Got Water?

by Michael G. Livingston

According to Fortune magazine (May 2001), "water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations." Why? It’s the law of supply and demand—supply is finite and decreasing; demand is increasing.

About 97% of the world’s water is salt water. Another 2% is fresh water locked in glaciers or ice caps. The remaining 1% of the world’s water supply is fresh water available for human use. That is the good news. The bad news is that this 1% is decreasing and the entire world’s water supply is becoming contaminated.

The UN estimates that by 2025, over 2.7 billion people will be living in countries with severe water shortages. At present about 15 million people (mostly children) die each year from a lack of clean, usable water. As the supply goes down and the demand goes up (due both to population growth and to use of water in agriculture and industry), the death toll will rise substantially.

The contamination of water is linked to the contamination of the air and land. And the contamination of water anywhere threatens to contaminate water everywhere. This is because of a basic physical process called the hydrologic cycle.

The sun heats the oceans, lakes, and rivers, causing evaporation. The evaporated water forms clouds and moist air that moves over land and falls as precipitation. The precipitation infiltrates the ground, forming aquifers, or runs off into lakes, streams, or rivers—which eventually carry the water back to the ocean.

Pollution picked up anywhere (say from an oil spot on the road, pesticides used on a farm, or air pollution generated by a coal power plant) spreads everywhere.

Nothing better illustrates the global contamination of the world’s water supply than the contamination of the oceans themselves. A recent study of beach and seabed sediments (The New York Times, May 11, 2004) showed that plastics now "permeate even the seabed."

Two recent national reports found that the oceans around the U.S. are dying due to high levels of pollution. The Pew Oceans Commission issued the first report in 2003. The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (a group appointed by President Bush) issued the second report in 2004 (The New York Times, April 21, 2004). Both reports have a number of good suggestions for curbing the contamination of the oceans but both reports’ recommendations fall far short of what is needed.

The reason is that the contamination comes from non-point sources. A point source is a single outlet, such as a municipal sewage plant or a factory that dumps waste into a stream or lake. A non-point source is diffuse, due to economic activity often far from a lake or stream.

As the Pew Commission report emphasizes, the greatest sources of non-point source pollution are runoff from the land (which carries the pollution of soil into the water supply) or the depositing of air pollution into water through rain or direct deposit.

While point source pollution has decreased dramatically in the last 30 years, and the banning of certain products such as lead in gasoline and DDT have also substantially reduced a few types of contaminates, the overall contamination of lakes, rivers, aquifers, and oceans has increased due to non-point source pollution.

Not only is the supply of water becoming contaminated, it is decreasing. For example, in the U.S. we increasingly rely on aquifers to supply water for agriculture and drinking. If you use up the water in an aquifer faster than the recharge rate (the rate that water naturally infiltrates into the aquifer) you are essentially mining the aquifer.

After withdrawal of the water the soils that hold the water collapse, reducing the aquifer’s capacity to hold water and leading to subsiding of the ground above the aquifer.

The Ogallala aquifer, which provides water for much of Denver and for about 20 percent of all irrigated land in the U.S., is being used up 14 times faster than the recharge rate.

While supply decreases, demand increases. Average per capita water use has increased three-fold since 1800. The world’s population has grown from 1 billion in 1820 to 6 billion in 2000. Further, the use of water around the world is very unequal. While some face draught, water is used for the golf courses and fountains of Las Vegas.

The rising demand and falling supply of water is making water a valuable commodity to be bought and sold. All over the world, water supply is being privatized or threatened with privatization, a trend that all socialists must oppose tooth and nail. Currently about 10 multinational corporations are vying for control of the world’s water supply. These corporations generate about $400 billion annually, a figure that is likely to grow.

An important book to read documenting the corporate theft of usable water is Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke’s "Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water," published in 2002.

To save the world’s water supply we must fight for specific reforms now, such as restrictions on smoke-stack emissions, control of feedlots and agricultural runoff, and preservation of wetlands—which act as pollution filters for lakes, rivers, and oceans. We must also oppose all attempts to privatize water.

The non-point source pollution that is contaminating the world’s usable water comes from the unregulated and unsustainable activity of capitalist industry and agriculture. Ultimately, the only long-term solution is a democratic, sustainable socialism, where the economic activity of society preserves and safeguards the health of people and the planet.

This article first appeared in the July 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.