Blue Gold, European Water Partnership Blog

With the launch of Blue Gold, the European Water Partnership (EWP) is creating a communication platform for the EWP, its members, the European water community, stakeholders and those interested in water at large.

Blue Gold is in important tool in achieving EWP's mission to be an action-oriented forum for all stakeholders including local, national and European governmental agencies, knowledge institutes, business, non-governmental organizations, public and private financial institutions, end-users and civil society groups. It constitutes a platform for exchanging views, finding solutions for water challenges in wider Europe and stimulating cooperation and partnerships.

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T. Boone Pickens thinks water is the new oil—and he’s betting $100 million that he’s right

There Will Be Water

by Susan Berfield, BusinessWeek
Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it’s all a matter of supply and demand. “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” he says.

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling “blue gold"—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

Into this environment comes Pickens, who made a good living for a long time extracting oil and gas and now, at 80, believes the era of fossil fuel is over. So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there’s a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year. “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”

THE BIGGEST PUMP WINS
Pickens, an Oklahoma native, geologist, and someone who calls himself the luckiest guy in the world, is the quintessential entrepreneur. He started as a wildcatter in 1956; three decades later his Mesa Petroleum was the largest independent exploration company in the U.S. But that’s not how Pickens made a name for himself—it was his hostile bids, one after the other through the 1980s, for oil companies far more powerful, far wealthier than his own. Pickens thought they could do more for their shareholders. He never took over any of them. He did, however, push them into deals they might not have considered otherwise, which helped reshape the oil industry. He did, sometimes, make hundreds of millions when he sold his stakes. And shareholders did, often, benefit. He was briefly the most famous businessman in America, a corporate raider who always wished people would call him a shareholder activist.

By the mid-1990s, though, Pickens had fallen. After a brutal and expensive fight with Unocal, he gave up his raiding. He lost control of Mesa Petroleum after a series of financial and managerial miscalculations. He went through an expensive divorce from his second wife and retreated to his ranch. It was in the midst of this that he acquired a newfound regard for water as a commodity that should be bought, sold, and traded for the benefit of those who own it and those who can afford it.

In 1996 a local water utility made its first big purchase of groundwater rights in the Panhandle. The utility, known as the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CRMWA), bought nearly 43,000 acres of water, some of it just south of Pickens’ ranch, for $14.5 million. (Property owners in Texas, and elsewhere, can sell their water separately from the land above it.) That Roberts County would become the stomping ground for the Panhandle water wars was perhaps inevitable. Underneath it lies one of the world’s largest repositories of water, moving slowly among layers of gravel, sand, and silt. The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from Texas to South Dakota and contains a quadrillion gallons of water—enough to cover the U.S. mainland to a depth of almost two feet. Yet the extensive irrigation necessary to grow corn, cotton, and wheat in west Texas has left the Ogallala nearly depleted in some places. It is not an aquifer that is easily or quickly replenished. But the land in Roberts County is unsuited for agriculture, and so the Ogallala there is largely untapped.

Since the early 1900s, groundwater use in Texas has been governed by what’s quaintly called the rule of capture, otherwise described as the biggest pump wins. It lets landowners pump as much water as they can, even if doing so drains neighboring properties. This put Pickens in an uncomfortable position: If he didn’t sell his water to CRMWA, the utility could potentially suck some of it right out from under his ranch. So he tried. But “they told me to kiss off,” he says. Kent Satterwhite, who was then assistant general manager, says: “Boone was fairly insistent that we buy his water. It made him mad that we didn’t have the money to buy it.” That was the first of several contretemps between Pickens and various local water authorities. Pickens next approached the city of Amarillo, which also had begun to acquire water rights in Roberts County. It wasn’t interested, either, though it did purchase water from several other nearby landowners. “Amarillo was pissed off at me,” says Pickens, who has a long and fraught history with the city. When Amarillo turned him down, Pickens felt surrounded. “I had to find a buyer for my water,” he says, “or I was going to be drained.”

LANDOWNERS DIVIDED
There’s a saying in Texas: “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting.” Pickens decided to fight. In 1999 he created a company called Mesa Water and began to accumulate water rights so he could strike a deal with another city altogether. The hell with Amarillo. Pickens was confident he could sell his water: The population of Texas was expected to jump 40% by 2020, mostly in urban areas one dry season away from drought.

Pickens’ decision to get into the water business was regarded by some in the Panhandle as nothing more, or less, than a shrewd move by a man who knows the value of commodities. The economy of the High Plains region is based on people taking out the natural resources and selling them. If water that can’t be used for farming ends up in the taps of city residents hundreds of miles away, that’s fine. Pickens says he’s buying stranded, surplus water that needs to be rescued. Kim Flowers, who runs an 8,300-acre ranch in Roberts County, speaks for many landowners when she says: “People can do with their water as they wish as long as they’re not wasting it.”

In all, Pickens, CRMWA, and Amarillo have spent about $150 million to buy up nearly 80% of the water rights in Roberts County, undermining and outbidding one another along the way. One unsurprising effect of their competition is that the price of an acre of water has in some places doubled, to $600. That’s something in which Pickens takes pride. Much as he did in the 1980s, when he went after big oil companies he believed weren’t doing right by their shareholders, Pickens now talks about creating value for Roberts County landowners. They make money from selling their water while continuing to live, run cattle, and hunt on their property. “I told them I was going to raise the value of the land, and I accomplished that. The landowners are all tickled to death. I made our water worth something. And anybody with any sense would sell it.”

Not all Roberts County landowners wanted to do business with him, though. Pickens intended to pull water from an aquifer that is pretty much the sole source for the Panhandle, and that isn’t refilled quickly, and sell it to a place like Dallas, whose water use is the highest of any city in Texas. This seemed ludicrous, even reckless, to some. C.E. Williams runs the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District, which is responsible for managing the competing demands on the region’s share of the Ogallala. He puts it this way: “As a district, we cannot pick and choose where the water goes. But personally I am concerned. I have a son who is an irrigated farmer, and I have grandkids, and I want to make sure that they can conduct commerce when they want to.”

Pickens has a way of dismissing the complexity of a situation, sometimes even the possibility of an opinion contrary to his own. In this case, any opposition to his plan from anyone who is not a Roberts County landowner, who is not essentially a shareholder in this venture, he deems irrelevant. Williams, he points out, doesn’t himself have any property. “Water is a commodity,” he says. “Heck, isn’t it like oil? You have to come back to who owns the water. The groundwater is owned by the landowner. That’s it.” When it comes to potential buyers, Pickens cares about only one thing: how much they’re willing to pay. “Do I care what Dallas does with the water? Hell no.”

Republican State Representative Warren Chisum is a Roberts County rancher who owns 12,000 acres next to Pickens and sold his water to Amarillo in 2001. He would seem to be a natural ally. He’s not. “My water will remain local,” he says. “It’s controversial to ship it out of the Panhandle. When we run out, we’re done. The long-term value is to keep it here. That’s contrary to what Pickens wants to do. It’s his water. But he won’t be here in 50 years.”

