the face of widespread scarcity, the price of water in cities, industries and agriculture continues to be closely politically controlled and heavily subsidized. Chinese farmers consequently are still irrigating water-guzzling crops in dry regions in competition with cities and factories that treat and recycle far less water than is common in the West.
Chinese industry generally uses three to 10 times more water than its counterparts in the West-a significant, long-term competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace when the subsidies or the water itself give out. Clean freshwater shortages also impose a ceiling on China's future competitiveness in water-intensive, high-tech industries such as biotechnology, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals. Other hidden competitive disadvantages stem from the interdependencies between water, energy, and food: China's heavy reliance on coal-based ammonia production for its fertilizer and textiles manufacturing, for instance, consumes 42 times more water than the West's cleaner natural-gas-based ammonia production methods. Inefficient flood irrigation and heavy artificial fertilizer use, moreover, continue to pauperize soils, and add to the pollution loads diminishing China's long-term ability to feed itself.
Notwithstanding their warning of possible environmental catastrophe at Three Gorges, China's leaders show no sign of wavering from their tenacious determination to harness and conquer nature through many more giant infrastructure-based water schemes in active fault zones. In addition to the country's master growth plan of a dozen more hydropower bases on the upper Yangtze, China is launching immense dams on the upper basins of the Mekong and the Salween that have the potential to divert and pollute those great rivers before they exit China to bring life to the Asian nations founded around their middle and lower reaches.
Not just China's own Yellow and Yangtze, but most of the great rivers of Asia originate in the Tibetan Plateau. Indeed, China's aggressive international stance toward its domination of Tibet is as much about pragmatic control of its own and Asia's regional water resources as it is about nationalist politics. Given the vital importance of those rivers to water-stressed societies downstream, it is troubling that China stands uncooperatively apart-as it generally does on any international agreement that might possibly constrain its freedom to pursue its overriding national growth goals-from all but two other countries in the world in voting against the 1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention recognizing the need to fairly share international waterways in ways that don't significantly harm other river states and are equitably shared among them.
Yet all China's grandest hydraulic plans are dwarfed in scale and ambition by its heroic South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The inspirational spirit, once again, had been Mao Zedong, who during his 1952 inspection of China's water resources, noted: "Southern China has too much water and the north has too little. We should try to borrow some from the south to help the north." With water famine looming in the north and desirous of making the 2008 Beijing Olympics an international showcase for the new China, Chinese leaders in 2001 launched the transnational civil engineering water transfer scheme of uncertain technical feasibility and environmental side effects to redirect rivers of water-two and a half to three times the volume of the Colorado River or 25 times more than Libya's subterranean Manmade River-northward from the Yangtze basin. Three separate channels, totaling 2,200 miles in length, were designed to carry the water across mountains, canyons, waterways, railways, and other arduous natural and man-made landscapes, to deliver parched north China from its dire thirst.
Work on the eastern and central routes began on an accelerated timetable to be ready to deliver water for the Olympics; the more complex, western project is programmed to start after 2010. The eastern route diverts water from the mouth of the Yangtze and, with the help of 13 pumping stations, lifts it to channels that carry it along the coast through the north China plain and on to the cities Tianjin and Beijing. Large sections run through still-functioning portions of the Grand Canal. The central route is to enlarge the huge artificial reservoir on the Han River, a main tributary of the Yangtze, and build a new 200-foot-wide water canal and aqueduct the length of France across the heavily populated north China plain toward Beijing and Tianjin. Supplemented by water from a Yangtze aqueduct near the Three Gorges Dam, it is designed to travel by tunnel under the Yellow River, cross 500 roads and 120 railway lines, and displace a quarter million people in its building. The goal is to relieve pressure on the Yellow by supplying water to the thirsty regions around it. The final western route is envisioned to reroute water from the Yangtze headwaters in the glacial, Tibetan plateau directly into the Yellow River-the only one of the three routes to replenish the Yellow River directly.
The doubts of environmentalists and water engineers about world history's largest water transfer project were brushed aside in the urgency to deliver water to the north. The main worry about the eastern route has been that it might simply spread the extreme pollution from the Grand Canal and contaminate regional river basins. Following the great flood of 1855, large stretches of the Grand Canal had been left in a state of disrepair and left dry. The hundreds of miles still in use, which transported over 100,000 cargo ships annually, had become a filthy, malodorous, lifeless, black-colored cesspool of factory effluent and urban sewage; even touching its waters was treacherous to one's health. The diversion project requires building hundreds of new sewage treatment plants, closing the endless rows of dirty factories along its banks, massive dredging, and other major cleanups.
Along the central route, a chief concern has been that taking too much water from the Han tributary would upset the region's ecological balance and worsen pollution farther downstream. Pumping water across the mountains from the Three Gorges Dam would, in turn, lower that dam's hydroelectric output by at least 6 percent. The western route would be by far the most technically challenging, having to cut through mountains and gorges through tunnels up to 65 miles long in an earthquake-prone zone.
The South-to-North Water Diversion scheme is China's most ambitious hydraulic undertaking to harness and conquer nature since the Grand Canal itself. Like the Grand Canal, it represents a potential new landmark chapter in water and world history-the opening of a new era of nationwide plumbing networks that consolidate all accessible surface and ground water into a single supply that, if successful, likely will be imitated by other water-distressed nations. Such long-distance, gigantic-scale water-moving approaches are increasingly disfavored in the United States and other industrialized, liberal democracies as environmental anathemas whose benefits can be provided with fewer negative side effects in more ecosystem-sustainable ways. Critics often liken it to the Soviet Union's disastrous alteration of the Aral Sea and regional climate from its replumbing of central Asia.
