Blue Revolution Part 3

Visitors can walk across the barrage atop a wide, concrete bridge and gaze down at its nine steel gates, each a hundred feet wide and weighing seventy tons. When rains pound Singapore during low tide, the gates are lowered to release excess water from the reservoir into the sea. When the monsoons. .h.i.t at high tide, the gates stay closed and seven drainage pumps push the water out. Designed for the sinking Netherlands, the super-sized pumps can displace 75,000 gallons of water a second.

The barrage is creating Singaporeas fifteenth reservoir, the first inside the city center. Combined with two more reservoirs now under construction, it will help increase the nationas water-catchment areas from one-half of the island to two-thirds. The Marina Barrage has also brought kayaking, dragon boating, and many other public events back to the mouth of the Singapore River. But, kind of like those kids at Americaas largest water park, kayakers at the barrage donat have to fret over waves or even tidesa"PUBas water controls eliminate them. They donat have to worry much about wildlife, either. The freshwater reservoir is replacing the tidal estuary. Scientists from the National University of Singapore found some thirty fishes that will no longer be able to breed as a result of the barrage, including snapper, Asian sea ba.s.s, and Indo-Pacific tarpon.39 While barrage construction was under way, they also built the islandas first desalination plant, which wrings thirty million gallons of freshwater each day from the sea. PUB officials consider other countriesa desalination wasteful abecause you treat it at great expense, use it once, and return it to the sea,a says Harry Seah. aBut if you are recycling, it can make sense.a40 Indeed, at half the cost of desalination, PUB officials have put their faith primarily in NEWater. They recently unveiled the nationas fifth NEWater plant, bringing the islandas capacity to more than a hundred million gallons a day. Thatas about a third of Singaporeas daily water demand.41 Finally, to capture the main ingredient for all those NEWater plants, Singapore is building a sewage superhighway deep underground. The so-called deep-tunnel sewerage system, 200 feet below the islandas surface, is part of the largest wastewater-treatment project in the history of the world. A ma.s.sive tunnel, larger than those that carry Singaporeas subway trainsa"20 feet in diameter compared with the 19-foot-wide train tunnelsa"runs under the island below the trains.42 This tunnel and a second one planned for the future will replace smaller pipelines, pumping stations, and reclamation plants across the island to free up precious land for other projects. Gravity pulls used water from homes and industries, concentrated in the northern and eastern part of Singapore, through the tunnels and into giant, centralized water-reclamation plants on each end of the island. The first, Changi, at the east side, can treat 176 million gallons of wastewater a day. (Singapore built its fifth NEWater plant on Changias roof.) In the future, PUB plans another such plant on the west side of the island. The scheme allows aevery drop of used water to be collected, treated, and further purified into NEWater,a says Yong Wei Hin, a.s.sistant director of the Changi plant.43 By the last decades of the twentieth century, Singapore was broadly recognized as having the most advanced water-supply technology in the world. But as it turns out, the nation had gotten almost too good at providing water. PUB officials began to notice an unintended irony: water had become so accessible, and its protection and production so invisible, that people were taking it for granteda"at least by Singaporean standards.

Per capita water consumption grew steadily in Singapore during the 1970s, the 1980s, and especially the 1990s. Elaborate aSave Watera campaigns in each of those decades didnat make a drop of difference. Nor did a water-conservation tax in the 1990s that charged more to Singaporeans who used more.44 Ultimately, one strategy has worked best to lower consumption, says Seah and others. The government set out to instill a water ethic in citizens. PUB officials say the effort to build a personal connection to water has spurred more conservation than either publicity campaigns or price incentives. Since the mid-1990s, per capita consumption has declined steadily from nearly fifty gallons a person to forty gallons a person in 2010. The governmentas goal is to hit thirty-six gallons a person by 2030.45 The strategy to abring people closer to water so that they can better appreciate and cherish this precious resourcea was much more than public relations.46 The most ambitious piece was making the Marina Barrage a waterfront public attraction. It is a very successful one, judging by the hordes of children in bathing suits running, jumping, and laughing in its fountain park on a recent hot day. Aside from fountains, sculptures, and gardens, Marina Barrage has a two-story, circular visitor center shaped like a seash.e.l.l. The center houses the pumping station behind gla.s.s walls, a popular Chinese restaurant called the 7th Storey, and the Sustainable Singapore Gallery, with artwork and hands-on exhibits meant to educate the public on environmental and especially water issues. Its roof is a gra.s.s play area as big as four football fields, where families picnic and fly colorful kites.

At both the Sustainable Singapore Gallery and the NEWater Factory, hands-on displays are high tech, flashy, and interactive, designed to appeal to young Singaporeansa love for technology. Uniformed schoolchildren wind through the exhibits, many of them filling out cla.s.sroom a.s.signments. PUB works closely with both public and private schools on water curriculum. Beginning in kindergarten, kids learn all about Singaporeas afour national tapsa: the imports from Malaysia, NEWater, desalinated water, and the increasingly important idea of local catchment areas. aWeare not asking them to name every reservoir and the average annual rainfall,a says PUBas Linda Dorothy de Mello. aWe just want them to make the connection.a47 The most direct new connection between Singaporeans and their water is the one that gets them weta"the kayaking at the Marina Barrage, the public park back at Bedok Reservoir and similar projects under way all over the island.

At a public housing neighborhood called Kolam Ayer, nondescript high-rise apartments once overlooked a drab, razor-straight ca.n.a.l. Today, the waterway has been restored with trees and aquatic plants on its banks and a river walk with floating decks and hands-on projects for neighborhood kids. A toddler yanks a giant Archimedes screw meant to teach children an ancient method of moving water. An elderly man enjoys two hobbies at once: as he fishes with a cane pole at the edge of the ca.n.a.l, his songbird hangs in a willow behind him, silent in a tiny, teak cage.

Living in their small, high-rise apartments, well cared for by a government that has convinced them to drink recycled water and celebrate how skillfully their nation captures every drop, the Singaporean people may seem like those songbirds in their lacquered cages. The birds have benevolent caretakers, clean water in hand-painted bowls, beautiful venues for singing.

But itas not quite how youad want to live, if you were a songbird.

Water officials in Singapore like to say theyave closed the water loop: Every river is dammed, with significant impact to fish and other wildlife. Every bit of water is collected, whether rainfall or sewage. Seawater and wastewater alike are squeezed into freshwater.