In 2002, Pickens began approaching several of Texas’ sprawling cities, all of which share one defining feature: Their populations are growing so quickly that they are constantly in need of new supplies of water. But with water, as with so much else, location is critical. And Pickens’ water is far, far away from anyplace that might buy it. Pickens knew he’d have to build a pipeline, and to do so at anything resembling a reasonable cost, he’d need the power of eminent domain—the right of a government entity to force the sale of private property for the public good. Water utilities have that right. If Dallas agreed to buy Pickens’ water, it could extend such authority to him. But Dallas deemed Pickens’ price too high and declined to do a deal. So Pickens and his executives tried to create a Fresh Water Supply District—a government entity that would have that power. But they couldn’t get it through.

Over the next several years, Pickens continued accumulating water rights and began to lease other land, this time with the idea of creating the world’s biggest wind farm. “One of the great wind areas is right up where we are,” says Robert L. Stillwell, Pickens’ general counsel. “You can set it right on top of where the water is.” And since, one day anyway, Dallas may well buy both, Mesa could use a single right-of-way for the water pipeline and the electric lines. In Roberts County there would be real economic benefits from the wind farm. “The wind is meant to sweeten the deal,” says Representative Chisum. “The big money for Pickens is in the water.”

It had been a decade since Pickens first realized the potential value of the water deposited eons ago in the sand below the High Plains. Now it was time to employ the one resource he hadn’t yet used: his lobbying clout.

POWERFUL LOBBYING
In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened in the grand statehouse in Austin. The 80th session turned out to be very productive, and one person who kept busy during that time was J.E. Buster Brown, a former state senator and one of the most powerful lobbyists in town. Among Brown’s clients is Mesa Water. “My job is primarily defensive,” Brown says of his work for Pickens. “I’m watching to make sure there is no legislation passed that creates obstacles to Pickens doing what he wants to do. I’m supposed to make sure nothing bad happens.”

Brown did more than that: He helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way. “We helped move that along,” says Stillwell. “We thought it would be handy and helpful to everyone.”

After the bill passed, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Texas director of Public Citizens, an advocacy group, says several legislators were drinking coffee and reading through it. “Uh-oh,” one said. They’d just realized the amendment would help Pickens build his pipeline. “Many legislators were watching for this play,” Smith says, “and it still snuck by.” State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican who represents Lubbock, says: “It probably should have raised our suspicions, but we were moving a lot of bills. And it would have been hard to hold up this one even if we’d discovered the amendment.”

Pickens still needed the power of eminent domain if he was going to build his pipeline and wind-power lines across private land. And by happy coincidence, the legislators passed a smaller bill that made that all the easier. The new legislation loosened the requirements for creating a water district. Previously, a district’s five elected supervisors needed to be registered voters living within the boundaries of the district. Now, they only had to own land in the district; they could live and vote wherever. The bill, as it happens, was put forth by two legislators from Houston; Brown says he and Mesa had nothing to do with it. “That wasn’t our bill,” says Brown. “I wish I could take credit for it.”

Pickens moved quickly to take advantage of the new rules. Over the summer of 2007, he sold eight acres on the back side of his ranch to five people in his employ: Stillwell, who resides in Houston, two of his executives in Dallas, and the couple who manage his ranch, Alton and Lu Boone. A few days later, Mesa Water filed a petition to create an eight-acre water-supply district with those five as the directors and sole members. On Nov. 6, Roberts County held an election to decide whether to form the new district. Only two people were qualified to take part: Alton and Lu Boone. The vote was unanimous. With that, Pickens won the right to issue tax-free bonds for his pipeline and electrical lines as well as the extraordinary power to claim land across swaths of the state.

No one at Mesa regards Roberts County Fresh Water Supply District No. 1 as an unusual arrangement. “We’re no different from any other water or electricity supplier,” says Stillwell, meaning they, too, would use the power of eminent domain only as a last resort and for the public good. As for the suggestion that he wouldn’t have qualified to be a board member under the old rules, Stillwell says: “It doesn’t matter that I’m on the board. It would have been another me, just a local me.”

“WE’RE NOT HAPPY”
Pickens was ready to reach out to landowners along the route. In April, 2008, Mesa sent out some 1,100 letters to people along the 250-mile proposed right-of-way, from Miami, Tex., to a town called Jacksboro, just short of Dallas. The letters included a Texas landowners’ bill of rights, information on the condemnation procedure, a map of the route, and a list of open houses they could attend for more information.

One stifling evening in May, about 50 people showed up at the Twin Lakes Community Activity Center just outside Jacksboro. When the ranchers arrived, more than a dozen of Mesa’s public-relations consultants, hydrologists, and land men were waiting for them. Standing behind tables laid out with pens, cups, hats, and bags with the District No. 1 logo, the officials were available to answer questions about the 250-foot-wide corridor Mesa would use to construct, maintain, and possibly expand the pipeline and electric lines. While this arrangement allowed everyone to get information specific to their property, it also precluded any public questioning of the Mesa standard-bearers. This did not go unnoticed by the ranchers. “We’re not happy,” said one. “Pickens is pushing his power trip on us. I can’t fight his money. But if he asked first, I might have thought better of it.” Another said: “Land goes way back for a lot of people here. If you tell people you want their land, Texans raise their guns.” At the end of the evening, most of the pens and hats and cups still lay on the tables.

Pickens isn’t bothered that by his invoking the right of eminent domain, Mesa has inflamed landowners up and down the route. “It always does,” he says. Mesa expects to acquire the land it needs in the next 18 months and pay about $30 million for it; Pickens wants to begin construction on the $1.2 billion pipeline right afterward. It should take about three years to complete. If all goes according to plan, Mesa will be able to pump enough water to satisfy the needs of some 1.5 million Texans every day.

Pickens hopes to strike a deal with Dallas or the urban areas around it before Mesa starts building the pipeline. “Eventually they will need it,” he says. So far, though, the talks might best be characterized as preliminary. “We continue to meet with Pickens’ staff and engineers to get a better understanding of the proposal and so they can understand what our needs are,” says Mike Rickman, assistant general manager of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which supplies water to 13 cities north and east of Dallas. “Mesa has a lot of water. But how much will it cost to buy it and deliver it?” Rickman says that at some point he would have to consider the consequences for the Ogallala: “Does it make sense to take water from an arid portion of the state? We don’t want to harm our neighbors out there.”

In Roberts County, people hold on to the hope that pumping from the Ogallala can be controlled. In 1998, as Pickens and local water utilities began buying up water rights, the groundwater conservation district placed some restrictions on the rule of capture that it calls the 50-50 rule: Anyone who receives a new permit to pump can draw down the aquifer by only 50% over the next 50 years. Later, an additional limit of 1.2% per year was set. These essentially manage the depletion of the Ogallala under Roberts County; there, it is replenished at a rate of only 0.1% a year. Williams, who put the rules into place, says: “It’s like taking dollar bills out of your bank account and putting nickels back in. Even with a big bank account, there’s an end. That’s pretty much what’s happening in the Ogallala.”

Pickens has promised to abide by the 50-50 rule. “I don’t have any concerns about depleting the aquifer. All I’m doing is selling surplus water,” he says. “I’m not about to drain all the water out of Roberts County. I have my ranch there. But I could sure take it down 50% and not hurt anybody. And it could make a lot of people a lot of money.”

Fluoridated water now reaches nearly 70% of U.S. population

Nearly 70 percent of U.S. residents who get water from community water systems now receive fluoridated water, according to a report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The proportion of the U.S. population receiving fluoridated water, about 184 million people, increased from 65.8 percent in 1992 to 69.2 percent in 2006, said the report.