On one level, the international debate over water management is a recasting of the ancient Chinese Taoist-Confucian philosophical argument over the degree to which man should bend to the natural order to live in modest harmony with it or strive to command and harness it artificially to his will. In modern parlance, the debate is framed in terms of soft-path versus hard-path solutions. Tao-like soft-path advocates, who have been gaining influence internationally with the spread of the environmentalist movement, emphasize improved efficiencies from existing water supplies and "right-scaled" solutions tailored to users' needs that give preference to smaller, more decentralized technologies and administration, and operate in closer harmony with the flow of nature to achieve systemic environmental balances. Hard-path proponents, who have dominated engineering thinking for most of human history and reached their zenith of achievement in the twentieth-century age of dams, continue to favor technologies and centralized infrastructures that strive to remold Nature's ecosystems and water resources on a grand scale. In the twenty-first century, China is the unapologetic, leading state representative of the hard path. Yet on a simpler, everyday level, the Chinese predilection for outsized waterworks projects simply reflects the nation's desperate thirst with few viable short-term alternatives.
If successful, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project could vault China beyond the immediate peril posed by its water-scarcity crisis. But it is unlikely to solve China's longer-term crisis for an obvious reason-the Yangtze itself is already becoming overtaxed and doesn't have enough surplus to send north to keep pace for long with China's rapid modernization. It postpones, but does not constitute a direct response to, the fundamental problem of China's freshwater security and ecosystem depletion.
Meanwhile, global warming lurks as a potential environmental Hiroshima over China's total water supply. Glaciers in the Tibetan plateau that are the source of its major rivers are rapidly melting, as they are across the Himalayas. All of China's giant dam and water transfer schemes could be transformed overnight into an epic boondoggle if disappearing glaciers render them all wrong sized for the new, more extreme seasonal climate patterns. China is not alone in facing the global warming threat, but the sheer scale of its gamble on the success of its large dams and water transfer schemes means that it has more at stake than everyone else. No one knows for certain how much time China has before it feels the full brunt of its climate change reckoning. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that by 2035, global warming is likely to result in the melting away of enough of the glaciers to cause the nation's freshwater supply to fall as much as a third below its farming needs-about the same time frame that China's other water environmental crises are expected to climax.
China's future hinges heavily upon how it meets its water and environmental crises. The twentieth-century restoration of its illustrious, old civilization and its rising superpower status both depend upon it. One possible political outgrowth is that the nation's grassroots environmentalist movement may emerge as an enduring domestic force that nudges the government in a more liberal democratic, responsive direction. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the environmentalist pressures might provoke an authoritarian backlash that collides violently with the inexorable, immediate need to provide vast new supplies of water and other resources to meet the material expectations of a billion and a half people. Whether China succeeds or fails in meeting its water challenges, the outcome will be felt internationally and leave indelible impressions on the history of the twenty-first century.
While water scarcity and ecosystem depletion is a vulnerability for fast-growing, water-stressed giants China and India, it is simultaneously delivering to the relatively water-wealthy, liberal industrial democracies of the West a renewed strategic opportunity to revive their own waning leadership status in the changing world order. In an age of scarcity in which freshwater is becoming the new oil, the industrial democracies enjoy an enormous comparative resource advantage that they have yet to fully recognize or exploit.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
Opportunity from Scarcity: The New Politics of Water in the Industrial Democracies The headline scarcity crises among the world's demographically stressed, water poor overshadows one tantalizing, emerging trend in the relatively water-wealthy, industrial democracies-an unprecedented, sharp productivity gain in the use of existing freshwater supplies. This new development is being driven by the growing engagement of market forces as fresh, clean water resources run short and pollution regulations firm up. It offers an alternative, beacon path for alleviating the water crisis-and a pathway for the Western-led market democracies to relaunch their global leadership. Generations of water resource underpricing and inefficient political management have led to colossal waste in every society's use of water-and therefore created correspondingly huge opportunities to increase effective total water supply by using those current resources more productively. For example, each North American uses two and a half times more renewable freshwater than the world average-and could unleash a proportionately prodigious new supply to productive uses simply by adopting readily available, high-efficiency practices and technologies. Tapping such already available supplies, moreover, comes at a lower environmental cost than any incremental new supply that can be extracted from nature or reallocated among river basins.
The democracies born in ancient Greece and Western traditions enjoy greater leeway to pursue improved efficiency solutions to their water shortages because, in the main, they have more favorable water profiles, competent governing mechanisms, and many fewer demographic burdens on their resources than the world's water Have-Nots. Most have renewable water supplies that are ample, available year-round on a predictable basis, and fairly easily accessible. Rain-fed agriculture is widespread and provides a reliable natural food base. While America's groundwater use is large and growing in some major regions, the nation is not excessively dependent upon it for irrigation to feed itself as are India, Pakistan, China, and countries in the Middle East. Water infrastructures, while in many cases obsolete, leaky, and in need of overhaul, are comprehensive and functional. Industrial and urban water pollution is regulated and monitored. Although the industrial democracies' overall relative population size is shrinking to only one-ninth of humanity, their comparative hydrological resource advantages help put them in a good position to make the breakthrough innovations to meet the era's defining challenge of augmenting the productive supply of freshwater in an environmentally sustainable and economically vibrant manner. As with other water breakthroughs in history, doing so would leverage their wealth and influence in the new century's global order.
Indeed, by aggressively reallocating its current supplies using existing technologies, America is well positioned to not only remain the world's leading food exporter, but also to free up water resources to boost its energy output, accelerate industrial production, and maintain robust growth in its services and urban economies. The comparative impact upon a world economy and political order constrained by water resource scarcity is potentially akin to the advantages gained from the early, large discoveries and production of oil in the twentieth century.
The remarkable increase in water productivity under way in the advanced industrial democracies represents a startling historic break in the correlation between absolute water withdrawals and economic and population growth. After three centuries of increasing twice as fast as world population, average water withdrawals per person are declining in many advanced democracies without any slowdown in economic growth. American water withdrawals peaked in 1980, and declined about 10 percent by 2000; in the same period, the nation's population expanded by 25 percent and the economy continued on its long-term growth trajectory. From 1900 to 1970, U.S. water productivity per cubic meter withdrawn had remained relatively constant at about $6.50 of gross domestic product; by 2000 it had soared toward $15. Japan's economic productivity per unit of water increased fourfold between 1965 and 1989. The pattern was similar in much of Europe and Australia.
