The World Water Crisis Seeps Into Whatcom County

Alan Rhodes is a retired teacher. He currently uses some of his free time to do volunteer work for the North Cascades Audubon Society, the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, and People for Lake Whatcom.

On a rainy winter day in Whatcom County, it can be difficult to picture people sunbathing on Florida beaches. It can be equally difficult, living as we do in an area where water seems abundant, to fully realize what a scarce resource clean, fresh water is throughout much of the world.

Recently author Carol Rubin appeared at Village Books to talk about her new book, “How to Get Your Lawn Off Grass,” a guide to replacing water-guzzling lawns with hearty, drought-resistant native plants and ground covers. Rubin and many others who have studied world water issues know that water is too precious a resource to pour onto traditional lawns. She began her talk by quoting from her book the following sobering statistics on the state of the world’s drinking water.

•Only one-half of 1 percent of the water on the planet is drinkable.

•The water supply is finite. As our population continues to grow out of control, the amount of drinkable water diminishes.

•1.3 billion people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water right now.

•Four thousand people die each day from waterborne diseases.

•Forty percent of the world’s population relies on water originating in a country that is not their own.1

Given this grim appraisal, the headline in The Bellingham Herald on the opening day of the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, August 26, 2002, did not seem an overstatement: “World Thirsts for Clean Water.”

While oil has been the “black gold” that countries fought over for much of the 20th century, water is coming to be known as “blue gold,” and the same types of conflict that have centered on oil are increasingly centering on the “ownership” and control of water. Ismail Serageldin, World Bank vice-president for environmental affairs, stated the issue in a terse, chilling phrase, “...the wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.”2

In his recent book, “Water: the Fate of Our Most Precious Resource,” Marq de Villiers points out the obvious fact that while we are not making any more water, we are making a lot more people. While approximately 250 million people populated the planet 2000 years ago, in the next twenty years the number of people living in North Africa and the Middle East alone will reach 400 million.

De Villiers runs through a horrific list of what is happening to water right now. For example, all surface and ground freshwater sources are now fully used in Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Cyprus, Malta, and the Arabian Peninsula. Within ten years, the same conditions will exist in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.

Lake Chad, once a source of the Nile, shrinks 100 meters every year. The water table in China drops by one meter every year. Beijing has to divert water from farmland to meet the city’s needs, causing people to leave farming for the city, which exacerbates the problem. The Punjab and Bangladesh are seeing the water table drop even faster than China.3

And these sorts of problems are not limited to the third world. In the American Southwest, Colorado River water has been a source of friction, conflict, and litigation for many decades. By the time this once mighty river reaches Mexico, most of the water has been drained off to satisfy the ever growing demands of Southwestern cities and agriculture. Once the water reaches the Colorado Delta in Mexico, it is literally a trickle, and in drought years it never gets there at all.4

Even more disturbing, the Ogallala aquifer — which supplies Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Nebraska—is disappearing faster than any other aquifer in the world. Withdrawal exceeds replenishment at a rate that approximates the flow of the Colorado River. This is a water source that could have lasted hundreds of years under careful regulation. Instead, it will quite literally be used up in the very near future.5

What happens when a natural resource becomes a commodity, and the commodity begins to get scarce? The same thing that always happens: the speculators and profiteers are the first to see what is happening, and move in quickly. Those who see a shrinking water supply as a vehicle for hefty profits have added water to their privatization list.

Thus, Fortune magazine joyfully proclaimed “Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.” Fortune noted that the privatized water industry is already making more money than the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry, and has reached 40 percent of oil company profits. Moreover, they have amassed these staggering returns after privatizing only 5 percent of the world’s water.6

Across the globe, huge corporations have quickly become involved. Vivendi and Suez are French companies that operate in the U.S. through U.S. Filter and United Water, while RWE, a German firm, controls American Water Works. Singing the glories of privatization, these corporate giants convince municipalities to turn over their public water systems.

The promises are familiar: greater efficiency, better service, lower prices (the sweet Enron song, with slightly different lyrics). When the promises turn out to be empty, and cities realize they’ve been taken for a ride, their troubles are often just beginning. Jim Hightower, a political writer and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture was so disturbed by what he learned, that he devoted a recent issue of his newsletter to nightmare situations that several U.S. cities have brought upon themselves when they fell victim to the siren song of privatization.

Under the privatized water firm, United Water Resources, Atlanta saw brown, debris-laden water coming out of its taps for four months before any action was taken. Fire hydrants became inoperative, and complaints over poor service skyrocketed. When Jersey City also contracted with United Water Resources, the company subcontracted meter reading to a private firm, but when complaints came in about misread and malfunctioning meters, customers were referred to city employees.

As soon as American Water Works took over the water system in Chattanooga, Tennessee, it attempted to secretly export Chattanooga’s water to Atlanta. American Water Works also took over the municipal system in Pekin, Illinois, where they let infrastructure deteriorate and did not maintain fire hydrants, while raising rates on an average of 10 percent each year. After gaining control of the system in Huber Heights, Ohio, American Water Works immediately raised rates by 30 percent, and began diverting water outside the city.

When irate customers, high prices, and broken promises impel cities to restore public control of water, their troubles are often just beginning. They face huge corporations with lots of money, lots of lawyers, and lots of practice at playing rough.

For example, when Chattanooga tried to buy its system back from American Water Works, the company tied the city up in court, outspent it, and wore it down until Chattanooga gave up the fight. This was a painful loss, since going public again would have saved 100 million dollars and cut water rates by 25 percent.7

Developing countries face even greater struggles, as they are often under severe economic pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to privatize their systems. Many Whatcom County residents had a chance to see the disastrous results of third-world privatization in a documentary film that played at the 2002 Whatcom Human Rights Film Festival.

Sheila Franklin’s film, “The Water is Ours, Damn it!,” looked at what happened after the World Bank used the pressure of a 25 million dollar loan to force the municipal government of Cochabamba, Bolivia to privatize its system. Under ownership of the U.S. company Bechtel, Cochabamba’s water rates eventually rose 300 percent, a sum far beyond the financial means of most Bolivians.

It took strikes, arrests, deaths, and massive public demonstrations to force the government of Bolivia to rescind the privatization agreement, and has left Bolivia facing a 25 million dollar lawsuit from Bechtel.

The situation, then, is quite clear. There isn’t much fresh water on earth to begin with; the world’s population is growing by 85 million people each year; our water consumption is growing even faster than the population; and nature’s replenishment can’t keep pace with our demands for water.

Logic dictates that, in addition to seeking technological solutions, we practice strict conservation and exercise the greatest care in our stewardship of water sources. Instead of responding intelligently to a grave situation and looming catastrophe, we continue to behave irresponsibly.

We use water to grow rice in the hot, dry desert of California; we dump millions of gallons of water on the lawns of sprawling cities like Las Vegas; we turn municipal systems over to private corporations focused on profit rather than the public good. While we have already entered an era in which every drop of fresh water on earth must be viewed as precious, we continue to treat water as an infinite resource, cheap and negligible.

And how are things progressing in our own backyard, Whatcom County? How do we treat Lake Whatcom, our only source of drinking water for tens of thousands of city and county residents? We land airplanes on Lake Whatcom, operate boats and jet skis on it, log around it, clear land in the rainy season, and — most serious of all — allow continued residential development.

All this is done with full knowledge of the degradation of the water’s quality that has been going on for years, a situation that has resulted in the Department of Ecology listing the lake under section 303 (d) of the Clean Water Act as an “impaired waterway” because of low levels of dissolved oxygen.

This condition occurs when increased nutrients in a lake (lawn fertilizers, chemicals, pet waste, runoff from impervious surfaces) result in an increase in decaying biomass, which decreases dissolved oxygen.8 The result is a lake that begins to look more like a prematurely aged lake than a healthy one—a lake that is dying before its time.

It is not surprising that when the Department of Ecology took samples from Lake Whatcom and Whatcom Creek in 1998, they found fourteen different pesticides in the water. Three of these pesticides—chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion—were present at levels exceeding standards that protect aquatic life. These three insecticides are commonly used on lawns and gardens.9

When we finally do enough damage, and getting water to our homes becomes a more expensive operation, we can probably rest assured that some smiling corporate folks from out of state will show up to explain how they can solve all our water problems for us.

Thirty years ago, E.F. Schumacher published his groundbreaking book, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.” Schumacher noted that every economist and businessperson knows the difference between capital and income, knows that capital generates income, and knows that if we use up capital, income ceases.

Schumacher saw what many others had not seen—natural resources are a type of capital, gifts of capital that have sustained us for many centuries. And now we spend our capital as if it were disposable income.

When we talk about the Lake Whatcom watershed, there are voices coming from various quarters (real estate, development, logging) that argue passionately, using all the familiar words—progress, prosperity, property rights. Realtors push Lake Whatcom as the perfect place to build that dream house. The Building Industry Association makes frequent appearances in the press and before the County Council to protest any restrictions on development in the watershed.

These forces seem willing to gamble our future for short term gain. Given the worldwide shortage in fresh water and the looming global crisis, with its potential for economic chaos, rampant disease, and international conflict, not even one small county in the Pacific Northwest has a right to gamble any longer. u