The percentage of people served by community water systems with optimal levels (which are defined by the state and vary based on such things as the climate) of fluoridated water ranged from 8.4 percent in Hawaii to 100 percent in the District of Columbia, according to the report.

“Community water fluoridation is an equitable, cost-effective, and cost-saving method of delivering fluoride to most people,” said William Maas, director of CDC’s Division of Oral Health. “We’ve seen some marked improvements; however, there are still too many states that have not met the national goal. The national goal is that 75 percent of U.S. residents who are on community water systems be receiving fluoridated water by 2010.”

Fluoride, a naturally occurring compound in the environment, can reduce or prevent tooth decay. Adding or maintaining tiny levels of fluoride in drinking water is a safe and effective public health measure to prevent and control tooth decay (dental caries). The second half of the 20th century saw a major decline in the prevalence and severity of dental caries, attributed in part to the increasing use of fluoride.

Based upon studies and a systematic review, the new report suggests that fluoridation resulted in a median 29.1 percent relative decrease in tooth decay in the United States.

WaterAid rsanitation eport released at the G8 Hokkaido summit in Japan

Tackling the Silent Killer – The Case for Sanitation

This report sets out a framing case for the importance of sanitation in securing progress across the health, education and economic MDGs. The paper highlights the profound impact of poor sanitation on child mortality and points to compelling evidence that poor sanitation may be the biggest contributing factor to child deaths in the developing world. The paper points to the failure of the international aid system to respond to evidence (or historical experience) for strategic or ‘smart’ interventions that can drive the necessary rapid developmental gains if the MDGs are to be realized.

link to report http://www.wateraid.org/documents/tacking_the_silent_killer_the_case_for_sanitation.pdf

Making the Negev Desert bloom once seemed like a good idea, but it’s killing the Dead Sea.

The Myth Of Water

By Kevin Peraino and Kevin Peraino and Joanna Chen, NEWSWEEK

Israel ranks 49th on the green index but first among desert nations.

Few notions are more deeply rooted in Zionism’s founding mythology than the exhortation to “make the desert bloom.” The earliest Zionist pioneers arrived in Palestine with a strong faith in science and technology, shaped by the Jewish enlightenment that began in the late 18th century. They also brought an earthy sense of self-reliance that made growing their own food—even in the bleak Negev Desert—a high priority. Amid the ashes of the Holocaust, that determination only deepened. “For those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands, and even millions,” Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1954, when he moved to the Negev himself. As Israeli society grew increasingly devout in the 1970s, the prophet Isaiah provided further inspiration: “The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

At first glance, today the parched land indeed looks glad. The arid coastal plain sprouts with fields of watermelons, tomatoes and sunflowers, and Israel has earned a reputation for creative use of sparse water supplies. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Israelis pioneered the use of “drip irrigation"—which delivers water directly to a plant’s roots. More recently, Israeli experiments with desalination and water recycling have drawn attention around the world. The Yale/ Columbia Environmental Performance Index ranks Israel 49th overall and best among desert nations, in part for managing the stress irrigation puts on water supplies. Still, some scientists worry about the environmental cost of building an economy in the desert. Israel consumes 1.8 billion cubic meters of water each year; 15 years from now, it will need an additional 1.5 billion cubic meters to meet demand rising due to population and economic growth, according to Israeli water experts. About half of Israel’s clean water is used for agriculture, yet farming accounts for only 2 percent of Israel’s GNP. Considering those numbers, some environmentalists are beginning to question whether agricultural growth in a desert climate like Israel’s is really sustainable. The question, says David Brooks, a Canadian water expert and environmentalist, “is not whether water is used efficiently in Israeli agriculture, but whether agriculture is an efficient way to use water in Israel.”

Water has long been a deeply political issue in the Levant; wars are waged over it. Aquifers and other sources of water tend to straddle political boundaries. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War, was a water-company executive who spent long hours poring over maps of potential sources. According to “The Iron Wall,” a history by Avi Shlaim, Eshkol believed that “without control over the sources of water the Zionist dream could not be realized.” In 1964 Israel completed the National Water Carrier, designed to pipe drinking water from the Sea of Galilee, in Israel’s north, to the Negev in the south. Syria and other Arab states then moved to divert the headwaters of the Jordan, igniting fierce clashes that included Syrian-sponsored Palestinian guerrilla attacks. The water wars were one of the key factors in the establishment of the PLO in 1964.

Diverting water from the Galilee has contributed to another devastating environmental consequence: the drying of the Dead Sea. Much of the water that once made its way down the Jordan River is no longer available to replenish the body of water downstream. Before 1964, the Dead Sea used to receive 1.3 billion cubic meters of water each year, according to Eilon Adar, who heads the Water Research Institute at Ben-Gurion University. Now “at most it gets 200 million cubic meters a year.” Since the inauguration of the National Water Carrier, the sea level has fallen by 21 meters, and continues to drop at a rate of roughly one meter each year. “The Dead Sea is dying,” says Adar. “There’s an environmental toll here, and we’re really worried.” There’s also an economic toll: the dangerous sinkholes developing under the Dead Sea have badly hurt the region’s tourism industry, according to Adar.

Israel’s romantic notions of making the desert bloom have encouraged heavy government subsidies for farming. Israeli farmers pay roughly 40 percent as much for their water as those who use it for nonagricultural purposes, says Hillel Shuval, a water expert at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Academic College. The subsidies help Israeli farmers export much of their produce, which makes little environmental sense in an arid country. Exporting one kilogram of wheat is equivalent to exporting 1,000 liters of water, which means Israel in effect exports 100 million cubic meters of water each year, about as much as its desalination plants produce. Two years ago Israel inaugurated a massive desalination plant in the coastal city of Ashkelon, but desalination is costly and energy intensive; each cubic meter of clean water costs roughly 60 cents to produce, according to Adar. “Subsidizing water for agriculture results in irrational use, in growing crops which otherwise wouldn’t be economically feasible,” says Hillel.

The Negev is the laboratory for new technologies Israelis hope may solve their water troubles. Some of the most ambitious recycling experiments are found there, just minutes from the cabin where Ben-Gurion retired to the desert. In a sun-bleached sandlot surrounded by date palms and desert scrub, 41-year-old Amit Ziv explains how his kibbutz pumps 500,000 cubic meters of warm, brackish water each year from an aquifer 800 meters below ground. The water is first cycled several times through man-made ponds for growing fish including sea bass, tilapia and barramundi, then funneled to fields of wheat, olive and jojoba. “We wrote the book on this stuff,” says Ziv.

Experts, though, wonder how far technology can boost supply. Drip irrigation and desalination can only do so much. Making the desert bloom was a good idea “in its time,” says Brooks, but now “the very idea of developing the Negev is wrong.” The day to rethink Israel’s romance with desert farming may be here.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143688

As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.

Land, Water And Conflict

By Jeffrey Sachs, Newsweek

The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity and tighter oil supplies will add to the stresses. As violence increases, in new crises resembling those now underway in Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan, the tendency might be to look to the military for solutions. We’ll need to keep in mind that engineers and doctors will be the only ones who can truly keep us safe.