The sudden upsurge in water productivity is a market response to the economic incentives created by the combination of growing water shortages and water pollution regulations that came into force from the 1970s with the environmental movement. The environmental golden rule of thumb is that users have to discharge water to the ecosystem in the same pristine condition as they have taken it from nature. Led by thermal electric power plants, industry, and cities, large water users soon realized that they could save money on pollution cleanup by using less water overall through more efficient conservation and recycling technologies.
Gradually, the first generation of government environmental rules are being refined into a subtler, soft-path efficiency approach more attuned to ecosystem needs and services. In messy, pluralistic Western democratic style, government officials, market participants, and environmentalists are often working together as constituent representatives in devising solutions tailored to specific user needs and conditions, including appropriate scaling. Small-scale, ecosystem-friendly solutions are preferred when feasible. The European Union's Framework Directive on water policy (2000), for instance, expressly discouraged new dams where economically and environmentally viable alternatives existed; dams are also starting to be removed and replaced by wetlands restoration and reforestation in America. Legislatures and courts for the first time are granting ecosystems a legal entitlement to a sustainable share of contested water supplies. Creative concepts of valuing provision of ecosystem services are also being devised so that environmental regulations can be fulfilled and exchanged in a more flexible, market-oriented manner. Greater attention is being focused on suppler efficiency measures, such as water consumption-that is, water that is used and lost for other purposes such as irrigation water-instead of simpler, gross withdrawals, which fail to capture the productivity of recycling water for multiple uses or treated releases that are reused again by others downstream. Intermediation mechanisms are being launched, often supported by governments, to help users sell their annual water rights at premiums to other, presumably more efficient, users.
As water grows scarce and soft-path regulatory approaches take form, a market price and a marketplace for water services are coming into existence. A few businesses are pioneering measurements of their water-use "footprints," a parallel of the carbon footprint tool gaining traction to help each entity reduce its contribution to global warming. Business enterprises are making major investments in water to compete for market share and profits. In vague outline is the embryonic contour of an artificially grafted, long-missing Invisible Green Hand mechanism that fully prices in the cost of utilizing and restoring water resources and that can enlist the historically prodigious forces of private market wealth creation in the provision of a sustainable environment. It is still early days. Large, crucial sectors, notably agriculture, remain heavily subsidized, lightly regulated for pollution, and insulated from market forces. Development is occurring locally, and sporadically, in response to needs as they arise. The change faces strong entrenched and ideological opposition on all sides. Hard-path approaches to moving, storing, draining, and cleaning water still prevail overall within the slow-changing governing water bureaucracy. At the same time, traditional environmentalists remain suspicious of any treatment of water as an economic good. They fear it may lead to its being governed solely as a profane commodity, according to dictates of market forces with inequitable outcomes and without regard to its inherently priceless and sacred value to nature and human life. But between these two poles, something novel is taking hold.
One place where the combination of water shortage, ecosystem protection, and market responses has been catalyzing a more productive use of existing freshwater is in America's arid Southwest. At the dawn of each new era of water history, societies face the classic transitional problem of how to reallocate water resources from old uses to newer, more productive ones. By the end of the twentieth century, America's Southwest water productivity gap had become enormous between its privileged farming businesses that were still guzzling from the trough of socialized irrigation water from the bygone age of government dams and the modern West of dynamic cities and high-tech industries. The same volume of water-250 million gallons per year-could support 10 agricultural workers or 100,000 high-tech jobs; California's agribusinesses were using 80 percent of the state's scarce available freshwater but producing just 3 percent of its economic output. Within agriculture, too, water was being inefficiently consumed in one region by water-thirsty, low-value crops like rice and alfalfa, while high-value fruit and nut trees were being cut back in another place for lack of water. The essential problem, even in the arid Southwest, is not that absolute water availability is too scarce to sustain robust economic growth, but rather that regulated water is both too cheap and vested in less efficient users and thus impedes the simple market price incentive mechanism that would otherwise reallocate it toward more productive uses.
In few places was the disparity greater than among the 400 farm agribusiness descendants of Southern California's Imperial Valley water district who consumed 70 percent of California's 4.4 million acre-foot allocation of Colorado River water under the 1922 compact at the delivery cost of only about $15 an acre-foot, and the 17 million thirsty Southern California coastal dwellers who were paying 15 to 20 times more to meet their much more modest needs. Imperial Valley's water surfeit, furthermore, encouraged particularly profligate farming practices, including the desert planting of water-thirsty crops, and the consumption of twice as much water per acre as other California farmers.
Such an enormous disparity between the farm and city price of water and the formation of a political alliance of city, industrial, and environmentalist interests with the clout to offset the farmers' historical dominance within California's hardball water politics, did not escape the notice of the billionaire Bass brothers, scion investors of one of Texas's oil empires. In the early 1990s, the Basses invested about $80 million of their $7 billion fortune to buy up 40,000 acres of Imperial Valley farmland-and the water rights that were conferred with it. Reminiscent of William Mulholland's deception in purchasing Owens Valley land to gain access to its river water in the infamous Los Angeles water grab earlier in the century, they avowed to farmers wary of losing their water rights that they wanted the land merely to raise cattle and not to speculate on water.
Soon enough, though, the Basses managed to persuade the cooperatively owned Imperial Valley water district that its best interest lay in selling San Diego 200,000 acre-feet of its 3.1 million acre-feet entitlement each year starting at $233 per acre-foot-a markup of nearly 20 times its own subsidized effective cost-for an immense, cumulative profit of more than $3 billion over seventy-five years. The plan, moreover, called for Imperial Valley to invest a slice of these profits in water efficiency improvements intended to save at least as much water as it was selling to the city, so that in practice it wouldn't lose any of its precious Colorado River water at all. Despite the farmers' exorbitant profit, San Diego liked the deal because it provided an independent water source and a one-third savings over what it was then being forced to pay to the powerful, Los Angelesdominated Southern California water authority.