Singaporeans had no choice but to close the loop. They live on a tiny island with hardly any freshwater supply. They fear reliance on a political rival for their lifeblood. In the United States, this is not the case. Weare blessed with more than 250,000 riversa"3.5 million miles of them. The longest, the Missouri, flows for a stunning 2,500 miles. The largest, the Mississippi, at its mouth gushes 593,000 cubic feet per second.48 Weave got the largest single source of fresh surface water on the planet, the Great Lakes, which hold a fifth of the worldas supply.49 Another 60,000 trillion gallons or so course underground in aquifers, recharging to the tune of about a trillion gallons a day.50 Singaporeans deserve global admiration for the breathtaking turnaround of their economy in just one generation. They deserve deep respect for giving every person in the country access to clean water and sanitation. And they deserve credit for becoming the worldas ultimate water conservationists, reusing every drop on their tiny island.

Some American communities have so overtapped their natural supply that theyare being forced to do the same. But for those that still have options, the best one happens to be the easiest and the cheapest: keeping as much water as possible in natural systemsa"rivers, lakes, and streamsa"and valuing every drop like the treasure that it is.

Singaporeas water lesson is not NEWater, the barrage, or the other technological breakthroughs piling up engineering awards from the United States and other parts of the world. The crucial lesson is that the island nation managed to build an ethic among a citizenry that had stopped caring about water.

Most Americans want to see wild rivers. We want to put up rain barrels and keep chickens in the backyarda"or at least have the right to do so. We donat want to see the raising of pigs and ducks phased out completely. We donat want to be fined for forgetting to flush the toilet. We donat want to be told not to chew gum.

We have the engineering prowess to harness every river. We have the technology to wrest freshwater molecules from sewage. In fact, the semipermeable membranes central to the first step of NEWater come from Pennsylvania-based GE Water and Process Technologies. Continuing to build our way to water supply will certainly enrich the contractors who land the projects. It will further empower our water bureaucracies la Singapore, where no one is allowed a cistern because water managers must capture every drop of rain.

But if we took better care of our abundant water resources, and if we used them wisely, we wouldnat have to.

Chapter 8. The Big Dipper.

If the notoriety of a public figure may be measured by the number, range, and sheer juiciness of nicknames bestowed, then Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority for more than two decades, is the most notorious water manager in America.

The New York Times calls her the Vegas Water Czar.1 Her local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun, anoints her the Chosen One.2 Following that biblical theme, the trustworthy WaterWired blog, produced in Oregon, calls her Mosesa"but actually, itas in honor of Robert Moses, the power broker of New York City who bullied through bridges, tunnels, and parkways in the mid-twentieth century, wiping out urban neighborhoods to shape the modern suburbs.3 Inevitably, s.e.xist monikers cling to a woman in power. Mulroy is reviled as the Water Witch of the West.4 Iave heard her called the Water Czarina, the Alpha Female, and this twist: the Alpha Female with Cojones.

In her Las Vegas home, Mulroy also picked up the nickname Scarlett. Water journalist Emily Green describes this comparison with the aruthless, scheming, tough, histrionic, and beautifula heroine in Gone with the Wind who cries, aAs G.o.d as my witness, I will never be hungry again!a5 Mulroyas job is to make sure Las Vegas, the driest city in the driest state in the nation, will never, ever be thirsty. The reason sheas racked up so many nicknames is because sheas very, very good at it.

No member of Americaas water-industrial complex thinks bigger than Patricia Mulroy. She wears ambition like the signature turned-up collars on her blouses; she has since her twenties, when as an a.s.sistant administrator in Clark County government, she helped fend off annexation of the lucrative Las Vegas Strip by city government. Mentally quick and physically fit, she bounded up the local-government ladder. In less than ten years, she was running the Las Vegas Valley Water District as deputy general manager. Her determination did not go unnoticed by the water-loving Strip. When the water districtas top position opened up, the wizards of illusion who make fountains dance in the desert pushed Mulroy in preference to an archetypal water-management candidate, a former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and a.s.sistant secretary of the interior who was looking to come home to Nevada.6 Las Vegas didnat want a water manager steeped in arcane western water law, accepting of the historic compact that gives Nevada the least water of all the seven states that share the Colorado River. When the river was divvied up in 1922, southern Nevada was nearly deserted; the entire state received 4 percent of the Colorado allocation.7 In the 1990s, Las Vegas became the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country.8 It fancied itself the glittering symbol of the New West. It wanted new ways to find new water.

Mulroy got off to a promising start. She began by taking on the fountaineers themselves. She convinced Steve Wynna"the Stripas best-known resort developer, the conjurer of flamboyant public water shows at the Mirage, the Bellagio, and Treasure Islanda"that he and fellow casino developers would recycle the water in their ch.o.r.eographed fountains, or lose them. She also began to help residents reduce what was then a 350-gallon-a-day water habit, targeting their irrigation of subtropical lawns in the Mojave Desert.9 But Mulroyas job was, and remains, to secure more water so the city can continue growing residents, real estate, and resorts. The new position gave her control over just one of seven rival water companies that serve southern Nevadaas Las Vegas Basin. Almost immediately, she began to work on the other six, trying to convince them to pool their water under a new mega-agency. Her argument: having tapped out Nevadaas original allocation of the Colorado, Vegas must become a bigger player to land more water. By combining resources, the water purveyors could develop regional supplies. They also might be able to win more clout at the negotiating table with the other states vying for water from the Colorado.10 Less than a year into the new job, Mulroy made one of the biggest urban water grabs in western U.S. history. After quietly prospecting to figure out how much groundwater could be pumped up from the rest of Nevada to serve Las Vegas Valley, Mulroyas district filed applications for all the unclaimed groundwater in about half the state. Her local rivals liked what they saw. They agreed to merge into Mulroyas mega-agency. After just three years as head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she was also named general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.11 Ranchers and residents of the rural counties where Vegas made its claim for every last drop of groundwater were furious. They saw Mulroy as aforeclosinga on their future, by tying up all the available water rights in the four huge counties. Their battle cry became aRemember the Owens Valley!a12 The Owens, just east of the Sierra Nevada in California, was once fertile home to orchards, farms, and ranches, but it dried to a near dust bowl after William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at the turn of the twentieth century, carried out a quiet plan to acquire Owens water and send it by aqueduct 235 miles to LA. The shadowy deal was fictionalized in the 1974 film Chinatown, with a character based on Mulholland named Hollis Mulwray.

In 1992, when the late environmental writer Marc Reisner updated his cla.s.sic book on western water, Cadillac Desert, head recently come across the aforcefula Patricia Mulroy, and he wrote about her in the promising context of urban water alliances taking shape in the New West. But in either a Freudian slip or a sly nod to her potential, Reisner referred to her as Patricia Mulwray, using the last name of the Chinatown character.

The new nickname may turn out to be the most apt of them all. For the woman who definitely had the cojones to forge a bold, new path for water in the New West instead has become the nationas most ardent champion of the old.