Hundreds of millions of people live on the margin of survival, and their numbers will increase if we continue on our current trajectory. The poorest of the poor tend to be found in remote, environmentally stressed regions, such as the drylands of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which is evident in Yale and Columbia’s Environmental Performance Index. In these places, droughts are becoming more frequent and land more scarce. Rural populations head for the slums in cities unequipped to provide jobs, safe water, sewerage and other basic services.

With a business-as-usual approach, more regions are likely to experience intensifying stresses. Human-induced climate change is predicted to make drylands drier and increase the risk of floods and powerful cyclones in more-humid regions. Increasingly crowded coastal areas will face greater risks of devastating storms. In places that currently rely on groundwater, such as in India, China and the American Southwest, wells will run dry, or become too expensive to drill. And in places in the Andes and in South Asia that depend on the seasonal melting of glaciers for irrigation, these water flows may stop as the glaciers disappear.

The results are unlikely to be pretty. Poor and hungry people are vastly more likely to fall into violent conflict than rich and well-fed populations. And when the climate gets tough, people migrate. Nomads from the drylands of northern Darfur went into the more-humid farm regions of southern Darfur in the 1980s in search of water for their livestock. Similarly, migrants from other parts of the African Sahel, such as Burkina Faso, moved south toward the coastal regions, into the Ivory Coast and other coastal countries. In both cases, the migrations triggered conflicts. Such conflicts are not inevitable. Violence is often stoked by ruthless and demagogic politicians. Still, the environmental crises and ensuing desperation provide the fodder.

Outsiders tend to attribute violence to religion, culture and politics and overlook the underlying causes of water, food and jobs. What some regard as the arc of Islamic instability, across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is more accurately an arc of hunger, population pressures, water stress, growing food insecurity and a pervasive lack of jobs.

Real solutions will require bold investments in sustainable development. The United States, Europe, China, India and wealthy oil states will have to join forces to help conflict-prone parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia to raise food output, increase access to education and family planning, and improve productivity through investments in roads, power, irrigation and telecommunications. To head off even more devastating climate shocks in coming decades, we must also end the deadlock over climate-change policy. In water-stressed and conflict-prone regions, technology such as drought-resistant crops, solar-thermal power and drip irrigation can underscore our common fate and interests on an increasingly crowded and crisis-prone planet.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143700

Beijing Water Crisis Exacerbated

By SHAI OSTER, The Wall Street Journal

BEIJING—The Olympics is contributing to Beijing’s worsening water crisis by increasing use of it for sports venues and prestige projects like giant musical fountains, according to a report by Chinese researchers.

The report, issued this month, says preparations for the August Games are adding about 5%, or around 200 million cubic meters, to normal water use in Beijing this year. The report says that officials are diverting water from farming in provinces around the capital, and tapping rapidly diminishing reserves of groundwater, instead of promoting conservation that could better address the issue. It says that the situation is a continuation of a long-standing, mistaken approach by the government in its water policy.

“Beijing’s water crisis stems more from decades of short-sighted policies that have degraded its watershed, and a political fixation on large-scale and environmentally damaging engineering projects to keep the taps flowing at little or no charge to consumers,” the report says.

The report was published by Probe International, a Canada-based environmental group, and edited by Dai Qing, a prominent Chinese journalist who was once jailed for her criticism of the Three Gorges Dam. Other Chinese experts who contributed to the report requested anonymity, in part for fear of government reprisals, according to Probe International.

Chinese officials have acknowledged that more work is needed to promote water conservation, but say that rising living standards and a growing population mean that supplies must be increased to meet new demands. Officials say raising tariffs too high would hurt the majority of urban residents, whose incomes are still much lower than in the West.

In one Olympics-related case described in the new report, the government is spending 430 million yuan, or about $62.6 million at current exchange rates, to build a 13-kilometer underground pipe to divert water to a river that has been dry for about a decade, to be used for Olympic rowing. The extra demands posed by the Olympics have forced Beijing to divert water from surrounding provinces, which have been required to guarantee steady supplies to the capital, the report said.

Beijing’s supply of water relative to its population is among the smallest of any of the world’s biggest cities, and is one-thirtieth the world average. Water consumption is between 4 billion and 4.5 billion cubic meters a year, slightly more than the natural supply. Nationwide, China’s available water supply per capita is one-fourth the world average. The biggest segment of demand comes from residential use, which has grown 10 times between 1995 and 2005, and now represents 39% of water use. That’s more than agriculture or industry.

Northern China is a naturally arid region, but it has been especially dry in recent years. Rainfall in the past decade has been 28% below the historical average.

Water is being pumped out of underground supplies much faster than it can be replenished, the report said.

Beijing already has the highest water tariffs in the country, but they need to go even higher to encourage conservation, the new report says.

New report shows how corruption undermines the global response to climate change and food shortages

Corruption in the water sector is a root cause and catalyst for the global water crisis that threatens billions of lives and exacerbates environmental degradation, according to the Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, released today by Transparency International (TI).

“Water is a resource without substitute. It is paramount to our health, our food security, our energy future and our ecosystem. But corruption plagues water management and use in all these areas,” said Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International.

The report, the first of its kind to explore the impact and scope of corruption in different segments of the water sector, identifies a range of problems, from petty bribery in water delivery to procurement-related looting of irrigation and hydropower funds; from covering up industrial pollution to manipulation of water management and allocation policies.

“Corruption’s impact on water is a fundamental governance problem, yet it is not sufficiently addressed in the many global policy initiatives for environmental sustainability, development, and food and energy security. This must change,” added Labelle.

The water crisis is undeniable and the corruption challenge it faces is urgent. More than 1 billion people worldwide have no guaranteed access to water and more than 2 billion are without adequate sanitation, which has devastating consequences for development and poverty reduction.

Corruption thwarts global response to climate change and global food shortage

“Climate change requires the world to come up with what is likely to be the most far-reaching and complex global governance framework ever devised. Without addressing the corruption risks, especially as they relate to water, such plans stand on shaky ground”, said Labelle. The report demonstrates corruption’s potential to obstruct effective enforcement of water-sharing pacts and resettlement arrangements, both key to confronting the fallout from climate change.

Irrigated land helps produce 40 per cent of the world’s food, but corruption in irrigation is rampant. Addressing this risk is fundamental to increasing food production and tackling the global food crisis. “Massive new investments in irrigation have been announced worldwide to help counter the food crisis, yet water shortage means food shortage and if corruption in irrigation is not also addressed, these efforts will fall short,” stated Labelle.

For the Philippines, which has allocated close to US$1 billion for irrigation and related agricultural improvements, the report presents case evidence of how corruption has hindered the building and performance of irrigation dams. In India, a country at the centre of the crisis, corruption is estimated to add at least 25 per cent to irrigation contracts and the proceeds help maintain a corrupt system of political handouts and compromised oversight. In the end, investment costs rise, systems are rendered inefficient and small farmers are left especially vulnerable to water shortage.

Drinking water and sanitation: the poor carry the greatest burden

When corruption occurs, the cost of connecting a household to a water network increases by up to 30 per cent, raising the price tag for achieving the Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation by a staggering US$48 billion, according to expert estimates in the report.

Corruption in drinking water and sanitation emerges at every point along the water delivery chain; from policy design and budgeting to building, maintaining and operating water networks. It drains investment from the sector, increases prices and decreases water supplies. One result is that poor households in Jakarta, Lima, Nairobi or Manila spend more on water than residents of New York City, London or Rome.