Although applauded by federal and state regulators, environmentalists, and most nonfarm participants because it finally began the transfer of water from agriculture to the cities, the deal got bogged down in the internecine battles between California water authorities and other interests. As the millennium approached, the proposed water sale became engulfed entirely in the larger regional crisis on the Colorado: Diminished by drought, full allocation draws by fast-growing Arizona and Nevada, and the fact that the river's average annual volume was less than the 1922 compact had estimated, the Colorado basin was fast running out of enough total water to supply everyone's existing needs. Storage in Lake Mead was dwindling to alarmingly low levels. Without major modifications, the iconic Hoover Dam and other Colorado water infrastructure, would have sufficed for less than a single century.
In late 1999, U.S. secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt, backed by the other Colorado basin states, issued the first-ever ultimatum to California to end its decades of river overdrafts, then running about 800,000 acre-feet per year, and to live within its compact limit of 4.4 million acre-feet. California was given until year-end of 2002 to come up with a plan to wean itself off its Colorado overdraw by 2016. The regulators also insisted that the plan include the transfer of water from Imperial Valley to the coastal cities and to protect existing water ecosystems. Failure to devise an acceptable program, the interior secretary warned, would lead to the immediate cutoff of the excess flows.
Imperial Valley agribusinessmen furiously resisted being forced to accept the terms of a deal that they correctly foresaw would be the start of a slippery-even if lavishly gilded-slope to losing control of the virtually free irrigation water, which American taxpayers had granted their forbearers for settling the barren desert long ago. In particular, they bridled at the demands that they allocate some of their water to preserve the ecosystem health of the Salton Sea, the inland lake that had formed when the Colorado River flooded its levees in 1905, and that was replenished only by the runoff from the valley's 82-mile All-American Canal and 1,700 miles of irrigation ditches.
When the December 31, 2002, deadline passed without an acceptable plan, the unthinkable happened: At 8:00 a.m. on New Year's Day 2003, the new interior secretary, Gale Norton, stood by the pledge of her predecessor from the opposition Democratic administration, and switched off three of the eight pumps controlling the flow from the Colorado into the 242-mile-long aqueduct to Southern California. At the turn of the spigot, Imperial Valley lost as much water as it was to have sold to the cities-without any compensation. Still the farmers did not buckle. Then, in August 2003, the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation increased the pressure by releasing a study that concluded that in response to the drought the government could cut off water to Imperial Valley because farmers were using it wastefully-the whispered amount of the waste was 30 percent. Playing "good cop" to the Fed's "bad cop," the California state government stepped forward and offered to share some of the water and infrastructure cost burden to preserve the Salton Sea.
Within two months, in October 2003, the agribusinessmen of Imperial Valley capitulated. The ceremonial signing of the landmark agreement to transfer Colorado River water to San Diego and other cities was held at the Hoover Dam. In all, 500,000 acre-feet per year, or one-sixth of Imperial Valley's water, would be reallocated. An estimated 30 million acre-feet-some two years' annual flow of the Colorado River-would move from primarily agricultural to urban uses over seventy-five years. No one doubted that further calls on agricultural water lay ahead as the New West continued to rise.
Despite the multibillions of dollars of profit they would receive for selling a fraction of their taxpayer-subsidized water, some bitter Imperial Valley farmers felt cheated. "They should pay $800 an acre-foot versus $250," complained farmer Mike Morgan. "The greatest water heist ever is going on right under your feet." Others, however, promptly got over their grievances and moved forward to recoup much of the water lost to the sale by improving existing water productivity through investments in repairing leaky irrigation networks and in new technologies, such as high-tech satellite sensors to monitor crop and soil moisture and activate precision watering devices. In fact, the only big losers from the Imperial Valley water deal were Mexican farmers, who for decades had been pumping up groundwater that had leaked from the irrigation ditches on the American side of the border. They now suddenly found their wells running dry due to the Californians' more-efficient irrigation methods. Ever lucky, Imperial Valley soon stumbled upon another potential bonanza under the Salton Sea's southwest corner-a large geothermal field that could significantly boost California's renewable electricity production.
By breaking the political logjam over the Colorado, the landmark agreement with Imperial Valley paved the way in late 2007 for a second breakthrough accord-an emergency plan among the Colorado River compact states about how to allocate scarce water among themselves should the river flow fall below the 7.5 million acre-feet promised to the lower basin. Given the downward revision in the Colorado's long-term average flow to only 14 million acre-feet per year, and with Lake Mead only half full because of a severe drought, such an emergency was likely to occur; moreover, with climate change models forecasting a 20 percent decline in rainfall compared to most of the twentieth century, and shrinking annual mountain snowpacks exacerbating summer shortfalls, the emergency seemed likely to strike sooner rather than later. The shared sense of impending crisis spurred unusual, proactive efforts to improve the productive use of existing water supplies before the crisis threshold was crossed.
The 2007 emergency accord included innovative market and ecosystem-management arrangements that stimulated interstate water trades and consumption reductions by allowing users to bank their savings in Lake Mead or aquifers for later use. Fast-growing, desert-bound Las Vegas, for instance, offered to pay for new water storage facilities or desalinization plants in California in exchange for an extra draw on California's Colorado River allotment. Las Vegas was already one of the most conservation efficient cities. Every drop of its sewage wastewater is treated and released into Lake Mead, where it is further purified by dilution and pumped back to the city's taps. Even with its growing population, water use has fallen from its peak in 2002 thanks to various conservation methods, including promotion of low-flow toilets and appliances, paying residents to replace water-thirsty lawns with natural desert flora, and higher consumer prices. In the eastern Rockies, the city of Aurora, Colorado, was creating a recycling loop even more elaborate than Las Vegas's. It was buying agricultural land downstream along the South Platte River so it could draw water that had been naturally filtered by the sandy riverbanks through a series of adjacent wells. The water was then to be pumped to the city in a 34-mile-long pipeline, purified, used, treated, discharged back into the river, and then recaptured in the riverbank wells to start a new circuit. Each round-trip took forty-five to sixty days and recycled half of every drop.