Mulroy has indeed helped redirect the flow of Colorado River water for the good of her city. Sheas prevailed in her argument that Las Vegas, with its $60 billion economic output, is at least as valuable as the 400 farms in Californiaas Imperial Valley that were getting as much Colorado River water as all of Nevada and Arizona combined.13 In 2001, Mulroy negotiated water-banking agreements with Arizona and California that let Nevada pay to store water in those states, then pull extra from Lake Mead. In 2007, when the Colorado River Basin states agreed to a new pact for how the river should be divvied when it runs low, they also let Mulroyas agency build a $172 million reservoir in California to store any Colorado River water unclaimed by U.S. agricultural users (say, in case it rains and the farmers donat need it) to keep it from flowing to Mexico. Again, the deal lets Nevada withdraw more than its meager allocation from the Colorado.14 (Mexico is allocated 1.5 million acre-feet of the Colorado under a 1944 treaty with the United States in which Mexico agreed to send water the other direction from six tributaries that feed into the Rio Grande. Mulroy also has proposed funding desalination plants for Mexico in exchange for some of the countryas allocation.) And despite her crusade for freshwater sources, Mulroy has declared war on waste. Sheas championed water-wise housing developments and landscaping. She started a cash-for-gra.s.s program that pays homeowners $1.50 a square foot to tear out their lawns. That and other initiatives helped Las Vegas pinch off 20 percent of its water use between 2001 and 2008, even as the metropolitan area added 482,000 new residents in those years to reach the milestone of two million in population.15 aThe future, foundational ethic of water agencies has to be weaning the community of wasteful water use,a says Mulroy. aSome of this is easya"weare not asking you to carry your urn to Lake Mead. Weare talking about, if youare going to live in the desert, live as if itas a desert, not with Kentucky bluegra.s.s.a16 But in some ways, Las Vegas has made water too easy. Despite rate increases during Mulroyas tenure, Las Vegas families still enjoy some of the lowest water prices in the nation. An a.n.a.lysis by the water-reporting consortium Circle of Blue in 2010 found that a family of four in the water-scarce city has an average $32.93 monthly water bill, while a family using the same amount must sh.e.l.l out $72.95 a month in Atlanta, which receives ten times Vegasas rainfall.17 When I interviewed Mulroy in fall 2010, Las Vegas residents could still water their lawns with this inexpensive water three times a week.

This disconnect between cost and scarcity is part of the problem with the ma.s.sive groundwater project to tap the aquifers beneath the Great Basin of eastern Nevada, which would pull water from under the rural Nevada counties as well as some in western Utah. Itas not that rural Nevadans or next-door neighbors in Utah donat recognize the need to share the regionas most important resource. But they donat want to see it siphoned to keep water cheap in Las Vegas at the expense of their own economy and ecosystems.

Mulroy argues that the Southern Nevada Water Authority has a legal right to tap water that belongs to Nevada. But say the groundwater project makes it through the courts. The country is full of water projects and compacts that were perfectly legala"or made so by state legislatures or Congressa"but one hardly needs to query Ask the Ethicist to figure out if they were right.

In his book Escaping Platoas Cave, the four-decade a.s.sociated Press correspondent Mort Rosenblum writes about the pathetic remnants of native villages in California and Mexico that once thrived on the banks of the Colorado River near where it flowed into the Sea of Cortez. In the early 1960s, the Colorado River treaty left Mexico with so little water that the riveras lush delta ecosystem shrank to a lifeless, salt-flat wasteland.18 In the community of Al Mayor in Baja California, a Cucapa Indian chief told Rosenblum, aOur river is gone. No more fis.h.i.+ng. Trees are dead. No one plants. The wells are dry.a The villagers can use the riveras salty trickle for was.h.i.+ng. But for drinking and cooking, they are forced to buy their water in 5-gallon jugs from a traveling water salesman.19 It was not until 1974 that the United States agreed to include water quality in its promise of Colorado River water to Mexico.

Local leaders in Utah worry that southern Nevadaas pipeline will prevent them from growing in the way their communities envision.20 Scientists who study Snake Valley, at the Nevada-Utah border, speculate that the project could dry up desert vegetation, not only wiping out wildlife habitat but also creating dust storms to rival those of the 1930s.21 History bears out the need to listen carefully to these warnings, and come up with a new, ethical framework for moving water around U.S. regions. But Mulroy doesnat see it. Even as she fas.h.i.+ons herself the new, green water manager for the twenty-first century, challenging the conservative mind-set of the men who divvied up the Colorado River, sheas dreaming of a bigger water grab than those guys ever imagined.22 In 2009, as Congress debated the nearly $800 billion federal stimulus bill, Mulroy served up her most audacious suggestion for how to spend the money: if the federal government really wanted to pump up job growth and stimulate the economy, she suggested, perhaps it should consider the largest water-diversion project in American history. What if the nation decided to capture floodwater from the Mississippi River and use it to recharge the ma.s.sive aquifer being sucked dry underneath Americaas Great Plains?23 Mississippi floods are a menace. Meanwhile, to the west, weare depleting the High Plains Aquifer. Could the problems cancel each other out?

Mulroy envisions a scheme that would dwarf the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, take a decade or more to build, create tens of thousands of jobs, and inject billions of dollars into the economy. Engineering firms CH2M Hill and Black & Veatch floated the idea as part of a nothing-off-the-table contract with the Southern Nevada Water Authority as drought sunk the level in Lake Mead. In their 2008 report, the firms looked at all sorts of options for bolstering the flow of water in the Colorado River. They included building a pipeline from the Columbia River on the border of Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon, even s.h.i.+pping water down from Alaska. But the Mississippi plan is the one that sparked Mulroyas imagination.24 In public appearances and in interviews, she often seems to be working on the argument. She points out that athe West is growing dryer and the East is growing wettera under the specter of climate change.

s.h.i.+pping water from the wetter eastern United States to quench the arid West is not a new concept. In the 1960s, Texas politicians hatched the outsized Texas Water Plan to capture Mississippi River water and replenish their overtapped plains.25 In the 1970s, Congress authorized a $6 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study on the feasibility of transporting water west to the High Plains.26 In the early 1980s, Jonathan Bulkley, a former water-policy professor of mine at the University of Michigan, conducted the last serious study of the question, to show how much it would cost to connect the Great Lakes to the Missouri to move water to the High Plains. The Rocky Mountains are the roadblock. Transporting water around, through, or over them makes moving water from the eastern to the western half of the country ma.s.sively expensive, Bulkley says. He couldnat see the taxpayers going for it. Building the infrastructure only as far as South Dakota, he found, would cost $20 billion (in 1982 dollars). That doesnat include the energy costs to hoist the water up and pump it hundreds of miles west, which he calculated at another $7 billion.27 But, like a bottled-water genius on Madison Avenue, Mulroy has taken a water project long considered flat and has carbonated and sweetened it to appeal to a new generation. Mississippi water could refill the High Plains Aquifer as the first in a chain of infrastructure projects and exchanges from east to west. Suburbanites in Denver and farmers across the eastern flank of the Rockies could then tap into the Mississippi water, relinquis.h.i.+ng Colorado River water they now pump across the Continental Divide. That would leave more water in the Coloradoa"and more for Las Vegas.28 Las Vegas has invested deeply in conservation under Mulroy, who paid her customers more than $100 million to remove gra.s.s and replace it with desert vegetation. Still, the arid oasis lives so far beyond its water means that it also comes up flat in the search for a water ethic for America.