Industrialised countries are not immune. Corruption has plagued the tendering of water contracts in cities like Grenoble, Milan, New Orleans and Atlanta. Likewise, cases of bid-rigging and price-fixing in water infrastructure provision have surfaced in Sweden, while in Chicago water budgets fell victim to misuse for political campaigning.

Risks for the environment and energy security

Corruption in water resources management undermines the sustainability of water supplies, fuels highly unequal water sharing which can incite political conflict and fosters the degradation of vital ecosystems. In China, for example, corruption has weakened the enforcement of environmental regulations, abetting the pollution of aquifers in 90 percent of cities and making over 75 per cent of urban rivers unsuitable for drinking or fishing.

Corruption in hydropower inflates the cost of dams and related projects. It also makes re-settlement more challenging by preying on compensation funds and initiatives meant to aid displaced people. The stakes are high: hydropower accounts for one-sixth of the world’s electricity production and investment volumes are projected to reach US$60 billion annually over the next 20 years.

A time for action: solutions to clean up the water sector

Corrupt conditions in water persist because their greatest impact is exacted on those with the least chance of redress, disproportionately affecting women, the poor and those with no voice at all: future generations and the environment.

Nonetheless, as the Global Corruption Report shows, taking action against corruption in the water sector is both timely and feasible.  Key recommendations of the report include:

Establish transparency and participation as guiding principles for all aspects of water governance: From transparent budgeting and participatory policy-making to public mapping of water pollution, public audits of projects and access to contract terms and performance reports, transparency and participation strengthen integrity in water governance, but need to be adopted globally.

Strengthen regulatory oversight: Government and the public sector continue to play the most prominent role in water governance and should establish effective regulatory oversight, whether for the environment, water and sanitation, agriculture or energy. Institutional reform and capacity-building are essential to bring oversight in water up to the standards already achieved in other sectors

Ensure fair competition and accountable implementation of water projects: All stakeholders have a role to play. Contracts should incorporate anti-corruption measures. Governments and contractors can enter into agreements for fair public procurement. Lenders and donors must strengthen anti-bribery provisions in their due diligence requirements.

Transparency International, along with the International Water and Sanitation Centre, the Stockholm International Water Institute, the Swedish Water House and the Water and Sanitation Program-Africa founded the Water Integrity Network (WIN) in 2006. Today WIN is a growing network of organisations and individuals that fights corruption in all parts of the water sector. The Global Corruption Report 2008 benefited from expert and financial support from WIN.

Singapore’s PUB agrees with Suez on cutting-edge research

Singapore’s national water agency, PUB, has signed a five-year Memorandum of Understanding with SUEZ Environnement to collaborate on cutting-edge water research.
PUB will work with the French waste and water management company on research projects relating to filtration membranes for drinking water, water recycling, water quality analytics, waste minimisation and valorisation, and hydroinformatics.
The company will develop technologies in partnership with the national water agency, as well as offer water solutions tailored to the latter’s needs. PUB will also be able to participate in SUEZ Environment’s global research network, which comprises 120 international partners including universities, technical organisations and companies, and some 400 researchers.
The MOU was signed today at the Water Expo, one of the six key events at the Singapore International Water Week, a global event for the water industry.
The signatories were Mr Harry Seah of PUB’s Technology and Water Quality Office, and Mr Philippe Gislette, who is in charge of SUEZ Environnement’s R&D Centre. Mr Chan Yoon Kum, PUB’s Assistant Chief Executive (Water Supply), and Ms Diane d’Arras, SUEZ Environnement’s Vice President of Technology and Research, acted as witnesses.

Commenting on the MOU, Mr Jean-Louis Chaussade, CEO of SUEZ Environnement, said: “This agreement lays the basis of a partnership that should enable both parties to take advantage of each other’s expertise by developing a scientific and technological alliance that will generate synergies and create value in the water and environment businesses.”
With this agreement, the company further strengthens its commitment to research in Asia, a region where it aims to expand its expertise on major environmental issues. In April this year, it signed an agreement with Tsinghua University in Beijing, and in 2006, launched partnerships with Tongji University and the Eastern China University of Science and Technology, both located in Shanghai. 
To facilitate this latest collaboration, SUEZ Environnement will locate a representative in Singapore. It plans to set up an office in the country’s WaterHub, a facility devoted to water companies and organisations.
PUB’s Chief Executive, Mr Khoo Teng Chye, said: “SUEZ Environnement shares Singapore’s commitment to forwarding-thinking water research. With this MOU, we will be able to pool our collective resources in some of the fastest-growing areas in the field, such as membrane technology and water reclamation.
“We are also pleased to see this vote of confidence in Singapore’s water industry and its development as a global hydrohub.”
The MOU was one of several collaborations and deals signed during the Singapore International Water Week (23 to 27 June 2008), an annual summit, conference and trade show attended by some 5,000 representatives from governments, utilities providers, businesses and academia.

The water grad

Susan Berfield, writing in BusinessWeek
, describes the rush to control water supplies.

Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. ...

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water — or what many are calling “blue gold” — will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Pickens understands that. ... “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”

Private Water Investment Costly for Customers, Says Food and Water Watch

A future favorable to investor owned water utilities will
result in higher rates, fewer consumer protections, a limited or
non-existent federal safety net for low income communities and large
infrastructure investments built to maximize profit, not the interest of the
public, according to a Food & Water Watch analysis of investor briefs.
“Corporations have a financial incentive to oppose conservation, protection
of drinking water sources and other policies and programs that would save
money and help offset the economic burden on communities across the nation,”
said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. “Wasted water
drives up a company’s revenue, which flows from people’s water bills.” In
fact, the investor research firm believes that if “faulty underground
infrastructure were to interrupt a major city’s water supply for an extended
period,” the public would be less resistant to rate hikes that benefit
corporations. The analysis also reveals U.S. states where regulators are
especially friendly to private ownership or management of water:
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut, with a nod to California’s recent
about face on strong consumer protections and shift toward encouraging
privatization of water service. Although public utilities provide water to
about 86 percent of people on community water systems, a private sector push
is on to change this. The report, *Costly Returns: How Corporations Could
Profit From Inflating the Already High Cost of Repairing the Nation’s
Crumbling Water and Sewer Infrastructure*, analyzed investor briefs by
Boenning & Scattergood and reveals that, thanks to some fancy finance and
accounting, private utilities tie higher earnings to increased costs.
“Absent a needed increase in federal assistance, consumers and communities
across the nation will see their bills continue to climb as utilities make
necessary repairs and upgrades. Yet, corporate advocates are deceitfully
using the costs of those upgrades to push elected officials into privatizing
their water and sewer systems,” concluded Hauter. “[T]he investment case for
[investor owned utilities] is predicated on two key growth drivers, rate
base expansion and ongoing industry consolidation, and federal funding for
water system improvements is an incremental negative for both,” said one
Boenning and Scattergood brief. “In terms of rate base, theoretically, every
dollar that the federal government injects into local water systems is a
dollar that will not go into someone’s rate base. . .” According to the
report, our nation’s aging drinking water and sewer infrastructure spans
almost 1.5 million miles of piping, including about 640,000 miles of sewer
lines. And, U.S. cities endure 250,000 to 300,000 water main breaks, lose
one-fifth of their water through leaks and suffer 1.2 trillion gallons of
wastewater spills each year. Americans will spend up to $1 trillion by 2019
to upgrade and repair our 1.5 million miles of piping and the treatment
plants to avoid a public health crisis. In Costly Returns, Food & Water
Watch makes the case that privatization of water utilities would result in
unnecessarily expensive and water-wasting projects. Often, the touted
efficiencies of the private sector amount to little more than downsizing the
workforce and cutting employee benefits – two actions that surely work
against timely and effective completion of improvement projects on aging
systems. Food & Water Watch advocates the establishment of a federal trust
fund to support our water infrastructure. Federal funding would reduce
financing costs, allow small municipal systems to fend off privatization and
ease the financial burden on families across the nation. “Instead of solving
our water crisis, privatization pads the pockets of corporate water barons,”
said Hauter. “Indeed, when Congress passes a federal trust fund, it should
be available only to the publicly owned and operated utilities that serve
most of the nation’s population.” *Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit
consumer rights organization that challenges the corporate control and abuse
of our food and water resources. Visit http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org.*

