EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

The world really is running out of fresh water. That hits close to home
by Peggy Boyer Long

"Now when I envision the globe, I try to see beyond political boundaries to the world as it really is: a collection of watersheds, lakes, rivers, and aquifers that together maintain the earth's biota — which is to say, us. Now the world's quotidian skirmishes and conflagrations are mere background noise. Now it is the water that scares me." Jacques Leslie, "Running Dry," Harper's, July 2000

Last spring, water ministers from 115 countries met in The Hague. While they couldn't, or wouldn't, agree on solutions, Jacques Leslie writes in Harper's, they agreed on the problem, what he calls an unassailable fact. The world is running out of fresh water.

Here's how the experts see it. The world's supply of fresh water remains roughly constant. In the past, we've been able to tap that resource in ever-more-ingenious ways: with dams

— there are some 840,000 of them throughout the world — with irrigation systems, and with wells. But, again experts agree, the increase in the world's population means, as Leslie puts it, the usual technological response "is beginning to push against an absolute limit."

Further — about the consequences of this next point, there is disagreement — the human impulse to channel, even move water has had powerful impacts on the earth's natural ecology. Leslie, and many environmentalists, would add detrimental. Dams deplete rivers. Salt breaches irrigation systems. Consider this much. We are indisputably draining groundwater faster than aquifers can be replenished. We are sucking the world's lakes and rivers dry. What has Leslie scared is not merely the potential for thirst, but the potential for famine. "The billion-dollar question among water and agriculture experts," he writes, "is whether, owing in part to water scarcity, the human race in the twenty-first century will lose the capacity to feed itself." What has to change, he concludes, is how we use the world's available supply of fresh water.

These facts, the unassailable ones and the disputable ones, hit closer to home than we might think.

The international water conference, and another water conference held last July in Chicago, met as Midwesterners faced their second straight summer of drought. This relatively short-term crisis was averted by rain, as Derek Winstanley and Mark E. Peden of the Illinois State Water Survey note in this month's issue, though we can hardly afford overconfidence in the long-term.

"Drought conditions will revisit us," they conclude in the essay that begins on page 33, "and with a greater frequency and severity than we have experienced in recent memory. As the population increases in some regions of the state, those water supplies will become strained. In short, Illinois will continue to face periodic water shortages."

These water experts, and others who attended the Chicago conference, argue rightly that we should do something about it now. And, rightly, they see the need to begin with comprehensive regional water supply planning.

As critical as the suggestion is, even this initial step may not be easy. Setting aside well-grounded Midwestern fatalism about the weather, there's something more. "Global warming, we know, is here," Leslie writes. "Nearly every significant indicator of hydrologic activity — rainfall, snowmelt, glacial melt, evaporation, transpiration, soil moisture, sedimentation, salinity, and sea level — is changing at an accelerating pace."

Making planning difficult, at best. But not impossible.

At the least, like the officials who met in The Hague, we'll need to agree on the problem, if not the solutions. Now may be as good a time as any to read up. Fortunately, there already are plenty of resources on this issue. Here are just two: In his Tapped Out, Paul Simon outlines the challenges, and in her Fresh Water, E.C. Pielou offers a scientific grounding in the ecology of water.

4 November 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues