Nati Harnik/AP Images
Last spring, the Midwest endured epic flooding from melting snow followed by day after day of torrential rains.
My local theater in Bennington, Vermont, just staged an original play on an unlikely theme for a drama: fouled drinking water. Entitled Water, Water, Everywhere, it’s the story of two young, breezily flirtatious reporters exposing the scandal of industrial chemicals in the water supply. The villain here is perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a man-made chemical used in local factories to manufacture Teflon coating for fiberglass fabrics, the stuff of sports stadium domes, airport terminals, and the like.
This cutting-edge alchemy was a boon to the local economy. In 1968, a Chemical Fabrics Corporation VP boasted, “The area within a 15-mile radius of Bennington may well be the Teflon glass coating capital of the world.” Through the decades, however, PFOA—which persists in the environment and is toxic in minute amounts—leached into soil and flowed into rivers. Illnesses associated with PFOA include thyroid disease, kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, and hypertension: medical conditions that had been cropping up with unnerving frequency in our communities. Starting in 2015, people living in towns that housed these plants learned the water they’ve sipped on and bathed in for years is unsafe. Which explained a lot.
The Vermont–New York corridor is hardly alone in our water woes. In Flint, Michigan, tainted water has resulted in high blood lead levels in children, the developmental impacts of which may not manifest for years. Several years after news of the crisis broke, Flint residents still report skin rashes, hair loss, and other symptoms. Newark, New Jersey, too, is plagued by lead in drinking water from corroded pipes.
Water wreaks havoc in other ways. Many parts of the U.S. have bumped up against water emergencies like flooding, drought, or wildfire. Words like “record-breaking” and “unprecedented” appear so often as to lose meaning. Our industrial habit creates its own crises: transporting fuels via pipelines and tankers means potential spills; fertilizer runoff from farmland adds to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, hurting marine life; and overdevelopment means paving over wetlands that serve as buffers during storms. The latter is one reason the 2017 hurricanes Harvey and Irma—in Texas and Florida, respectively—were so destructive.
The landmark 1972 Clean Water Act required permitting for commercial activity that posed a threat to the nation’s navigable waters, tightening regulations on industry. Over the decades, the Clean Water Act’s purview has been expanded, notably by the Waters of the U.S. rule, enacted in 2015 under President Obama, which broadened protection to many streams and wetlands. The rule, an inconvenience to extractive industry and Big Ag, was in Trump’s sights from day one, and in September EPA chief Andrew Wheeler signed its repeal. This rollback of water protections leaves more streams, lakes, and wetlands vulnerable to pollution, putting at risk the people and wildlife that depend on them. The change could directly affect more than 100 million people, whose drinking water was safeguarded under the 2015 rule.
Despite water’s centrality to human well-being, food security, and ecological stability—to the sustenance of life—our country has not lately done a great job of stewarding it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Water, by definition, is at once fluid and cleansing; we can choose to repair our broken relationship with water. A Green New Deal focused on climate resilience, meaningful employment, and environmental justice is an ideal opportunity to turn this around. Doing so carries multiple benefits for health, biodiversity, climate, community self-determination, and overall quality of life in cities and rural areas alike.
Jason Schneider
To truly embrace this new water ethic we need to change how we think about water. Specifically, in two ways: One is to situate water within the commons. This will guarantee access to clean water for all—and ensure that corporate entities can no longer pollute water with impunity.
The other is to bring to water policy an understanding of how water “works”: how it moves across the landscape and through the atmosphere. This presents opportunities to work with nature’s water cycling, rather than fight against it, as is often the case. Allying with hydrology has implications for how we grow food and how we build. And by creating the conditions for landscapes to absorb water, we can minimize the damage from ongoing land degradation and extreme weather events, saving costs as well as lives. A water-wise mindset also means promoting natural hydrological cooling processes, an added buffer in the face of climate change.
Our Water Covenant
In 2010, the United Nations recognized the human right to water for drinking and sanitation; the motion passed easily, though the United States was among the 44 nations that abstained. This stance has to change: Acknowledging clean drinking water as a basic civil right is an essential starting point, a foundation for a just water deal.
Universal access to water is only possible when water belongs to everyone. With water shortages looming in many parts of the globe, there’s growing interest in water as a commercial investment: the ultimate cynical market ploy, scarcity as an opportunity to broaden your portfolio.
Apart from the humanitarian factor, treating water as a commodity takes us down the wrong path. In the U.S., schemes to privatize water systems have been unsuccessful. According to Food and Water Watch, private control of water results in inflated costs, poor service, and diminished public trust. As food justice advocate Anna Lappé writes, “we have seen the results of water privatization: It doesn’t work. Water is not like telecommunications or transportation. You could tolerate crappy phone service, but have faulty pipes connecting to your municipal water and you’re in real trouble.” Private and public alike, today’s drinking and sewer systems are deteriorating and overstressed.
Understanding how water works, and incorporating this into water policy, will not only replenish water sources but also help us to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The bottled-water market is another threat to water access. A fair water scenario means the public, not private interests, controls local water. A while back, I met Hayu Patria, a food sovereignty advocate from Indonesia, who told me about a village where she works that’s known for its high-quality spring water. Once it was branded and bottled by a subsidiary of Danone, locals struggled to get clean water, often walking long distances across mountainous terrain to do so.
In the U.S., Nestlé, the world’s largest water bottler, draws millions of gallons a year from the San Bernardino National Forest, leaving streams dry. According to the state of California, this water isn’t legally theirs to take. In north Florida, more than 100,000 people signed a petition asking the regional water district to save Ginnie Springs and not “let Nestlé pillage community water and churn out more plastic garbage.” The global bottled-water business is where two environmental challenges, plastic pollution and water access, converge.
Aside from cases of clear negligence, the financial and health costs of polluted water are primarily borne by the public. The burden needs to be on the polluter; when the cleanup fees get dumped on taxpayers, companies have scant motivation to reduce contaminants at the source. The biggest assault on water comes from agriculture: nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste. Farmers often hedge their bets by applying more fertilizer than they need. The excess lofts skyward to form N2O, a potent greenhouse gas, or dribbles into waterways as nitrates, a health hazard in drinking water.
The integrity of our waters is one reason to expedite a transition to regenerative agriculture, farming that avoids chemical inputs and improves soil ecology. Soil that’s high in organic matter filters out nitrates and curtails runoff. Livestock appropriately managed build soil organic matter and enhance water cycling. Animal waste only becomes a concern with confined operations—as we’re reminded of when a hurricane rips through North Carolina hog country.
Eric Risberg/AP Images
The global bottled-water business is where two environmental challenges, plastic pollution and water access, converge.
Keeping Water Where It Falls
Our built environment is designed to sluice away water as quickly as possible. To a degree this makes sense: Water standing around poses the risk of disease and gums up travel in cities. By contrast, nature seeks to hold onto water to sustain plants, animals, and microbial life. The challenge is that man-made surroundings keep growing, with more ground paved over and more water lost to local ecosystems. Impervious surfaces—roofs, sidewalks, highways—are conduits for falling and flowing water, which picks up pollutants that are then carried to sea.
We need to acknowledge the water cost of development and address this in planning. Instead of a system that drains water from one place only to flood areas downstream—a standard that wastes perfectly good water and creates urban heat islands—let’s manage water to keep it in the environment. We can see rainfall as a resource rather than an inconvenience, and make small adjustments to construction and landscaping so that water is held and flows slowly to where it can be productive. In Tucson, rainwater-harvesting guru Brad Lancaster grows a food forest on his small urban lot. He even convinced the city to approve curb cuts that direct wastewater to food-bearing trees. Municipalities can devise incentives to build simple earthworks or other means to infiltrate water. Some cities impose a charge per area of impervious roofing, recognizing the public cost of extra runoff.
“Water infrastructure” generally refers to pipes, dams, and culverts. But we can also think of soil as water infrastructure. For our ability to meet our water challenges—whether a flood means millions in disaster relief or whether a river stays within its banks—largely hinges on how we treat our soil.
More than half of the organic matter in soil is carbon, and carbon turns soil into a sponge: According to the USDA, every 1 percent increase in soil organic carbon (i.e., moving from 1 percent to 2 percent) represents an additional 20,000-plus gallons of water per acre that can be held on the land. Given the stress on farmers due to inadequate or unpredictable rainfall, this is huge: Carbon-rich soil maintains moisture in times of drought, so crops can last longer between watering. Plus, water soaking into the ground reduces the chance of flooding.
We can think of bare soil as malfunctioning infrastructure: the ecological equivalent of busted pipes. Absent plant cover, when there’s a heavy rain soil seals over and water streams away. Healthy, covered soil has pore spaces for water to linger and filter through, replenishing underground water stores. Much of what we now regard as “water problems” can be understood as a failure-to-keep-water-on-the-ground problem. Several states have passed soil legislation, highlighting that healthy soil improves water-holding capacity and overall watershed health.
Connecting Water, Land, and Climate
Water is always in flux, absorbing and releasing heat, shape-shifting from gas to liquid to solid and back again. A new lens on water takes into consideration how water functions in nature. Water in the environment generally calls to mind “blue water”: lakes, rivers, and oceans, what would be colored blue on a map. Equally important is “green water,” moisture held in soil and living plants, as this is what supports vegetation, protects against erosion, and bolsters aquifers.
This in-ground water also keeps landscapes cool. Within a vegetated area, moisture circulates: It moves upward through plants and evaporates from soil (evapotranspiration), then descends as rain or dew. This “small water cycle” helps moderate the temperature differential between day and night: Plant transpiration dissipates heat from the sun, which is then embodied in water vapor—heat that is later released via condensation, in the air at cloud altitude, or on the ground as dew. This sequence, repeated continuously across the world’s varied landscapes, is the primary means by which the Earth regulates solar energy and therefore manages heat.
Understanding how water works, and incorporating this knowledge into water policy, will not only replenish water sources but also help us mitigate and adapt to climate change. We’ve long accepted a connection between water and climate, but the link tends to go in one direction: that climate change will intensify storms and have a negative impact on water availability. We can also look at how water affects climate and explore ways to support water’s cooling properties.
An interesting water development is the granting of rights to lakes and rivers. The Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India have personhood rights—the right to flourish and be free from harm. In North America, the Klamath River now has legal standing in Yurok tribal court, and this year Ohio voters approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which allows the people of Toledo to act as legal guardians to the lake, which has been marred by nutrient runoff. These examples reflect a growing rights-of-nature movement, based on the belief that nature has inherent value, not just in its use for humans.
Bestowing agency to rivers and lakes may seem a novelty right now, but maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. For at the end of the day, what’s good for water is good for us.