Water Crisis: Ending the Policy Drought

Water Crisis: Ending the Policy Drought
By Terry L. Anderson, with a foreword by Marion Clawson
    An excellent survey of the political economy of water.
Price: $2.00
Publication Date: 1983
ISBN: 0-932790-38-0
Number of Pages: 121
Paperback
Categories: Energy and Environment, Online Book Specials

About the Book From the Peripheral Canal in California to synfuel plants in the Rockies to sinkholes in Florida, the approaching water crisis is increasingly on the nation’s mind. Terry Anderson offers a unique and informative perspective on this issue.

Early settlers in the West established an efficient property rights system for allocating water. But when competition developed for water, property rights were overturned as water users turned to the government for guaranteed access. The costs and benefits of water use were separated, and demand increased faster than supply. Today these problems are growing more severe, and political conflict over water is increasing. Anderson explains how we got to our current predicament and describes how a new set of market-oriented institutions could head off the water crisis and reduce political conflicts.
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About the Author Terry L. Anderson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, executive director of the Political Economy Research Center, and professor of economics at Montana State University. Marion Clawson earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. His influence on forests and forest policy was substantial, especially in the context of public policy toward America’s publicly owned forested lands. He passed away in April 1998 at the age of 92.
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What Others Have Said “This is an outstanding book encompassing ideas that will make a real difference in the study of water policy. It is a real winner.”
--Richard L. Stroup, Department of the Interior

“Informative, provocative, and comprehensive… deserves attention and respect.”
--Marion Clawson, Resources for the Future

Bottlemania’

First Chapter
‘Bottlemania’
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
AN ALARM IN THE WOODS

On a balmy fall afternoon, with the maples at their flaming peak and the white ashes shading to yellow, Tom Brennan, natural resources manager for Nestlé Waters North America, drives down a gravel road in western Maine. He parks his truck in front of a small stone cottage topped by a pitched green roof. The building wouldn’t look out of place in the Adirondacks. But its green wooden door opens not to reveal a rag rug and a woodstove but yet another door — a serious-looking door made of thick steel that can be breached only with the right combination of keys, codes, and security, cards. Behind it are cameras and a motion detector. Are they guarding a gold reserve or an arsenal? No, they superintend an assemblage of stainless steel pipes, gauges, levers, and a device called a pig, about the size and shape of a boat bumper, that’s periodically forced through the pipes with water pressure to clean and disinfect. The linoleum floor is spotless.

“Any sort of intrusion into the pump house,” Brennan says, “and the water automatically shuts off.” The pump house aggregates water from five boreholes, or wells, located not far away at the bottom of a gentle valley, and sends it shooting through an underground pipe and, a mile to the north, into the largest water-bottling plant in the country. When the water comes back out, it’s in plastic containers labeled Poland Spring.

I take a good look around, not really appreciating the engineering that goes into such a place, and then we turn to leave. I am eager to see the water, the place where it springs from the earth. Brennan fumbles with a security card and keys, then we continue downhill through a young forest. Turning a bend, we come upon a man in casual clothes walking rapidly, a roll of duct tape in his hand. His black Lab darts into the trees, then back out and in again. When he hears the truck, the hiker glances furtively over his shoulder, then slips into the roadside bracken.

“He sure disappeared quick,” Brennan says, without emotion. Though the fifteen-hundred-acre property is private, Nestlé, a Swiss-owned conglomerate and the largest food-processing company in the world, isn’t strict about trespassing. The road is gated but no fence lines the property. If hunters call first to make arrangements, they are welcome. But it isn’t hunting season now.

At the bottom of the valley we park near five matching well houses, smaller versions of the stone building uphill. We walk into the woods and down a staircase flanked by white pine and larch. Where the slope bottoms out, tussock sedges line a shallow, sandy-bottomed raceway-narrow canals lined with boards. “The stream feeds into a trout hatchery,” Brennan explains, pointing toward a shed in the distance. I walk along the watercourse, looking for springs. The ground is soft, and the water bubbles here and there through fallen leaves and watercress. Finally I see what I am looking for. I squat in a patch of swamp dewberry and contemplate a tiny boil of water.

“Can I drink it?” I ask. Brennan shifts his weight and hesitates before saying, “If you want to.” If I expect encouragement, it isn’t forthcoming.

Filled with a sense of moment, I bend and dip my hand into the water, which appears black. I check to make sure there is nothing obvious swimming in my palm, then close my eyes and sip. “So this is it,” I think. “I’m drinking from the source.”

The water tastes good to me. It is cold — forty-five degrees according to Brennan — and it is flesh. It has no smell. Beyond that, I can say only that I feel privileged to be drinking straight from the ground, a rare possibility in this age of ubiquitous animal-borne diseases and pollution. I can choose from nearly a thousand types of bottled water on store shelves, but I can’t, with infinitesimally few exceptions, drink from a naturally occurring body of water. Magically appearing from inside the earth, springwater has always had a powerful mystique. Civilizations have fought over such resources.

But I’m not feeling any mystique right now. What I’m mostly thinking as I sip anew is that this simple substance, rising in a rill not five hundred feet upstream from the Shy Beaver trout hatchery, is the driving force behind a multimillion-dollar plant that directs three hundred million gallons of water a year into the farthest reaches of New England, New York, and parts west. I try to stay focused on the moment, the elemental and pure (at least until it flows through Shy Beaver) nature of this liquid, but I can’t help thinking that this water is so much more: a signature product of the world’s largest food corporation, a flash point for activists environmental, religious, and legal, and either the biggest scam in marketing history or a harbinger of far worse things to come.

Brennan doesn’t hurry me; he doesn’t ask what I think of his water. He explains the morphology of the earth: the way glaciers retreated from this part of Maine thirteen thousand years ago and, in the process, formed deep beds of sand and gravel that expertly filtered the water. He shows me some test wells along the raceway and explains that water pumped through boreholes, the wells inside those little stone buildings, can be labeled spring if it has substantially the same chemical makeup as the actual spring, if it comes from the same geologic stratum as the spring, and if a hydraulic connection between the two can be proved. “And we did that,” Brennan says.

