Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it’s making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.
Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:
Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.
Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.
Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently.
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