I wanted to find a more holistic way of thinking about the ethica"beyond using less on our lawns and in our fountains, toward a shared respect for water, ecosystems, and people. I consulted a spectrum of philosophical readings, many of them conflicting. They ranged from eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who famously believed that nature held no moral standing at all, to Albert Schweitzer and his beautiful areverence for lifea ideas.29 I found academic tomes that tackled the promise of a water ethic, but so densely that the average person would no more read them than Newtonas Principia. But perhaps, with some 85 percent of Americans identifying with a religious faitha"nearly 80 percent with a Christian denomination30a"I could find some common ground for a water ethic in the Bible and other religious texts.

The arid deserts of the Middle East, birthplace of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, gave water utmost importance in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah.31 Like the flood myths, the theme of water as giver of life and cleanser of sin repeats again and again. The Quran considers water the most precious creation after humankind.32 In the Torah and in the Bibleas Old Testament, the world is created from water, which symbolizes the primordial ocean from where all life flows.33 The Bible mentions water more than any other element, and G.o.das care for people is often revealed with the gift of water. aHe watereth the hills from his chambers,a says Psalm 104. aThe earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.a34 Outside the desert of the Israelites, there was an obvious place to look for Christian views on water: the U.S. Bible Belta"specifically, the section where water has become most famously linked to prayer, Atlanta, Georgia. Most eastern cities sit atop ma.s.sive aquifers that supply groundwater to urbanites, or theyare close to major surface-water supplies such as lakes. Atlanta is not one of them. The Chattahoochee River, or the Hooch, as it is affectionately known by locals, is the smallest river in the nation to supply water to a major metro area. More than five million people in and around Atlanta rely on the Chattahoocheeas Lake Sidney Lanier for all their water needs.

Lake Lanier is actually a reservoir, created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s as it dammed the Chattahoochee. The real Sidney Lanier, a Georgia-born poet who wrote lyrically of the Chattahoocheeas rapids, likely would have been appalled by the impoundmentas christening. The river can no longer ahurry amain to reach the plain,a as Lanier wrote in his 1877 poem aSong of the Chattahoochee.a35 It is stretched too thin by Atlantaas lawn irrigation (the cityas biggest residential water use), toilet flus.h.i.+ng (the second biggest), and other household water demandsa"not to mention fourteen dams, sixteen power plants, and countless industrial draws, including the Hooch-filled bottles of Dasani that roll off Coca-Colaas production line in Marietta.36 Downstream, the Chattahoochee also brings life to south Georgia, as well as Alabama and Florida, where its basin helps irrigate 780,000 acres of corn, cotton, peanut, and other crops each year. In Floridaas Panhandle, the Hooch joins another Georgia river, the Flint, to become the powerful Apalachicola, which carries sixteen billion gallons of freshwater a day to the Gulf of Mexico, there creating one of the last unspoiled brackish bays in the Southeast.

During a devastating drought in 1988, federal environmental officials declared Apalachicola Bay a disaster area when diminished Chattahoochee flow killed the bayas nationally known oyster harvesta"the mainstay of the local economy. But the Corps of Engineersas allegiance stuck with Atlanta sprinklers rather than Apalachicola sh.e.l.lfish. In 1989, the Corps came up with a new dam-and-reservoir plan to harness even more of the Chattahoochee in dry times. A year later, Alabama, worried that a dwindled flow would hamper the stateas ability to grow and develop, filed a lawsuit to stop the dam. Florida joined the suit, arguing that further upstream withdrawals would destroy Apalachicola Bay and the regionas signature seafood industry.

Those were the opening jabs in a water fight that has slogged on for twenty years. In 1998, Congress pa.s.sed a celebrated truce: a water compact for the three states. But tristate officials failed so miserably in negotiating the compacta"they missed fourteen deadlinesa"that it was terminated five years later. The fight then moved on to courthouses in Birmingham, Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The lawyers fared no better than the politicians in figuring out how to share the Hooch. But in just the past decade, theyave managed to bill the statesa taxpayers more than $30 million in legal fees.37 This is the problem with Americaas water wars, be they among cities, regions, or states: the conflicts put each combatant in the defensive mode of figuring out how to get more and more water, rather than working together to use less. They cost citizens millions of dollars in legal fees without the first drop of anewa water. And they take attention away from whatas really important: working to keep as much water as possible in stream, and learning to live within our water means.

Georgia did not concede that last point until the water supply for its largest city very nearly ran out. State lawmakers had long refused to consider a state water plan. One big change that did make its way to Georgiaas state a.s.sembly, requiring that water-wasting toilets be replaced with efficient ones upon sale of an existing home, was unceremoniously flushed by the real estate industry. Hubris gave way to humility in fall 2007, a year and a half into the worst drought to settle on the southeastern United States in modern times. Lake Lanier came within 90 days of running dry. Then Georgia governor Sonny Perdue, a Baptist, led a public prayer service on the steps of the gold-domed state capitol in Atlanta ato very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.a38 He quoted Psalm 65, which praises G.o.d for water abundance: You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of G.o.d is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its ridges abundantly, you settle its furrows; you make it soft with showers, you bless its growth.39 The governoras prayers were answered, and then some. The next fall, Tropical Storm Fay shepherded a flock of storms that soaked the Southeast and helped fill Lanier. But the judge considering the tristate litigation over the Chattahoochee was not so benevolent to Atlanta. In 2009, U.S. District Court judge Paul Magnuson ruled that Lanier had never been authorized as a water supply for Atlanta; the Corps of Engineers had been illegally diverting it as such for fifty years. Magnuson gave Georgia, Alabama, and Florida until 2012 to come up with a water-sharing plan for the Hooch and have Congress okay it. Otherwise, head cut Atlanta off Lanier. His ninety-seven-page ruling ended with what may have been the most sensible statement uttered in the twenty-year legal battle: Too often, state, local, and even national government actors do not consider the long-term consequences of their decisions. Local governments allow unchecked growth because it increases tax revenue, but these same governments do not sufficiently plan for the resources such unchecked growth will require. Nor do individual citizens consider frequently enough their consumption of our scarce resources, absent a crisis. . . . Only by cooperating, planning, and conserving can we avoid the situations that gave rise to this litigation.40 Georgiaas politicians began to repent. In spring 2010, Perdue signed the Water Stewards.h.i.+p Act, which vaulted Georgia over any southeastern state on water conservation, with water-efficient building requirements and a daytime-irrigation ban. Later that year, when Perdue moved out of the governoras mansion, he said the lack of resolution in the tristate water wars was the major disappointment of his eight years in office.41 Inheriting the tristate tussle was incoming governor Nathan Deal, a three-term Congressman from north Georgia whose gubernatorial election strategy included plays to conspiracy theorists. On global warming, Deal challenged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyas finding that greenhouse-gas pollution endangers public health, charging that climate science is afundamentally corrupted.a42 When it came to water, Deal had tried to wean Atlanta off the Chattahoochee and Lake Lanier, but at the expense of the Flint River. During his last term in Congress, in 2008, he sought $10 million in federal funding to study reauthorization of a series of dams on the Flint that had been nixed with the help of Jimmy Carter during his terms as governor of Georgia and president.43 What most people outside Georgia donat realize is that the biggest water wars in the state are not with Florida and Alabama; they are between metro Atlanta and everyone else in Georgia. Besides the Chattahoochee, the Coosa and Flint Rivers also supply water to the metro region via interbasin transfers. The transfers are so controversial within the state that rural lawmakers ten years ago managed to ban water transfers into Atlanta from any basin outside the fifteen-county metro area. But Georgia was expected to change its interbasin-transfer rules in 2011, in response to both the Lanier problem and the fears in counties upstream and downstream of Atlanta that the metro area is asuckina water out of the state,a as a prime-time television commercial charged during the 2010 gubernatorial elections. aAsk the candidates for governor,a the ad admonished, awho will hold metro Atlanta accountable?a44 The Metro Atlanta Chamber called the ad a low blow to a city that is working hard to become sustainable. But the rest-of-us-vs.-Atlanta mentality is easy to understand when gold-dome politicians continue to draw beads on rivers like the Savannah, which forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina, and the Tennessee River, which doesnat even flow through Georgia. (That inconvenient fact hasnat stopped Peach State lawmakers. In 2008, they pa.s.sed a resolution directing the state to try to fix a 200-year-old surveying error they say keeps Georgia from its rightful share of the Tennessee River, which lies just a mile north of the Georgia-Tennessee border and carries some fifteen times as much water as the Chattahoochee.)45 Liberals laughed when Governor Perdue prayed for rain. But they should heed the moral of the story: Atlantaas Christian community has embraced water as a cause, perhaps more widely than in any other water-stressed part of the United States. Churches and religious schools alike are trying to help the city build a water ethic based on biblical stewards.h.i.+p principles. More than a dozen major Presbyterian churches, for example, work together under the auspices of the Earth Covenant Ministry, which developed a water initiative ato engage people of faith on the issue of water: how we use it, treat it, advocate for it, and share it with neighbors downstream for the flouris.h.i.+ng of all creation.a The ministry preaches a gospel of relating to downstream neighbors and nearby states anot as compet.i.tors with whom to be at war, but as companions in the shared responsibility of protecting water,a says the organizationas founder, Reverend Alan Jenkins. The far-reaching ministry gives water-conservation advice to paris.h.i.+oners and water-policy advice to politiciansa"weighing in on the transfer issue at the state Capitol Building, for example.46 Rural Georgians also are turning to their churches for an answer to water conflict. In Rome, in the northeast corner of the state, Joe Cook, Riverkeeper of the Upper Coosa, has been making the Wednesday-night rounds at Baptist and Methodist churches for a talk that asks, aIf you had water in abundance and your neighbor was in need, would you share your abundance with your neighbor?a Sharing is, after all, the Christian thing to do. But Cook says the answer, for a majority of paris.h.i.+oners in Rome, is no.

Itas not that they wouldnat share their water blessings (three rivers that carry through about 4.4 billion gallons of water a day, compared with the 1.6 billion gallons that flow by Atlanta in the Chattahoochee) with neighbors who were truly in need. But, like the rural Utah and Nevada interests fretting over southern Nevadaas groundwater grab, they donat want to see their rivers irrigate metro-area lawns at the expense of their own growth and prosperity. aMetro Atlanta is starting to get serious about water conservation and doing the right thing, but thereas still a lot Metro Atlanta can do,a Cook says. aUntil they do, the good Baptists of Rome, Georgia, and elsewhere are not inclined to share what they have in abundance.a47 After the philosophers, the academics, and the Christians, there was still one crucial authority I had yet to mine for ethical truths about water. And that was YouTube. One Sat.u.r.day morning, I settled in on the couch with my laptop and an expert navigator of cla.s.sic cartoons on each side of me. We searched for the short, evil genius Dr. Simon Bar Sinister, whoas always trying to take over the world in the Underdog series from the early 1960s. In an episode called aThe Big Dipper,a Bar Sinister creates a machine to suck up all the water on the planet. He plans to stash the contents of all the lakes, rivers, and oceans in small bottles so he can control the thirsty humans and make them his slaves.

It blew my mind that the Mad Mena"era advertising execs who created Underdog on behalf of General Mills managed to so presciently predict Americaas twenty-first-century water strife, down to Bar Sinisteras plan to sell the freshwater in small bottles at exorbitant rates. They even got the pattern of the water-industrial complex down: The first time he revs up the Big Dipper, it doesnat worka"the water freezes. The second time, it malfunctions againa"the water turns to steam. Third try, it fails again, causing the water to flood his house. But finally, the Big Dipper works and Bar Sinister begins to suck up all the water in the world, labeling his bottles with the sources: the Green River, Lake Michigan, the Ohio River, and so on around the planet.

The label on one of the bottles reads aMississippi.a No doubt, American ingenuity could build a Big Dipper to suck the Mississippi River into the thirsting High Plains Aquifer. The crack water lawyers of the West could finesse it through the courts. The casino builders of Nevada could even hook up with the iPad makers of California and lobby Congress hard enough to pour on the money. But none of that changes the ethical problems with long-distance transfer of water in twenty-first-century America.

Despite its sometimes devastating floods, the Mississippi has at other times dipped so low that barges could not make their journey south. Some boosters have suggested that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build a system of pipes to drain water from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi to buoy the boats next time it happens.48 Like the reengineering in the Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta and the Everglades, the image of pipes moving Lake Michigan water to the Mississippi, Mississippi water to the High Plains, and High Plains water to the Colorado deteriorates into a hallucination worthy of a Rube Goldberg cartoon. Tellingly, the Pulitzer Prizea"winning artist began his career as an engineer with San Franciscoas water and sewer department.

Such sketches have been drawn for just about every untouched stretch of freshwater left from East to West. In Florida, housing developers who had helped overtap the aquifer in the southern and central regions of the state looked hundreds of miles north to the tea-brown Suwannee, the least obstructed major river remaining in the United States.49 (Maybe theyad been watching too much Underdog: in the Big Dipper episode, one of Simon Bar Sinisteras little gla.s.s bottles is labeled aSwanee River.a) In Colorado, Fort Collins entrepreneur Aaron Million is seeking regulatory approval of his plan for a 500-mile, $3 billion water pipeline that would traverse the Continental Divide to bring water from the Green River and the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in southwest Wyoming to the fast-growing cities of Coloradoas Front Range.50 In a scheme to outdo Patricia Mulroyas Mississippi, seemingly eternal American presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche is building a small following for the North American Water and Power Alliance. The alliance has taken up a 1964 plan by Ralph M. Parsons, founder of the powerhouse Parsons Corporation engineering firm, who dreamed of building dams up to 1,800 feet high in the canyons of British Columbia to turn a natural depression called the Rocky Mountain Trench into a 680-million-acre reservoira"one with three times the capacity of all of todayas U.S. reservoirs combined.51 LaRouche and his followers tout a modern-day Civilian Conservation Corps project akin to the Moon landing in its promise for renewing Americaas scientific prowess and its spirit. The largest infrastructure scheme in history would put 4 million Americans to work diverting water from the border between Alaska and Canadaas Yukon territory into a acontinental water-management systema that will amake the great American desert bloom,a while stabilizing water supplies in the eastern United States and the Great Lakes.52 Itas a safe bet the water-loving Canadians would never stand for such a plan. In 1997, Canadian entrepreneur John Febbraro, of Ontario, sparked an international incidenta"and then, an unprecedented Great Lakes water treatya"when he managed to acquire a permit to s.h.i.+p water in bulk on oceangoing freighters from Lake Superior to Asia.53 Itas easy enough to discount LaRoucheas young Water and Power Alliance disciples, especially when they punctuate their water presentations with a peculiar obsession about the threat the United Kingdom poses to the United States. Others, such as Mulroy and Febbraro, paint a convincing picture of bountya"as well as the flood dangers that may be aggravated by climate changea"to argue for s.h.i.+fting water around regions, the country, or the world. Lake Superior is so large that astronauts could see it from the Moon, along with the familiar outline of the rest of the Great Lakesa"Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. The five lakes and their connecting channels form the largest fresh surface-water system on the planet. Only the polar ice caps hold more.54 Like the Mississippi, the lakes look to have more than their share. But environmentalists on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border point to the cautionary tale of the Aral Sea.

Once the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world, the Aral has gone from bountiful to pitiful in one generation. In the heart of Central Asia, the Aral once spread across the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan for 26,000 square miles. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet government began to divert the two freshwater rivers that feed the seaa"the Amu Darya and the Syr Daryaa"to increase cotton production in the desert for Russian textile mills. In fifty years, the project has shrunk the Aral to one-quarter of its former surface area, and just one-tenth of its former volume. Great Lakes journalist Peter Annin traveled to deserted fis.h.i.+ng villages in Uzbekistan and described thirty-foot cliffs aoverlooking a sprawling scrub-brush desert that stretches for miles beyond the horizon, with no water in sight. The cool sea breeze has been supplanted by a hot desert wind; the cras.h.i.+ng waves have been replaced by aimless drifts of desert sand.a.5.5 From a formerly thriving fis.h.i.+ng community called Muynak on the south sh.o.r.e of the Aral, Annin had to drive across the old seabed for five hours to get to the new southernmost point of the inland sea. The Aral was once a tourist mecca for fis.h.i.+ng and hunting. Today, the two smaller water bodies that remain of the brackish sea are so salty that no native fish survive. Nicholai Aladin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, calls it aa biblical disaster.a56 It is a disaster unlikely to be repeated in the United States or Canada, given todayas scientific knowledge, freshwater protections in both nations, and the Great Lakes Compact. The doc.u.ment, negotiated by all eight Great Lakes states and pa.s.sed by Congress in 2008, grew out of fears over the ease with which Febbraro acquired his bulk-transfer permit for Lake Superior water a decade before. It prevents bulk transport of water out of the lakesa"though a loophole allows companies to transport it in plastic bottles.

Americaas environmental history makes clear that the biggest water fixes are more likely to lead to new and never-imagined consequences than to something weave already seen. The Soviets did not set out to create the disaster of the Aral Sea, any more than Americaas twentieth-century water managers planned to drain the Colorado River.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the new Great Lakes Compact, the updated Colorado River Compact, and other efforts around the nation signaled an acceptance of this truth in regions that had battled over water in the twentieth. Water-conservation propaganda spread like gra.s.s (and often depicted bright, green gra.s.s) on highway billboards and television public-service announcements across the country. But as they asked their citizens to practice moderation, many water managers and their bossesa"often elected officialsa"could not, themselves, kick the urge to binge. They were not Simon Bar Sinister evil. Like Mulroy, they definitely viewed water as a treasurea"one to go after and count by the millions of acre-feet.

Californiaas Delta, the Florida Everglades, the Colorado River, and Georgiaas Chattahoochee all debunk the water-management myth that surplus water sloshes around in our rivers and under the ground. Western water managers know all too well that the 1922 Colorado River Compactas projections for the river flow that could be expected each yeara"17.5 million acre-feeta"were far too optimistic. By 1965, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said longer-term data showed the actual flow might be closer to 14 million acre-feet.57 Today, scientists say 13.7 million-acre feet may be a more realistic estimate.58 As Patricia Mulroy points out, when she took over as general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority a little more than two decades ago, Bureau of Reclamation computer models showed zero probabilitya"zeroa"that Lake Mead could ever fall as low as it has today. aTo me, probability has become meaningless,a she says. aWe have to function in the realm of hope for the best and plan for the worsta"know what you have to do when the worst occurs, and know when to pull the trigger.a59 The agency currently is tunneling under Lake Mead to install a third intake pipe below the reservoir in the original Colorado River channel. Mulroy says she will go forward with the groundwater project only if the level in Mead drops to 1,025 feet. The all-time low, set in 1956, was 1,083 feet.

In Was.h.i.+ngton, her bid for stimulus funding for a Mississippi River transfer study came up dry. But she says that if climate change brings increased drought in the West and violent weather in the East, aI predict it wonat take too many years of destructive flooding in the Midwest for this to find its way to Congress as a flood-control project.

aI donat think the politics are ripe yet,a Mulroy says. aBut Iave planted the seeds.a60

Chapter 9. The Business of Blue.