We take a look inside one of the well houses — more security cameras, more spotless linoleum and gleaming pipes — then Brennan locks up and we head back up to the bottling plant. We’re almost out of the woods when suddenly an electronic alarm shrieks through the silent forest. Rising from the valley floor, it drives crows from their treetops and brings my hands to my ears. Whoop, whoop, whoop — ten nerve-jangling blasts in a row, then a pause, then ten more. Brennan stomps on the brake and speed-dials the bottling plant, a look of mild panic on his face. Waiting for advice from HQ, he turns toward me and says, “You know all those caps getting screwed onto bottles that we just saw?” It’s a blur to me, those half-liter containers moving around the plant at warp speed, more than five million containers a day, but I nod. “Well, all those bottles just stopped.”

Maybe the alarm has something to do with that guy, the one with the duct tape and the Labrador? I ask. Or maybe security is simply testing the system? It isn’t for Brennan to say.

“Why would someone want to mess with a pump house?” I ask as Brennan puts the truck back in gear.

“You’d be surprised,” he says tersely. In 2003, operatives for the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) placed four incendiary devices inside a pump station in Michigan that supplied water to a Nestlé bottling plant. The devices failed to ignite, but ELF made its point: the substation was “stealing water,” the group stated in a communiqué. Clean water, it continued, “is one of the most fundamental necessities, and no one can be allowed to privatize it, commodify it, and try and sell it back to us.”

Is that what’s happening here? I’d come up to the town of Hollis to see how the water gets out of the famous Maine woods and into the skinny bottles with the green labels. They are ubiquitous where I live. You can’t walk a block in New York City without seeing a bottle in someone’s hand, their baby stroller, or bike cage, spilling from the corner litter baskets or crushed flat and gray, ratlike, in the gutters. Nationwide, we discard thirty to forty billion of these containers a year. The bottles, and the trucks that deliver them, are haunting me. Poland Spring is the bestselling springwater in the nation, even in a city with some of the best tap water in the world. Everyone is drinking the stuff, and other waters like it. In the West, it’s Arrowhead and Calistoga; in the South Central region, Ozarka; in the Midwest, Ice Mountain; in the mid-Atlantic, Deer Park; and in the Southeast, Zephyrhills — all owned by Nestlé, a company with estimated profits of $7.46 billion in 2006. Pepsi-Cola and Coke are bottling water too, and making billions.

Why this turn against the tap? And how had we gotten to the point where activists are sneaking bombs into pump houses — infrastructure devoted not to oil, but water? It isn’t just Michigan: citizens in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California, New Hampshire, Texas, Florida, and, yes, even Maine, are in arms against groundwater pumping for bottling. Legal scholars are loudly debating water rights; the United Church of Canada has called for a North American boycott of the stuff, so has a group called Food and Water Watch. The Franciscan Federation declared to the Environmental Protection Agency that access to safe and clean water is “a free gift from God,” and the National Coalition of American Nuns adopted a resolution, in the fall of 2006, that asked members to avoid drinking bottled water unless absolutely necessary. Their issue? Privatization of something so essential to life is immoral. An antiglobalization organization was traveling the country offering blind taste tests of bottled water versus tap. Their point — tap is pretty good — never fails to make the news.

Still, every week a new bottled water — offering the stuff neat or with “beneficial” additives (vitamins, herbs, laxatives, nicotine, caffeine, oxygen, appetite suppressants, aspirin, skin enhancers, or healing mantras) — hits the market. U.S. sales of bottled water leaped 170 percent between 1997 and 2006, from $4 billion to $10.8 billion. Globally, bottled water is a $60-billion-a-year business. In 1987, U.S. per capita consumption of the stuff was 5.7 gallons; by 1997 it was 12.1 gallons; and in 2006, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, it was 27.6. Sales of bottled water have already surpassed sales of beer and milk in the United States and by 2011 are, by some analysts, expected to surpass soda, of which Americans drink more than fifty gallons per person a year.

I’ve come to Maine because it seems an unlikely battleground. The state receives about forty-three inches of rain a year (about the same as other states in the region) and has a population of slightly more than one million, among whom Poland Spring is a familiar, and at one time beloved, face. The company has been bottling water from the town of Poland since 1845. Legal history recorded no objections when Hiram Kicker began to sell water from his family farm there, though a Portland newspaper, anticipating the nuns and the Canadians, scoffed at “selling something that God gave everyone for free.” In recent years Poland Spring, which was bought by Perrier in 1980 and then Nestlé in 1992, has expanded its reach into other Maine aquifers, and the objections have been hard to miss.

The epicenter of Maine’s water wars is Fryeburg, about an hour to the north of Hollis. “So what happened up there?” I ask Brennan, for the third time. We’re sitting at the conference table in the bottling plant, which was built atop a former potato farm. The alarm out in the woods had, we just learned, been an electronic glitch — a relief to everyone. Now Brennan glances at me, and despite his efforts to stay on message, to stay upbeat, I can sense the man’s fatigue. “Yeah,” he says, with a downward cast of his eyes. “The infamous Fryeburg situation.” He sighs. “It got complicated up there.”

Fryeburg sits along Maine’s western border with New Hampshire, a mere fifty-two miles northwest of Portland. The road in between passes ugly strip malls and tourist motels, busy marinas, and tiny towns with faded Main Street banners. Though Fryeburg, population three thousand, sees up to one hundred thousand canoeists and campers playing on its stretch of the Saco River in the summer, and twice that many visitors descend in October, for the eight-day Fryeburg Fair, the place has done little to attract the out-of-season day-tripper. Unlike neighboring towns to the east and west, Fryeburg has no bookshops, T-shirt stores, moose paraphernalia, or cappuccino joints. Instead, it has the Jockey Cap, a combo gas station and grill where older gentlemen sit on hard chairs reading the daily newspaper and the gossip flows all day. Near the town center is a small supermarket, a culinarily depressing place. When I tell a local I bought an egg-salad sandwich at its dell counter, he physically recoils. The main drag features a bank, a few utilitarian stores, a smattering of private offices, and the Fryeburg Water Company, whose unprepossessing appearance, on the bottom floor of a two-story frame house, belies the company’s position at the red-hot center of Fryeburg’s multimillion-dollar water woes.

Fryeburg is old, established in 1762, and a little inbred: the same dozen names show up on buildings, parks, cemeteries, hills, and rosters of elected or appointed officials. I meet men who own mountains, miles of lakefront, and vast swathes of forest handed down by land grants from the governor of Massachusetts. I hear about strangers showing up in town to buy property and the water that flows under it. Before long, Fryeburg seems like Chinatown, the movie, to me. Everywhere I turn there is intrigue, there is someone with a heated opinion, with “water on the brain,” as Jake Gittes, the character played by Jack Nicholson, puts it. I hear about hydrogeologists drilling test wells on the q.t., about dummy corporations, secret planning-board meetings, tape recorders at public meetings that stop at convenient times, notes that go missing, and appointed officials suspected of shilling for outside corporate interests. I meet the man who provided access to the spring that fills the tanker trucks of Nestlé.

And that, admits Howard Dearborn, was a big mistake.