Spurred by continuing drought, California introduced a state water bank that allowed northern California farmers to sell their seasonal water rights on fallowed land to farmers using more efficient farming techniques and growing more valuable crops. In 2009, the state-set price for watering parts of California's fertile, but naturally arid and badly overpumped Central Valley, was $500 an acre-foot-nearly three times the price of 2008, but still far below what the free-market price would likely have fetched. Coastal Southern California has also been turning to wastewater recycling to supplement drinking supplies because all available local and aqueduct-delivered natural water supplies had been exhausted. The Colorado River had maxed out. Mountain snowmelt and reservoir levels were diminishing with drought and global warming. Even long-distance freshwater piped from northern California was being curtailed, as court rulings and federal restoration for the Central Valley elevated the priority of conserving water to improve the health of the fish and wildlife of the depleted ecosystem of the San JoaquinSacramento River delta estuary and San Francisco Bay. With population growth forecasts still rising, Los Angeles and San Diego, as a last resort, were turning to large-scale recycling and purification of sewer wastewater-long used for irrigation and lawn watering-to augment urban drinking supplies.
The disparaging name critics label such projects-"toilet to tap"-is a misnomer. Not only is the wastewater intensively cleansed to a level that can be purer than naturally derived tap water; it does not go straight to the tap, either. Instead it is injected into the ground to be further filtered by natural aquifers before being drawn into public drinking supplies. There is little novelty in the concept. For decades, cities across the United States routinely discharged their treated sewage, or effluent, into local rivers such as the Colorado, the Mississippi, and the Potomac, where in diluted form it was taken into the drinking supply of cities downstream. The same principle had been followed by London in building its sanitary system in response to the mid-nineteenth-century Great Stink. The Southern California recycling projects differ in using slow-moving groundwater instead of surface river flows to do the additional natural filtering. The pioneering prototype was the facility that opened in January 2008 in Orange County, California, which has a capacity of 70 million gallons per day. Its labyrinth of tubes and tanks take in dark brown treated sewage water, then remove solids with microfilters and smaller residue through high-pressure reverse osmosis before a final cleansing with peroxide and ultraviolet light. The final product, as pure as distilled water, is injected into the aquifer for natural filtering before entering the public drinking supply. Water managers in water-stressed southern Florida, Texas, and San Jose, California, have been contemplating similar projects to help meet their future needs. Only one major city in the world-Windhoek, in Africa's arid Namibia-actually recycles water on a large scale from treatment plant directly to the drinking tap. Yet aside from the revolting idea of the source of such water, there is no technological, or cost-efficiency obstacle to believe that such truly closed, recycled infrastructure loops will not become more commonplace as the age of water scarcity advances.
Water shortage is also propelling Southern California's leadership in a modest global movement toward state-of-the-art desalinization technologies. Desal costs in California had fallen from $1.60 to 63 cents per cubic meter between 1990 and 2002, putting it on par with large, efficient reverse osmosis plants built in water-starved Israel, Cyprus, and Singapore. By 2006, there were enough proposals for new seawater desal plants to increase California's capacity a hundredfold, and supply up to 7 percent of the entire state's urban water use. The first major test of desal's mass production capabilities in California was joined in 2009 with a decision to build a giant, reverse osmosis plant near San Diego that was projected to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water daily from the ocean by 2011-10 percent of northern San Diego's requirements. While total desalinization capacity is still very small, California's sheer size and its special, water trendsetting status makes it a potential catalytic tipping point-especially if coupled with breakthroughs whereby solar or wind power can substitute for nonreplenishing and polluting fossil fuel energy-for the long hoped for takeoff of water desalinization.
A half century earlier, President John Kennedy had expressed mankind's age-old dream of desalination. "If we could ever competitively-at a cheap rate-get fresh water from salt water," he mused, "that would be in the long-range interest of humanity, and would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment." Ever since man first took to the seven seas, sailors had dreamed of desalting seawater. Long-distance European mariners in the Age of Discovery pioneered the installation of primitive desalting equipment for emergencies. Crude, large-scale water desalting was enabled by advancements in the distillation process made in the mid-nineteenth century by the sugar refining industry. Modern desalinization, however, was brought to fruition by the U.S. Navy, which developed it during World War II to provide water to American soldiers fighting on desolate, South Pacific islands. By the 1950s, a thermal-desalinization process based on steam-pressure-induced evaporation was developed; although very expensive, it was adopted on a fairly large scale in Saudi Arabia and other oil rich, waterless coastal nations of the Middle East. Also in the 1950s, the American government supported university research for a better desalinization technique-the reverse osmosis process was invented during Kennedy's presidency and was put into action on a small scale using brackish water in 1965. With the development of a much-improved membrane in the late 1970s, reverse osmosis desalinization plants for seawater became possible. Since they required enormous amounts of energy and the water they produced was so costly compared to water obtained by other means, it was unsurprising that the first big city desal plant was opened in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, in 1980, where energy was cheap and water pricelessly scarce.
Major improvements in energy recovery techniques and membrane technologies occurred with such speed from the 1990s that by 2003 desal costs had fallen by two-thirds, and desal was becoming a viable component of the diverse portfolio of water supply solutions being adopted in water-famished, coastal regions where supply was abundant and expensive long-distance water pumping unnecessary. Perth, Australia, for instance, got nearly one-fifth of its water from desalinization. Israel's desal share was poised to rise rapidly and desal offered hope of quenching some of the mounting thirst in the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Reverse osmosis membrane technologies at the heart of desalinization were also being applied in recycling wastewater in Orange County's pioneering plant and in Singapore, where it helped replenish local reservoirs. With growth stirring in desal, major corporations were gearing up to win market share in order to earn large profits as the market developed. Projections of market growth in the decade to 2015 ranged widely, from a trebling to a septupling of the $4 billion spent in 2005.
On its most optimistic projections, however, desalinization cannot be the panacea technology to solve the world's water crisis in the short term. Installed desal capacity is simply too tiny-a mere 3/1,000ths of 1 percent of the world's total freshwater use. Even if costs plunged, there are unsolved environmental problems about how to dispose of the briny waste; inland regions cannot be reached without expensive pumping and building long aqueducts. In the most likely, best case scenario, desal will become one of a portfolio of freshwater supply techniques that help countries muddle through their scarcity crises.
