Water, water, everywhere …
In the midst of a wet spring that’s flooded the area, it might seem silly to fret about water, but it is the center of life. As Galesburg poet Julia Fletcher Carney wrote in the classic McGuffey Reader in the 1800s, “Little drops of water/ Little grains of sand/ Make the mighty ocean/ And the pleasant land.”
But there’s tension and conflict surrounding this increasingly scarce resource: drought in America’s vegetable and fruit-growing region, climate change causing glacial melt, the bottled-water industry taking water and making landfill waste, and privatizing Earth’s key public resource.
Dozens of people discussed water at an April 26 Peoria workshop, “It All Flows Downstream: Water Consumption and Consequences.”
Joan Erickson of the Sun Foundation, which organized the event, said it was productive, with participants ranging from Harry Hendrickson of the Illinois Science Teachers Association and Bob Williams of the Illinois River Project to panelists Illinois State Water Survey director Misganaw Demissie, and Center for Humans and Nature director Paul Heltne.
“There was a multitude of issues being raised from a research perspective,” Erickson said. “There were people there representing all the major aspects of the issue. And it was videotaped” [for the Illinois Humanities Council series “All-Consuming: Conversations on Oil and Water” for future cablecast or online viewing from The Illinois Channel (www.illinoischannel.org/)].
Far from the Illinois River, California is in its third year of a crippling drought that could cause food prices to go up fast. Rainfall in California’s Central Valley – where half the nation’s fruit and vegetable come from – is below normal again this year; federal water reserves there are at a 17-year low; tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, and 1 million acres of cropland idled.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has pledged $260 million to help, but farmers say that’s a drop in a dry bucket and some are desperately trying to drill new wells.
“Up to 19 million southern Californians this summer will feel the impact of a new water reality,” Metropolitan Water District board chair Timothy Brick told the Christian Science Monitor.
Meanwhile, 75% of the planet’s fresh water is stored as ice in glaciers, which are rapidly melting into the salt-water seas, according to environmentalist Conrad Anker on PBS-TV’s “NOW” series, which said some of the largest glaciers will completely melt in 2030.
“We can’t take climate change and put it on the back burner,” Anker said. “If we don’t address climate change, we won’t be around.”
Still, water wasn’t really an issue in the 2008 political campaign, despite the country relying on non-renewable water resources for half its daily use and 36 states now facing water shortages.
“Water – whether we treat it as a public good or as a commodity that can be bought and sold – will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous,” said Maude Barlow, author of “Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.”
More than 1 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations.
Commercial as well as environmental and political issues are disconcerting. Last summer, after area cities objected to proposed water-rate hikes of more than 20%, rates increased anyway for Peoria and Pekin customers of Illinois-American Water, a subsidiary of the largest investor-owned U.S. water company. Peoria previously considered exercising its five-year option to buy its Illinois-American provider but voted against it; Pekin tried to seize its Illinois-American provider, but the attempt failed.
The bottled water industry – Perrier and Evian, La Croix and Aquafina and various imitators – has grown large and lucrative by promoting itself as “green” but producing a drink with dubious differences from tap water, expending colossal amounts of energy on shipping, and creating empties that are becoming a problem for waste dumps. Nestle – with one-third of the U.S. bottled-water market through brand such as Ice Mountain, Calistoga and Poland Spring – uses hundreds of millions of gallons of water from dozens of 70 fresh-water springs and underground aquifers across the country, according to the book “Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water,” by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman. The beverage giant has tussled with communities from Maine and Florida to Michigan and Texas.
Privatizing public water for packaging as private bottled products angers some.
“Water is a precious resource
shouldn’t be bought or sold,” said Gigi Kellett of Corporate Accountability International.
But it is.
Entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens – a former oilman who’s now advocating wind farms – owns more fresh water than any American, according to Business Week. And such ventures may grow.
“The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, a water-specialist lawyer talking to Business Week magazine. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”
Advocates are not indifferent or inactive, but many people still take water for granted. Concerned citizens are supporting wastewater reuse and desalination research, protecting water resources for agricultural and residential uses, and preventing water transfer. In fact, 20% of the world’s fresh-water is in the Great Lakes region, and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resource Compact – including Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York – has banned large-scale transfer of water outside the region.
Researcher Peter Gleick months ago told the Geological Society of America that there’s a “soft path” to sustainable water management, including decentralized water infrastructure, economic reforms and institutions that focus on individual communities.
There’s something uncomfortable about profiting from such a life-giving treasure, some say.
“Water [is] not a possession, a commodity, a source of economic advantage for some at the expense of others,” Bishop Frank T. Griswold, a Chicago Anglican, told 2007’s “Earth’s Water Crisis” conference in Virginia, “— but a gift, an outpouring of Divine love.”
Bill Knight is an award-winning Peoria journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.
