The New York Times ran an OpEd piece today about the looming water crisis, the prospects of bigger and longer droughts, and the need for more careful water conservation, under the title, Drought: A Creeping Disaster.  The writer, Alex Prud'Homme, knows water (He wrote The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century). The model he suggests we learn from is Singapore, where wastewater recycling is reducing overall water consumption, and desalination is adding to the supply.  

"To forestall a drought," he writes, "we must redefine how we think of water, value it, and use it."  It sounds like reasonable advice, especially if we live in a wealthy urban metropolis where water is in short supply.  But can the global water crisis really be solved by recycling wastewater or desalinizing seawater?   What about rivers and lakes?  What about Nature?

Is our long-term societal goal just to have water come out of our taps?  Or do we want to redefine our role within our local water ecosystems: our watersheds and river basins?   Worrying about water without bringing the natural context into our picture is the classic case of not seeing the forest because we're too preoccupied with the individual trees.  We need to worry about bigger things than water, like rivers and lakes and the Natural World. If we can "do right" by the natural world, we'll enhance our water security in the process.

Two new documents help us think about managing water from an ecosystem perspective.

1.  Ramaswami Iyer, water writer and former Secretary of Water Resources for the Government of India, offers an Alternative Draft (in the Economic and Political Weekly) of what India's new water policy ought to look like.  His vision nicely balances the priorities of environmental sustainability with the need for economic development.  Protecting Nature is not just to keep the water flowing so we can divert it; rather (or "and") respecting Nature and protecting rivers is seen as part of what makes us human.  While we may be hardwired to live in a "polis" as Socrates told us, we also need to live in Nature. 

2.  Water Management Options in a Globalised World (9MB download), edited by Martin Kowarsch, is a rapidly compiled collection of papers from a June 2011 conference organized by the Institute for Social and Development Studies at the Munich School of Philosophy.  The  paper by Kowarsch presents a framework (the "triangle of justice") for applying ethical analysis to water management options.  This nicely complements the paper by Akpabio who shows how cultural values underlie the frame within which water is managed.  His focus is southern Nigeria, but the point is universal.  When the water crisis is defined as a shortage of water, the solution is to conserve, recycle, and desalinize.  When the crisis is defined environmentally (rivers need help) or culturally (Indigenous communities depend on the river for their cultural identity) different kinds of solutions are needed.


Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau spent a lot of time thinking about water and Nature

What is water?  What is a river, or a lake?  These are the questions that come easily to mind during a vacation week on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan.  The lake water is constantly in flux, calm or stormy, blue or green, with waves going left or right, and water clear or murky.  We can describe the water with words or pictures, but what, really, is that water? 

A conference on "Steps Towards Discorvering the Intrinsic Nature of Water" will be held in Blue Hill, Maine, on July 31-Aug. 5, to address the question of what water is.  My friend and colleague, Jennifer Greene, director of the Water Research Institute, is organizing the conference (click for details) along with Wofram Schwenk from the Institute for Flow Sciences in Germany, and David Auerback, a professor of fluid dynamics.  They take their inspiration from the philosopy of Rudolf Steiner that there are lots of spiritual forces at work in our universe, and we can learn about them through careful observation of, for example, water.  

Western culture has decided that water is a resource and not a spirit, and that bodies of water such as Lake Michigan are pools of resources to be exploited for the material benefit of people.  That philosophy drives water development in a particular way, with debates about the details riding on the question of what strategies can yield the greatest benefits for the most people.  Re-orienting water development towards a concern for the wellbeing of the lake itself requires a different way of conceptualizing what the lake is.  That's what this blog, and the Water Culture Institute, are trying to do.

To get beyond our own cultural categories that tell us that Lake Michigan is a giant pool of resources, we can engage in a bit of cultural therapy simply by observing the lake and seeing what's out there.  What does it look like?  Does it look like a resource?  Does it look mysterious?  Sacred?  What color is it?  What is the shape of the water as it touches the air?  As the waves crash onto the shore?  

I engaged in a bit of therapy during the past week on the shore of the lake, in Lilly Bay, just north or Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.  I spent a lot of time looking at the lake and as Socrates (I think) said about the river, you can't see the same lake twice.  The colors and the waves are always in flux.  

There's the classic blue, or "wine dark" as the Greeks described the color of the Mediterranean.


In the early morning there is usually a red glow from the rising sun, which I only rarely managed to see; 


and at night, the lake becomes black, except when illuminated by moonlight:


The sand on the lake bottom gives a tan, green, or yellowish hue when the water is calm, and the subsurface texture can shine through.


And there is a lot of white color along the shore, as the blue waves get transformed into white froth as they hit the shore...

Today is Endangered Species Day, an annual celebration created 6 years ago by the Endangered Species Coalition to tug at our sensibilities and help us appreciate Nature's diversity.  The Endangered Species Act, passed under Richard Nixon in 1973, stands as a milestone for the Rights of Nature movement.  Species, at least endangered ones, are recognized as having some special value just for existing. 


A baby horned toad in Santa Fe, cautiously enjoying the sun

Two weeks ago here in Santa Fe, our City Council voted to keep the Santa Fe River flowing a little bit through this very dry Spring and Summer.  This is path-breaking for a river designated in 2007 as the Most Endangered River in America.  The City has other sources of water (including a new $250m pipeline from the nearby Rio Grande) so it is not losing anything by being generous, but in the words of Councilwoman Patti Bushee, it is an important symbolic effort: "When do we recognize that some of the water belongs to the river?"


The Santa Fe River enjoying some of its own water

About the same time Santa Fe voted in favor of its river, UNESCO released a long-awaited assessment on Water Ethics and Water Resource Management.  The study even mentions Aldo Leopold and the rights-of-nature concept, though unfortunately these themes are left out of the conclusions.  The report does set a new standard for human ethics, however, staking out a position that goes far beyond economic cost-benefits and into issues of human rights. 

Citizens in Pune, India, are dealing with their rights to a living river, and are resorting to a hunger strike to show their resolve.  The Ram Nadi (nadi means river), though small, is important to the wellbeing of local residents who have mobilized against the severe pollution and building encroachments in the river's floodplain.  It is obvious to Ram Nadi activists that what is good for the river is also good for them.  Click here for an account from the India Water Portal. 


Construction debris in Ram Nadi (Photo by  Ravi Karandeekar, from India Water Portal)