THE STORY THAT NEVER DIES - WATER WARS

There is nothing new about the battle over water. The story of the Newfoundland developer who wanted to ship water in bulk from a pristine lake in Newfoundland came up again. This time it was at a little-noticed water conference held in Toronto. It echoed the national sentiment: Canadians are very protective of our water. But the story has “legs” that go back generations.

Remember the brilliant movie “Chinatown” with Jack Nicholson? It was based On the reality of cities versus farmers in California. The Imperial Valley is the biggest single vegetable patch in the world. It exists only because farmers were allowed to pump millions of gallons of underground and reservoir water to irrigate what had been an arid valley. (That they still irrigate spraying water wastefully in the air is another story.)

The people of Los Angeles were thirsty for water. The farmers were even thirstier.It was a tawdry story of gangsters and crooked politicians. The majority of fresh water in California goes to agriculture. Today, because so much ground water has been pumped out, sea water has seeped into the aquifer making the water brackish. The other aquifer, the Ogallala, that made the plans of Kansas and Oklahoma the corn basket of the world, is also running dry. Still they pump. Water may be in short supply but the rush to populate the desert with places like Las Vegas and Phoenix has put a huge strain on water supply. No one seems to want to close golf courses. In Florida, where rainfall was never huge, the Everglades are being pumped dry. Now there is trouble brewing between Egypt and Ethiopia. The Nile, which runs through Ethiopia before it gets to Egypt, is being threatened. Ethiopia wants to build huge dam. The Egyptians, who have already built the Aswan dam, are furious. In Israel there has always been tension between Jordan and Israel over the water that flows in the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee.

Something’s gotta give! Conservation doesn’t work, at least not in Canada or the U.S. Some European countries have primary water filtration systems in homes so that the lawns can be watered, the toilets flushed, and cars washed with “used” water. Here we have no such facility. We have the Great Lakes. But has anyone noticed that the water levels keep going down?

There must be other solutions, I am not an expert in Hydrology, but it seems to me that we miss a chance to recover water. I have always wondered why we do not excavate enormous lake-sized cachement basins into which floodwaters could be routed, instead of having them ravage the countryside then flow into the sea. The principle of flood diversion is not new. Winnipeg has deep canals that are supposed to accommodate the high water levels that come to the Red River every spring. Israel, which battles constantly with Jordan over Jordan River water has confronted the shortage with massive desalination plants. However, I don’t know what that will do to ocean levels. Given that we are experiencing serious climate change (in spite of the Tea Party naysayers) and there may soon be enough melted ocean water to flood coastlines everywhere, maybe we should be using more seawater.

There used to be a wild idea to create a new sea in the middle of the arid Egyptian/Libyan desert in a place called the Qatara Depression. A canal could be built from the Mediterranean Sea and water would flow into this empty space, a space of nearly twenty thousand square kilometers. It would be salty and unfit for agriculture, but what if at the same time a huge desalinization plant were to be set up? There are already swamps there which contain some brackish water.

As I said, I am not expert, but it seems to me that we are not exploring water supply ideas beyond exporting the stuff that is easy to get to. Therein lies the answer. We do it cheaply, even though the gains are short-sighted. In an age when the marketplace tells us how to live, no one likes to suggest (horrors!) spending public money to create potable water where there is a shortage.