In the rainy, temperate eastern half of America, New York City, the nation's urban trendsetter in long-distance water storage and delivery systems, is also in the vanguard of the new soft-path movement. One of its most closely watched experiments is to exploit the natural, cleansing services of forested watersheds to improve the wholesomeness of its drinking water-and simultaneously save billions of dollars for the region's 9 million inhabitants. Ever since its gravity-fed Croton water system opened in 1842, New York had routinely extended its aqueducts and reservoirs farther and farther upstate into the Catskill Mountains and the upper reaches of the Delaware River to obtain more clean freshwater. By the 1990s New York City's water network featured three distinct water systems with one and a quarter year's storage capacity that delivered 1.2 billion gallons per day from 18 collecting reservoirs and three lakes in upstate New York. But a serious problem of deteriorating water quality had been building as the pristine rural, forested countryside surrounding the reservoirs degraded with modern development and farming. As a result, half the city's reservoirs were chronically choked with poisonous phosphate and nitrogen runoff from dairy farm pastures and over 100 sewage treatment plants that depleted oxygen levels and produced foul, algae blooms, as in China's Lake Tai, that killed cleansing biological life. When U.S. fresh drinking water standards were toughened in the late 1980s, New York City faced an ultimatum: build a state-of-the-art filtration plant-at a staggering cost of $6 to $8 billion, exclusive of the huge operating expenses of the energy-intensive filtration facility-or devise an alternative method to protect the quality of the city's water.
New York's innovative response was a $1 billion plan to improve the upstate forests and soils surrounding the reservoirs so that they conserved more water and filtered out more of the pollutants in a natural way-in effect, New York was enhancing the natural watershed ecosystem and putting a market value on its antipollution services in place of far more expensive, traditional, artificial cleansing infrastructures. Also remarkable was that New York's ecoservices project was forged by a new, politically inclusive consensus among city and state officials, environmentalists, and rural community representatives. Their multiyear negotiation was formalized in a 1,500-page, three-volume agreement signed in January 1997.
At the heart of the plan, New York City would spend $260 million to purchase some 355,000 acres-nearly twice the geographic area of the city itself-of water sensitive land from voluntary sellers to buffer the reservoirs. Some of the new city-owned land would be open to the public for recreational fishing, hunting and boating, and leased to private interests for environmentally controlled commercial activities such as growing hay, logging and production of maple syrup. Up to $35 million more would be spent to clean up and modernize several hundred dairy farms-including reducing their water consumption in milk production by up to 80 percent-to help them compete against the encroachment of concrete road polluting and waste-producing subdivisions. To mollify local communities still resentful of the city's imperious, historical use of compulsory sales to acquire watershed land for its reservoirs, the city agreed to spend another $70 million for sundry infrastructure repairs and environmentally friendly economic development. A new environmental division was created within the city's century-old watershed police force; armed with chemistry kits and looking for leaky septic tanks and rivulets of frothy, toxic discharges, they patrolled the countryside and subdivisions to protect the reservoirs. In effect, New York City has created a market price for the ecosystem services provided by its watershed. A decade later, it took another step toward marrying ecosystem sustainability and market economics by negotiating a complicated land swap with a big resort developer whereby a public forest acquired watershed-protective mountainside real estate in exchange for a smaller resort project on a less environmentally sensitive side of the mountain. The developer also agreed not to build on runoff-prone steep slopes or use chemical fertilizers on its golf courses.
The early results of New York City's watershed experiment are auspicious. Environmentalist watchdogs gave New York City good grades for drinking-water quality in 2008-a year after the city had won a further conditional ten-year filtration plant exemption from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In economic terms the program had saved the city up to $7 billion in unnecessary construction, expanded recreational revenues, and augmented the long-term sustainability of New York's water supply. With continued success, it offered a potential template for the next generation of urban water development. Indeed, other American cities, and some abroad including Cape Town, South Africa; Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Quito, Ecuador, also adopted variants of New Yorkstyle ecosystem service valuations to help solve their local challenges.
With echoes of both New York and Southern California, Florida's governor Charlie Crist launched in 2008 a novel initiative to revive a moribund restoration plan for the state's famous wetlands, the dying Everglades. For nearly a decade, a joint federal-state plan had been held hostage by the political grip of the state's water-guzzling, phosphate-polluting, and price-subsidized big sugarcane farmers. Deprived of clean water, half the Everglades had already dried up. By spending $1.34 billion in state funds to buy 181,000 acres of land from the giant U.S. Sugar Corporation, Crist opened the way for a land swap with other agribusinesses that would open channels to renew the historic flow of fresh, clean water to the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee.
In addition to enhancing its upstate watersheds to improve the quality of the water entering its reservoirs and aqueducts, New York City also embarked on a showcase water conservation program in the early 1990s aimed at trimming the system's total demand, thus reducing the absolute volume that had to be supplied and subjected to expensive purification and wastewater treatment. First, water and sewerage rates were raised sharply toward market levels to discourage wasteful use. A highly publicized, $250 million toilet rebate program for poorer families was also launched to jump-start a citywide trade-in of old 5- and 6-gallon toilets for newer toilets that consumed only 1.5 gallons per flush. Toilets are by far the biggest single water consumer in the household-accounting for about a third of consumption-and in 1992 the government mandated a gradual national conversion to low-flow models. By 1997 the toilet replacements, higher prices, and other measures, including comprehensive metering and leak detection, helped New York's daily water consumption to plunge dramatically to 164 gallons per person from nearly 204 gallons in 1988-a 20 percent savings, or 273 million gallons per day. As a result, New York officials projected that the city would not need any additional water supply for another half century, while incalculable millions of dollars were saved on sewage treatment and pumping. The replication of New York's conservation methods by cities across the United States has been one of the driving forces behind the unprecedented increase in America's water productivity since the 1980s.