In his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Richard Meeusen is known as a brash CEO who is highly opinionated and quick to point out the obviousa"especially the painfully obvious.1 The penchant has served him well. The former accountant was not yet 50 when he was named chairman, president, and CEO of Milwaukee-based Badger Meter Inc., the largest water-meter company in North America, which he then led to record sales of $280 million.2 Meeusen was able to move water meters even during the economic downturn by pointing out to utility, commercial, and industrial customers that not accounting for water is the same as not accounting for money.

But Meeusen has a more provocatively obvious statement to make about water, a twist on the aspirations of Patricia Mulroy: if areas such as Las Vegas and Atlanta are running dry, doesnat it makes sense to s.h.i.+ft water-dependent industrya"and even populationa"away from them, and to water-rich parts of the nation like Milwaukee?

aMost of the aquifers in America are being drained; most of the aquifers in the world are being drained,a says Meeusen. aMilwaukee has water. Letas look at this realistically.a3 This aquatic ambition hit Meeusen in 2009, when he was about halfway through reading Judge Paul Magnusonas ruling against Atlanta in the tristate water conflict. Given his line of business, Meeusen is a water wonk who prolifically readsa"and often tweets abouta"every new report, court ruling, and a.n.a.lysis on the subject, particularly if it involves scarcity. About the same time as Magnusonas Lake Lanier bombsh.e.l.l, Meeusen had read a local report from the Milwaukee Water Works that showed it operating at only 30 percent capacity.

aThe water system in Milwaukee was built to handle Miller, Schlitz, and other breweries we donat have anymore,a he says. aIf youare a wet business in Atlanta, you ought to be thinking about this.a Meeusen is intimately familiar with the loss of Milwaukeeas storied beer industry and the consequences for the cityas economy, having been born and raised in the west-side suburbs, son of a machinist on the bottling lines at Miller Brewing Company. Milwaukee was once the nationas No. 1 brewer, headquarters to companies, including Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz, drawn there by the water bounty of Lake Michigan and the rivers running through the city. But as Meeusen grew up, he watched the beer makers leave one by one, along with other industries and families lured away by the warm and business-friendly climate of Americaas Sun Belt.

When Meeusen was five years old, in 1960, Milwaukeeas population peaked at 740,000. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it hovered at 600,000, and only one brewer, Miller Coors, remained in Milwaukee. The tanneries, another mainstay built on large quant.i.ties of water, were gone, too.4 As the city shed jobs, unemployment climbed; Milwaukee was one of the few metro areas in the country to have fewer jobs in 2008 than in 2001.5 Water, Meeusen is convinced, is going to change all that in the twenty-first centurya"as surely as it was the main ingredient flowing through the cityas grand brick brewhouses in the nineteenth and twentieth.

In 2009, Meeusen and other business and political leaders in the city launched the Milwaukee Water Council to spark a ablue gold rush.a Milwaukee is already home to 150 water-dependent industries, including heavy hitters such as Veolia, Kohler, Siemens, and ITT. Some settled here to meet demand among breweries and other manufacturers that had to comply with water-pollution regulations beginning in the 1970s; now, they are working on technologies to stretch scarce water supplies. Others are homegrown, such as Badger Meter, whose products range from simple household water meters to electromagnetic meters five feet across used in hydroelectric plants. Still others have spun off from the University of Wisconsina"Milwaukee, which houses the Great Lakes Water Inst.i.tute.

In addition to drawing manufacturers that require large quant.i.ties of water for production, Milwaukeeas blue-gold rush boosters envision a aSilicon Valley of watera in the Midwest that also caters to those industries as it serves a world searching for new technologies in water quality and efficiency. They see Milwaukee as a global water hub like Singapore or Delft: water professionals gather at Lake Michigan for international conferences, and college students are drawn to UWMas new School of Freshwater Sciences, which is offering the nationas first doctoral degrees in that discipline.

Milwaukeeas blue awakening reflects that of the global private water business, which includes manufacturers, water-technology firms, utilities, and engineering and other consultantsa"the companies that monitor, manage, and improve water supplies. This sector still lags far behind energy when it comes to the private investment, industry standards, and government incentives that drove the green revolution. For example, the U.S. Green Building Council paid scant attention to water in developing its vaunted LEED certification program for buildings. Of sixty-nine possible points that builders could earn for sustainable construction, only five were available for water efficiency.6 (A new draft of the standards proposed for 2012 makes a leap, with new water credits, including one for recycling water in cooling towers.)7 But now, investors are beginning to flock to the $400 billion sector as it is buoyed by global shortages, growing population, and rising living standards.8 As scarcity forces customers in regions ranging from the American Southwest to Saudi Arabia to make operational s.h.i.+ftsa"using wastewater rather than freshwater in manufacturing, for examplea"companies such as GE that helped market innovations in the green-energy sector are turning to water.

Make no mistake: many of the players in the blue-gold rush remain overly enamored of the mega, energy-intensive solutions of the past. Desalination is the big fix du jour, though water-savvy Singapore has shrunk ambitious plans for desalination in favor of islandwide water recycling. The blue revolution is a treasure chest of small technologies: nanotechnology, microfiltration, aerators, and waterless everything; waterless urinals and car washes that subst.i.tute a small amount of chemicals; even new waterless woks for Chinese restaurants. These are the innovations that make the water ethic easya"helping us consume much less, and keep much more in aquifers, rivers, and streams.

The newest computer-controlled irrigation sensors have large farms slas.h.i.+ng as much as three-fourths of their water use from traditional flood irrigation. Filtration advances make recycled water an option for even those industries that require the purest water.

A building with water-efficient designs and products averages 15 percent lower water use, 10 percent less energy consumption, and operating costs reduced by 12 percent.9 The financials are convincing major corporations to make water conservation a key part of sustainability programs. U.S. food giant Kraft slashed global water use more than 20 percenta"by three billion gallonsa"in less than three years with operational changes and employee awareness. The companyas switch to recycled water to cool coffee grinders at its Maxwell House plant in Jacksonville, Florida, means twenty million gallons a year stays put in the St. Johns River.