When I first meet Dearborn, he is eighty-eight years old. His hair is snowy white, he wears oval, wire-rimmed glasses, and he dresses in timeless L.L. Bean fashion, his red-plaid shirt tucked into high-waisted chinos. A retired engineer, Dearborn lives alone in a sprawling split-level home amid a grove of white pines and beech on the shores of Lovewell Pond, not Far from the center of Fryeburg. Though Dearborn has lived here for more than fifty years, locals still consider him an outsider: he’s “from away.” He sold the company he founded here, Dearborn Precision Tubular Products, fifteen years previously, and has filled his time since then running a private foundation, inventing mechanical tools, and, more recently, badgering Poland Spring, challenging its right to draw water, to truck it through town, and to remove it from the state.

While some water activists are concerned with truck traffic in their rural towns, and others focus on the morality of selling water for large profits, Dearborn’s “big bitch,” as he puts it, is that Nestlé is “ruining the lake” by pumping from the springs that feed it.

“The lake is dead now!” Dearborn says to me, in a tone that implies this is obvious. “The water stays in it too long because it’s not being flushed by Wards Brook. It’s warmer and there’s increased growth of weeds on the bottom, which has lowered property values.” Houses have been taken off the market because they didn’t sell, Dearborn says. He worries that soon the pond will resemble Brownfield Bog — a low area that forms the southern end of Lovewell.

The heart of the two-thousand-acre Wards Brook drainage basin is the Wards Brook aquifer, made up of hundred-foot layers of permeable sands and gravel. It drains an area south of town, flowing north and then east into Lovewell Pond. Since 1955, the investor-owned Fryeburg Water Company has pumped water from the aquifer and piped it to nearly eight hundred customers in town, plus roughly seventy over the state line in East Conway, New Hampshire. Then in 1997, Hugh Hastings, president of the water company, paid a visit to Howard Dearborn.

“He stood on my deck,” Dearborn says as he gestures over an array of bird feeders fattening the squirrels, “and he told me the town was growing and that he needed more water.” Hastings had pointed out to Dearborn the tracts of forest the Hastings family owned: across the lake, to the northeast, was Mount Tom, which Hastings had recently sold to the Nature Conservancy; and around to the south was Pleasant Mountain, of which he and his family, which includes a state senator, own half. ("The Hastingses are like the Magnificent Ambersons,” a conservation worker from the region tells me.) Eventually, Hastings got to the point of his visit: he asked Dearborn for a right-of-way through his property so that he could drill a second well, near his first, in the Wards Brook aquifer.

“And like a dumb ass I let him cut a road through my property,” Dearborn says, shaking his head. “I even helped him out with my bulldozer.”

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BOTTLEMANIA by Elizabeth Royte Copyright 2008 by Elizabeth Royte. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Tapped Out

By LISA MARGONELLI, The New York Times

BOTTLEMANIA

How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.

By Elizabeth Royte.

248 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.99.
To paraphrase an old axiom: You don’t buy water, you only rent it. So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance. Partway through her undoctrinaire book, Royte, a lifelong fan of tap water, refills her old plastic water bottle, reflecting that “what once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered.” And by the end of the book she will have discarded the old plastic bottle too, but not the tap.

“Bottlemania” is an easy-to-swallow survey of the subject from verdant springs in the Maine woods to tap water treatment plants in Kansas City; from the grand specter of worldwide water wars, to the microscopic crustaceans called copepods, whose presence in New York’s tap water inspired a debate by Talmudic scholars about whether the critters violated dietary laws, and whether filtering water on the Sabbath constituted work. (Verdict: no and no.) Water is a topic that lends itself to tour-de-force treatment (the book “Cadillac Desert” and the movie “Chinatown” come to mind), as well as righteous indictments and dire predictions (“Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water,” “When the Rivers Run Dry: Water — The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century”). Where others are bold, “Bottlemania” is subversive, and after you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or tap, plastic or not), as freaked out by your own role in today’s insidious water wars as by Royte’s recommended ecologically responsible drink: “Toilet to tap.”

Eww. Sorry. Let’s talk about those evil marketers. In 1987, Americans drank only 5.7 gallons of bottled water per person per year, but the cumulative impact of ad campaigns and the vision of Madonna fellating a bottle of Evian in “Truth or Dare” more than doubled consumption by 1997. In 2000 the chief executive of Quaker Oats bragged to analysts that “the biggest enemy is tap water.” By 2005, the enemy had become the consumer’s bladder; and in 2006, Pepsi, which owns Aquafina, spent $20 million suggesting that Americans “drink more water.” That year we drank 27.6 gallons each at a rate of about a billion bottles a week.

But marketing swings both ways. As quickly as bottled water became a symbol of healthy hyperindividualism — sort of an iPod for your kidneys — a backlash turned it into the devil’s drink. In 2006, the National Coalition of American Nuns came out against bottled water for the moral reason that life’s essential resource should not be privatized. New numbers surfaced: each year the bottles themselves require 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture, and, one expert tells Royte, “the total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil.” Mayors from San Francisco to New York suddenly became aware of the new symbolism of bottled water as a waste of taxpayer money, a diss of local tap water and a threat to the environment. Some canceled their city’s bottled water contracts. Chicago began taxing the stuff. And celebrities — among them Matt Damon and ... Madonna — started backing a dazzling array of water charities in support of domestic tap and African water supplies, associating themselves with the magical ur-brand of “pure water” just as marketers and Madonna did in the early ’90s.

Royte asks, perceptively, if the pro-bottle and anti-bottle movements aren’t cut from the same plastic: “Is it fashion or is it a rising awareness of the bottle’s environmental toll that’s driving the backlash? I’m starting to think they’re the same thing.” To Royte, the author of “Garbage Land,” righteousness requires a greater commitment.

She finds it in Fryeburg, Me., a town of 3,000 that is trying to stop Nestlé’s Poland Spring from sucking 168 million gallons of water a year out of the pristine aquifer buried under its piney woods. As Royte arrives the town is in an uproar, with neighbor pitted against neighbor and rumors of secret planning-board meetings and of dummy corporations. Fryeburg is a “perfect example of water’s shift from a public good to an economic force,” she observes. The locals are more blunt: “This is what a water war looks like.” Fryeburg bears the burden of living at the other end of the giant green Poland Spring pipe. Residents of nearby Hiram count 92 water tankers rolling through their town in one typical 24-hour period; they feel themselves under siege precisely because their watershed is clean, while 40 percent of the country’s rivers and streams are too polluted for swimming or fishing, let alone drinking. Fryeburg residents try to repel the water company. They demand tests, throw a Boston Tea Party by dumping Poland Spring in a local pond, take the issue to Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court and hold a town meeting straight out of Norman Rockwell. Here I wish Royte had devoted more energy to the narrative. The people of Fryeburg and their complaints feel tentative — a sketch where a portrait could have been. And although her writing always flows, I sometimes wished for something less utilitarian.

That comes, unexpectedly, as Royte stands at the edge of the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. “Ignoring the bluish mountains that form its backdrop and the phalanx of security guards in our foreground,” she gazes “down onto the spillway which curves and drops like a wedding cake, in four tiers, before sending its excess through a granite passage,” supplying 1.2 billion gallons a day through 300 miles of tunnels and aqueducts and 6,200 miles of distribution mains. There once was grandeur in public works, and Royte captures the mythic heroism that inspired the politicians and engineers to build great reservoirs more than a century ago. Their outsize civic largesse makes our current culture of single-serving bottles feel decidedly crummy. But returning to public water’s golden age, if it’s possible, will not come cheap. Royt