New York City faced one other gargantuan challenge, however, for which it had no low-cost, water-productivity-enhancing alternative to old-fashioned, large government expenditure-the decrepit, leaky and potentially failing state of vital components of its aging water infrastructure. Significant leaks had sprung below ground in the original aqueducts that conveyed water from its upstate reservoirs, beneath the Hudson, to a final storage reservoir on the city's outskirts in Yonkers. More threatening still, New York's two, leaky urban distribution tunnels, completed in 1917 and 1936, respectively, which conducted water from the Yonkers reservoir throughout the city, hadn't been shut down for inspection for over half a century for fear they might fail catastrophically-forcing the evacuation of large portions of New York. From 1970, New York tunnel crews had been laboriously drilling through the solid bedrock 600 feet underground-some 15 times below the depth of the subway-to construct a modern, third tunnel that would enable the original two to be shut down and rehabilitated. The $6 billion Tunnel Number 3 was the largest construction work in New York City's history and one of the most monumental, although invisible and virtually unknown, civil engineering feats of the era-a subterranean descendant of the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal. Until the day it was finished and ready for service, around 2012, New York would continue to live in a slow-motion race against time and potential disaster.
The status of any society's waterworks network is both a bellwether and a foundational element of its economic and cultural dynamism. Many metropolises in America and Europe that industrialized early face the formidable challenge of modernizing their original domestic water systems. Although the quest for an era defining water innovation captures the headlines, maintaining good infrastructures for all the four main historical uses of water-domestic, economic, power generation, and transportation-is also a necessary condition of the industrial West's ability to fully exploit its comparative, global freshwater advantage. The failure to do so imperceptibly erodes efficiency and resiliency, and makes society more prone to shocks, such as the levee failures and flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005. Yet the engineering complexities, and the low political reward of supporting costly repairs, pose enormous obstacles. Often the work involves difficult, subterranean construction, amid intense atmospheric pressures and large, fast-moving volumes of water that cannot be shut off, and in systems that had not been designed with future renovations prominently in mind.
Following revelations from Riverkeeper, the private Hudson River environmental watchdog group and a major player in the watershed program, New York authorities in 2000 admitted publicly for the first time that a branch of the Delaware Aqueduct, the city's largest, had been leaking significantly for a decade. When first detected in the early 1990s, the tunnel's leakage had been about 15 to 20 million gallons per day; by the early 2000s, the leakage had swelled to 35 million gallons. While that totaled only 4 percent of the aqueduct's overall capacity, the leaks had to be fixed before they got worse and eventually the tunnel's structure gave way. The last inspection in 1958 had been done by driving through the drained, 13-foot-diameter tunnel in a modified jeep. But with all the cracks the tunnel could no longer be shut down for fear of structural damage from the change in water pressure. So in 2003, in an unprecedented action, the city sent an unmanned, remote-controlled, torpedo-shaped, minisubmersible, with protruding, catfish-whisker-like titanium probes that had been specially designed by the sea experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on a 16-hour data gathering mission through the dark, watery 45-mile-long tunnel. After studying the results for four years, the city decided upon the first phase of the complicated repair, which would cost $239 million. A team of deep-sea repair divers, working round the clock for nearly a month in a sealed, pressurized environment, were lowered 700 feet to perform the preparatory inspections and measurements amid the tunnel's currents in winter 2008.
New York's struggle to plug its twenty-year-old aqueduct leaks paled in degree of difficulty and urgency, however, to completing Tunnel Number 3. The project's genesis went back to 1954 when New York engineers descended a city shaft several hundred feet to the main control site for Tunnel Number 1 to prepare a long-overdue inspection. Their intent was to shut off the water flow so cracks could be found and repaired by welders from inside the tunnel. But when they began to yank on the old, rotating wheel and long bronze stem at the bottom of the shaft that controlled the six foot diameter open and shut gate inside the tunnel, it began to quake from intense pressure. Terrified that the brittle handle might break-or worse that the inside gate might shut permanently in the closed position and cut off all the water flowing to lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, and part of the Bronx-they dared not continue. They returned to the surface. From that day onward, New Yorkers had lived in ignorant bliss that no one could repair the two badly leaking, antiquated distribution tunnels providing all the water for their homes, hospitals, fire hydrants, and 6,000 miles of sewage pipes-or even know if a structural weakness was building to a critical threshold that would cause the tunnel to rupture and collapse in a sudden apocalypse. Some believed that only the outward force of water pressure was maintaining the tunnels' integrity. "Look, if one of those tunnels goes, this city will be completely shut down," said James Ryan, a veteran tunnel worker. "In some places there won't be water for anything...It would make September 11 look like nothing."
It took sixteen years before city officials were able to break ground on the elaborately planned remedy. Tunnel Number 3 was to be a redundant, citywide water network with many branches and a state-of-the-art central control facility. Once operative, it would allow flows to be easily turned off and repairs made anywhere in the city. The project's problems were time, immense cost-in its early years the project was delayed by New York's 1970s financial crisis-and the arduous, dangerous work of blasting and drilling through bedrock in tunnels that were as deep as some of New York's tallest skyscrapers. The work was done by a specialized, grizzled, close community of urban miners, known as sandhogs. Sandhogs had built virtually every notable New York tunnel system from subways to utility shafts; in the 1870s they worked inside high atmospheric pressure caissons, excavating the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were the first workers to encounter the agonizing chest pains, nose bleeds, and other symptoms of the bends. Many were killed. Two dozen had died digging Tunnel Number 3 alone. Because of the danger, they were well paid. Sandhog jobs tended to be passed down from father to son; many sandhogs were of Irish and West Indian descent.
