The Big Thirst: Chapters 1–2

Water creates both the hypnotic majesty of Niagara Falls and the miniature, untouchable filigree of each snowflake.

The effortless way we have come to manage water is a testament to both water’s moment-to-moment utility and to our own ingenuity.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the golden age of water, of the carefree, almost cavalier, attitude that our abundance has fostered.

We go to the trouble and expense to find city-size quantities of water, build dams, reservoirs, and tanks to store it and plants to treat it, then we pump it out to customers, only to let it dribble away before anyone can use it.

Our home water bills, which are less than half our monthly cable TV or cell phone bills, provide almost no insight into how much water we use, or how we use it—even if we study them. The pricing of water has a kind of invisibility—or opaqueness, at least—all its own.

The new class of micropollutants we are beginning to hear about—infinitesimal, almost molecular, traces of plastics, birth control pills, antidepressants—have literally been invisible even to chemists until very recently; you certainly can’t tell if they’re in your water by looking at it or drinking it.

We have ignored water—neglected our water supplies and our water systems, taken for granted the economic value of abundant water, and become blasé about the day-to-day convenience of easy water.

And so the nervous leaders of Barcelona’s water company did something unprecedented.

As Barcelona’s drought problems were becoming acute, a small city in Tennessee completely succumbed to the drought that was then in its seventh year across the southeastern United States.

Once a flourishing mining town, Orme has for a hundred years gotten its municipal water from Spout Springs, a mountain stream that ends in a dramatic two-hundred-foot cascade at the base of Orme Mountain.

And to just goose the stunning contrast between water wealth and water poverty one more notch, the 1.1 billion people who subsist on 5 liters of water a day are drinking water we wouldn’t wash our dishes in; whereas we are peeing into pristine drinking water, and flushing it away.

The climate-change models show that India as a whole may well get more rain if global warming proceeds as predicted, but that new rain will come in a band across the north, the parts of India already inundated during the monsoon season.

Every glass of water you pour—whether it’s coming from an Evian bottle, a filtered refrigerator spigot, or the kitchen tap—has a rich history.

Americans like to debate the palatability of what’s called “toilet to tap”—taking a city’s wastewater, purifying it to drinking water cleanliness, and putting it back into the water mains.

Almost no municipalities have the fortitude to do that.

The water used to raise the rice, on the other hand, isn't lost at all, except to the person downriver from the rice farm, or the competing irrigator across the road, or the underground aquifer from which the rice farmer’s wells draw.

That’s not to minimize or trivialize water shortages, which are urgent, often catastrophic.

Within river basins and watersheds and aquifers, water supplies are local.

Poor farming practices around the world squander huge quantities of water.

Because water has so often made people sick, because natural disasters—hurricanes, flooding, blizzards—are often caused by water, we have an ambivalent attitude about water that has only been softened by the last hundred years.

In fact, when we talk about water, it’s a little like when we talk about love. We aren’t really talking about water—we’re talking about our anxieties, our hopes, our sense of our selves, refracted through water. We’re talking about our vision of our community, about our livelihoods. When we talk about water, we’re often talking about power, or about security, or both.

The very universal access that has been the core of our water philosophy for the last hundred years—the provision of clean, dependable tap water that created the golden age of water—that very principle has turned on its head.

I’ll just drink bottled water if I don’t like what comes out of the tap. It is almost as if tap water is regarded not with respect and appreciation but with a hint of condescension, even contempt.

I’ll just drink bottled water if I don’t like what comes out of the tap. It is almost as if tap water is regarded not with respect and appreciation but with a hint of condescension, even contempt.

If we’re going to be ready for a new era of water, we need to reclaim water from our superficial sense of it, we need to reclaim it from the clichés. We need to rediscover its true value, and also the serious commitment required to provide it.

It’s easy to remember what it's like to use an eyedropper to squeeze a single, fat drop of water onto a microscope slide, and how big that drop looks, like an overstuffed couch cushion. It’s hard to learn to read the meniscus of water measured in a graduated cylinder.

Once you understand the lineage of water, you realize that the ads touting Evian (“born in the French Alps”) and FIJI Water (“untouched by man”) dramatically understate the case.

Here’s the thing that’s a little hard to grasp: Once you squirt that oxygen-hydrogen pair and that lone hydrogen into the crystal lattice of a rock, buried three hundred miles down, in what way are those atoms still water?

There is absolutely water in these rocks, and the scientists know it in at least three ways: These hydrated minerals are literally more pliant, more puttylike, than in their unhydrated state; the scientists can measure water’s pieces inside the structure of the rocks using infrared spectroscopy; and most important of all, when the pressure and temperature on the rocks are released in the right way, the H and the OH come squirting right back out of the rock, and they come out as water.

Right in the text of his essay in Water in Crisis, above the chart, Shiklomanov writes with all modesty, “It should be noted that the data on the amount of water on earth (as the authors of the cited monograph themselves note) should not be considered very accurate; they are only approximations of the actual values.”

Joseph Smyth is a geologist at the University of Colorado, one of the pioneers in trying to understand the dynamics and significance of deep water (he was also Steven Jacobsen’s thesis adviser).

“We can’t extract and drink that water, but maybe the water in the mantle is buffering the amount of water in the oceans.”

The hydrogen bonding isn’t something theoretical or ephemeral. Hydrogen bonding is as basic to the character of water as its sparkle, its splash, its very wetness. That clinginess of water molecules for each other is, in fact, the glue that holds much of the natural world as we know it together.

Liquid water exists at ambient temperature because of its somewhat quirky molecular structure.

Water is a great solvent—almost anything will dissolve in water, in part because of its polar molecules.

Few of us know enough to appreciate that the ice cubes floating in the glass of iced tea are like some kind of cosmic magic trick, let alone know enough to marvel that the whole sentient universe hangs on that trick.

In fact, in many factories that use UPW, it’s not just regarded as an industrial solvent, but it is considered akin to a poison. A swallow or a glass of it won’t hurt you, but as it does with the microchips, UPW is “hungry”—it will leach minerals right out of your body tissues.

Water’s personality, in fact, is layered with polarity, both inherently and in the ways we approach and manage water.
Water is transparent, and also reflects light.
Water is soft and soothing, and also hard as concrete.

We often keep the two kinds of water separate in our brains and in our day-to-day stewardship—utility water and beautiful water, water’s immediate functional role, and water’s larger context. That, in part, is why we’re drifting into trouble, failing to get water to people who don’t yet have it, and doing an indifferent job of managing water in places that take abundant water for granted.

And our feelings about water are often so powerful, so visceral, that we need to be sure they don’t prevent us from seeing water clearly.