IBM and the Dow Chemical Company are working on smart metering projects to give homes, businesses, and cities precise insights into water use, raising consciousness and lowering demand as they pinpoint leaks and inefficiencies. This will be especially useful to those munic.i.p.alities still losing as much as half their water through leaky pipes and to those that donat yet meter water use (currently charging a flat rate no matter how much residents run the tap).10 The water sector also is moving beyond real-time a.n.a.lytics to prediction tools that report how much water to expect in our aquifers, rivers, and soils on a given day. Such data is as vital as the weather forecast for water utilities, farmers, and others. But until now, we never invested in the technology to gather it. These tools, known as advanced hydroinformatics, also could better inform the public about water quality: we could tell shrimpers along the Gulf Coast when and where to expect Gulf hypoxia, help tourists skirt red tide outbreaks, and warn water-plant operators about Giardia pathogens coming downriver.11 The blue revolution gives new meaning, too, to blue-collar jobs. There are lots of thema"including in manufacturing plants that produce water-efficient products, wholesalers and retailers who sell them, and the local contractors who install them. An Alliance for Water Efficiency a.n.a.lysis found that $500 million invested in a national water-efficiency retrofit program for homes would create nine thousand jobs as it saves billions of gallons of watera"and the electricity required to produce those billions.12 Jobs were already on the rise in Milwaukee when I interviewed Richard Meeusen and other members of the Milwaukee Water Council in fall 2010. Their efforts had just landed a water-testing tech company out of California. An Ohio uniform supplier had erected a large industrial-laundering plant on the northwest side and hired eighty people. In a cavernous building abandoned by a heavy-equipment manufacturer, a local company called Sweet Water Organics had launched the first commercial spin-off of Will Allenas innovative urban aquaculture/agricultural model. Where industrial cranes had been pieced together last century, thousands of perch were fattening in ten thousanda"gallon rectangular pools stacked in vertical systems. Lettuce, basil, tomatoes, chili peppers, and watercress grew among the tanks, filtering the fish waste, which fertilized the plants. Sweet Water was already doing a brisk business peddling veggies to area restaurants; the perch would soon be selling size. aWe want Milwaukee to be the aquaculture center of America,a says Fred Binkowski, a fisheries biologist at the Great Lakes Water Inst.i.tute who is a.s.sisting the company. aPerch is the icon of the Friday-night fish fry.a13 This future sounded so inviting, I could almost smell the perch frying. It all made a lot of sense for Milwaukeea"except for one detail: to help recruit water-dependent industries from out of town, Milwaukeeas leaders decided to hold out the promise of cheap water. In this place of blue abundance, that may not sound like a problem. But when you consider that water giveaways are what landed us in such a fix to begin with, it could be a big one.

Priceless Of all the mysteries surrounding water, all its complexities, all the ways water can make us downright irrational, perhaps none is more mysterious and complex than the price of water. Consider just some of the madness: Globally, the poor pay much more for water than the rich. In the United States, we subsidize water the most for the sector that is doing most to deplete it. Individually, we pay a thousand times more for water in little plastic bottles than for the exact same water that flows out of the tap.

The illogic goes on. Americans who live in the regions of greatest scarcity often pay the least for water. The average family of four in Phoenix, the ultradry southwestern city in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, pays monthly water bills of $34, while a Boston family sh.e.l.ls out $65 for the same amount of water.14 When we sit down each month to pay the bills, the check to the water department is usually the smallest we write. This is why we donat worry about the tap in the same way we fret over edging up the thermostat each summer to shave a few bucks off the electric bill. Meanwhile, when some external factor inspires us to use lessa"like the drought that has plagued much of the United States in the twenty-first centurya"we feel punished by water utilities. When we conserve, they lose revenues, and often hike prices.

The same is true for private industry. One reason investors and businesses have been slow to embrace the blue revolution and start paying closer attention to efficiency is because cheap water meant they didnat have to. Subsidized irrigation helped make it rational for farmers to flood their fields. Likewise, the largest industries had no incentives to recycle water because fresh, treated drinking water cost them so little.

Our aquifers, rivers, springs, and streams would be a lot better off if everyone simply paid a fair price for using Americaas most valuable treasure. But with money and water, itas never simple. Milwaukee is a prime example. To hurry the blue-gold rush, the city is slas.h.i.+ng water rates for any company that brings in at least twenty-five jobs. But Milwaukeeas commercial water rates already were low compared with other utilities. In one study, Wisconsinas Public Service Commission found that an industrial customer such as Cargill Meat Solutions pays $41,151 per quarter for water in Milwaukee but would pay $157,557 in San Diego, $172,367 in Pittsburgh, $174,405 in Phoenix, $209,482 in Seattle, $251,984 in Atlanta, and $274,000 in Los Angeles.15 Moreover, the Milwaukee Water Works already was operating in the red because of declining water use in the city and rapidly rising water-treatment costs. In fact, just as the city planned to subsidize water to bring in new industry, it had to hike rates for current businesses and residents.

As Milwaukee looked forward to building a new, blue economy, local leaders said all the right things. They rhapsodized about water in the Wisconsin tradition of the Leopolds, John Muir, and g.a.y.l.o.r.d Nelson. They partnered up with Veolia on a Water Impact Indexa"a carbon footprint for watera"for Milwaukee and began working on projects to lessen the cityas impact on water, such as more wetlands development and conservation. But in practice, they undersold Wisconsinas water in exchange for growth. It was just the sort of giveaway that led other statesa"once water-rich Florida, for examplea"to water crises their boosters never would have imagined.

Milwaukeeas business leaders could be right that the nationas water woes will create regional economic s.h.i.+fts, forcing those industries that rely on large amounts of water, from manufacturers to food processors and bottlers, out of the Sun Belt. If so, it would not seem the time to make water cheap. Instead, itas the ideal opportunity to get the price of water right, ensuring its value to residents and old and new industries alike.

In spring 2010, an economist named David Zetland, a postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, filled out an application to serve on the California Water Commission. For the answer to question 37, aPlease explain why you wish to serve in the Schwarzenegger Administration,a he wrote, aThe Stateas water should be allocated to the highest and best use, for the benefit of all Californians. I have a long and public record of writing and speaking on this question, and I feel that I can be a useful member of the Stateas Water Commission.a Zetland slipped the application in an envelope, stuck on a Homer Simpson stamp, and put it in the mail to the governoras appointments office.16 Zetland never heard back. When the governoras staff announced the appointments, they included two members of the stateas construction industry, two representatives of water agencies, two environmentalists, a state senator, a water lawyer, and a farmer.17 This was no big surprise. For the most part, water management has avoided economists, who tend to point out pesky truths such as the cost inefficiencies of desalination, or the opportunity costs of the bulk water we give away to mining companies or other large users. Economists see these latter costs as lost opportunities: every gallon extracted to, say, grow alfalfa or to manufacture bottled water is one not used for some possible alternativea"producing electricity or growing a boxful of tomatoes or restoring a wetland.

Politicians steer clear of economists, too, because their answer to water woes is usually aRaise prices,a which voters donat want to hear. Admittedly, journalists donat often seek them out, either, because i