The excavation work on Tunnel Number 3 was all the more difficult because the sandhogs knew they were digging against doomsday if Tunnels Number 1 or 2 collapsed before they finished. Usually they could advance no more than 25 to 40 feet per day, chiseling, dynamiting, removing endless tons of rubble. Their methods were modern-age equivalents of the fire and water rock-cracking technique used by ancient Rome's aqueduct builders and Li Bing's Chinese tunnelers along the Min River. Progress accelerated when a new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, set a high priority on improving water facilities citywide and invested an additional $4 billion toward finishing Tunnel Number 3. The excavation rate more than doubled with the introduction of a new 70-foot-long boring machine-called the mole-with 27 rotating steel cutters, each weighing 350 pounds. Donning a hard hat in August 2006, Mayor Bloomberg descended into the tunnels and took a seat at the mole's controls to bore through the final foot of rock to complete excavation of the second, and most crucial, of Tunnel Number 3's four stages. The work, however, was not finished. At least six more years of work lay ahead to line the tunnel with concrete, fit it with instruments, and sterilize it so it could carry water. By then, it would be linked up with the water system's space age, electronically regulated, new central command center-featuring 34 precision stainless steel control valves, specially fabricated in Japan under constant, two-year vigil of New York city engineers, housed inside 17 giant cylinders weighing 35 tons. The control chamber itself was 25 stories beneath the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park in a domed vault three stories tall and the length of two football fields. Nothing aboveground, save a small guard tower and door leading into the grassy hillside indicated that it was the entrance to one of New York's most critical infrastructures.
Throughout the industrialized democracies, localities are facing infrastructure challenges similar in kind, if usually smaller in scale, to New York's. Estimates for upgrading America's 700,000 miles of aging water pipes and wastewater, filtration, and other facilities at the core of its domestic water systems range from $275 billion to $1 trillion over the next two decades. Global water infrastructure needs are several quantum orders of magnitude greater. Many major world cities have notorious leaks; possibly up to half of drinking water entering cities worldwide is lost before reaching residents.
Regions that fail to improve their efficient use of existing water resources are more prone to water shocks, slower economic growth, and to become enmeshed in political clashes over water with neighbors. The state of Georgia's unwillingness to invest to upgrade fast-growing Atlanta's water supply system, for example, caught up with it in 2007 when a prolonged drought caused the city's water reserves to dwindle to only four months. The governor's only immediate recourse was to impose emergency measures and to try to wrest a greater share of water from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system away from downriver neighbors Alabama and Florida, which depended upon the flow to keep its own electric power plants and factories running, and to sustain the Gulf coast ecosystem for its shellfish industry. Implementing simple efficiency measures, Georgia reckoned retrospectively, could have alleviated its water crisis by reducing water demand by 30 percent.
Relentless regional freshwater demand and diminished ice cover due to warming temperatures is also taking a costly toll in the north by lowering normal water levels in the immense Great Lakes. Every inch of lost water depth forces the lakes' fleet of 63 transport ships to lighten their annual cargo load by 8,000 tons to avoid grounding mishaps. This adds another cost to the global competitiveness burdens already faced by America's aging industrial belt of steelmakers and heavy manufacturers situated on the lakes' edges for its cheap transport and industrial water. Seaports that don't keep pace with the modifications required by the new generation of giant, ocean cargo supercontainers, some as long as a 70-story skyscraper and traveling halfway around the world between ports of call, likewise risk losing out on global shipping business. Extensive port restructuring helped New York recover some of its historical greatness as a harbor with renewed Asian trade following a prolonged loss of business in the second half of the twentieth century to more modern ports in America's southern and western coasts. With Great Lakes states ever fearful of schemes to siphon their water to dry parts of America, the U.S. Congress in 2008 passed a new legal compact governing lake water that provided strict conservation measures and banned the export of the lakes' water out of their basins.
The Great Lakes conservation measure was disappointing news to some in Texas, which had designs on its water dating back many decades. Although oil had built Texas, the state's future prospects-its economic prosperity and its outsized leverage on American national politics-rested chiefly upon whether it could rationalize its water use to sustain its large cities and industries. In the absence of a comprehensive program that increased effective water supply through efficiency and conservation, Texas seemed set to live through an accelerated reprise of Southern California's history of water grabs and speculations. Billionaire water speculators, including oil magnate T. Boone Pickens and Qwest Communications cofounder Philip Anschutz, for years had been exploiting a Texas law to acquire unrestricted water rights through land purchases and lobbying government officials to fulfill their ambitious plans to pump and sell nonrenewable Ogallala Aquifer water through multibillion-dollar pipelines hundreds of miles to thirsty cities such as Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso. At $1,000 an acre-foot, their profit potential was spectacular and Texas's good fortunes could be extended for a while-until the Ogallala fossil water itself gave out. Yet even as certain regions declined, the industrial democracies enjoyed an enormous advantage in the water infrastructure-building challenge facing the world, thanks to the existence of a competitive industry of large and small companies seeking to profit from the growing thirst and capable of expeditiously delivering solutions.
While cities are learning to use their existing water more efficiently, industry has been the largest single contributor to the unprecedented surge in water productivity. Across the industrial spectrum, water is a major input of production. Alone, five giant global food and beverage corporations-Nestle, Danone, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola-consume enough water to meet the daily domestic needs of every person on the planet.
Superior water productivity is one of Western industry's competitive advantages in the global economy, helping to offset the low wages and laxer environmental standards of industries based in poorer nations. American companies began to treat water as an economic good with both a market price for acquisition and a cost of cleanup before discharge in response to federal pollution control legislation in the 1970s. With characteristic business responsiveness wherever operating rules were clear and predictable, they sought ways to do more with the water they had and to innovate in their industrial processes so that they needed to use less overall. The results were startlingly instructive of the enormous, untapped productive potential in conservation.
No industrial sector uses more water than thermoelectric power plants. Huge amounts-two-fifths of all U.S. water withdrawals-are sucked out of rivers and other water sources as coolant, even though overall net consumption is low because the water is returned to its source a few minutes later. Galvanized by federal regulations requiring that the quality of the discharged water be as pure and cool as it was when withdrawn, the power plants increased recycling and converted their once-through systems to more efficient cooling technologies. By 2000 some 60 percent of all thermoelectric power capacity was using modern systems; the amount of water needed to produce one kilowatt-hour had plunged to only 21 gallons from 63 gallons in 1950.