It is time for a "local water" movement. The broader sustainability movement has grown and expanded in recent years to include a growing effort to strengthen local production, processing, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. This movement has been applied to clothing and other goods, to food, to energy. And now, I propose that it should be applied to water.
For food, increasing and strengthening local food systems offers a supplement and an alternative to the large-scale corporate food industry. For water, "local water" should mean something similar: stressing reliance on local water sources, management, treatment, and control.
And like the "local food" movement, the definition of "local" must be flexible. Our major cities long ago outgrew their ability to provide enough food for the - sometimes - millions of people living in them, and they long ago outgrew their ability to provide enough water with purely local resources. New York City relies on water from upstate New York. Los Angeles relies on water from northern California and the Colorado River. San Francisco moves water from the Sierra Nevada. Even ancient Rome built aqueducts to move water long distances to supply the needs of the city when it outgrew local springs.
So when I call for a "local water" movement, I do not mean cities must shrink, or cut off the movement of water from neighboring watersheds. But a local water movement would lead to increased efforts to use local resources more effectively, to treat and reuse water once it has been brought into a region, to minimize the broader environmental consequences of water use and management, and to give priorities to local actions and management.
I've written extensively about the need to move to a "soft path for water." The soft path makes use of smart and innovative technology but also requires that we use smart economics and institutions, consider ecosystem needs and health to be just as important as (and tightly connected to) human needs and health, and carefully consider water demands, not just water supply. Thinking about water in the local context is part of the soft path.
What might a local water movement mean?
A local water movement would prefer to improve the efficiency of current water uses as a way to control and manage demand over the more expensive and environmentally and socially damaging choice of expanding water supply by finding new water sources farther and farther away. For example, in a local water movement, Las Vegas would look inward at the way water is used now and figure out how to use it more effectively, rather than looking outward to take the water from rural counties and ranching communities to pipe to meet their needs, as they are trying to do.
In a local water movement, the consumption of bottled water would drop because local tap water would be purified to the best and strictest standards, and if people chose to buy bottled water anyway, they would not buy it from overseas sources but from more local ones because of the vast energy costs of making and transporting bottled water.
In a local water movement, the concept of "local" would encompass the concept of ecologically sustainable water systems with a premium put on healthy wetlands, fisheries, and natural water systems that produce significant local benefits.
A local water movement would give serious consideration to innovative distributed water-treatment systems for purification of water and for collection, treatment, and reuse of wastewater. The old centralized model of water purification, delivery, and wastewater treatment could use some competition from small-scale, distributed systems that may produce better local benefits. This includes expanding local efforts to use greywater.
A local water movement would prefer building desalination facilities over efforts to find more distant supplies, but only if such facilities could be built and managed under local, public control, in an economically and environmentally acceptable manner and if other less costly local alternatives, such as improved efficiency, had been tapped to the fullest extent.
A local water movement would prefer that water utilities be owned and operated by the community and the public, not by multinational corporations that suck profits from a community to satisfy far distant financial interests.
A truly effective and successful local food movement, or local energy movement, or a "local water movement" will be complicated, not easy (though no truly sustainable water systems are "easy."). It will have to be flexible, not ideological. It will require different solutions in different places. We will, and should, argue over definitions, ideas, policies, and approaches. But my hope is that the arguments over how to design a local water movement will lead to new ways of thinking about water. And that is sorely needed.
Drink local!
Peter Gleick
Pacific Institute
Follow Peter H. Gleick on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PeterGleick
1.You put yourself forward as an expert on water touting 'Pacific Institute' water expertise.
2.Your tax exempt charity 'The Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security' published a glossy 'paper' entitled "Agricultural Water Conservation and Efficiency in California Special Focus on the Delta", the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta a short drive from your Oakland offices.
3.'Pacific Institute':"The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a crucial resource. .... and more than half of Californians rely on water conveyed through the Delta for at least some of their water supply."
4.A current case before UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA Case 1:09-cv-01053-OWW-DLB refers to water distribution in the delta.
5.In this matter His Honor Justice Oliver W. Wanger has seen fit to, in legal terms, castigate proffered science as "arbitrary and capricious."
6.As this matter is within your professed field of expertise and right in your back yard were you or any member of the 'Pacific Institute' called to give evidence?
7.If so was evidence given by yourself or any member of the 'Pacific Institute' subject to judicial derision.
8.If not how could it be that neither of the litigant parties considered the "Pacific Institute" or its President, author of many books on the subject, could be useful expert witnesses? Why would they have to reach to the East Coast for experts?
Do tell”
If we localized water and power, we would see such a HUGE paradigm shift in this country, where people took responsibility for water catchment, permeable hardscaping, solar power, efficiency, conservation and made good choices, while Big Energy and Big Water shrivel and die. What a great future that would be!
We need to start by revolutionizing our relationship to our water and power in our own minds. The technology is here, now, to power ourselves from our roofs and water our yards using rainfall. All we need is potable water through the taps. Our public policy model should be steering us there rather than towards large dams, desal plants, power plants, canals and transmission lines...
The People of the (City or Town) declare that access to clean and affordable water is essential for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – both for the health of the people and for the ecological systems which support human and natural communities – and therefore, that it is a right belonging to the people of the (City or Town). We believe that our rights are threatened when public water systems which guarantee that access are controlled by a corporate few, rather than by our community. We believe that privatization of that infrastructure constitutes a usurpation of our democratic right to make decisions about that infrastructure, and therefore, that we are duty bound under the Constitution to prohibit such action.Public water systems and the infrastructure necessary for distribution of public water supplies within the (City or Town) shall be owned by the (City or Town) or a municipal authority of the City, held as part of the public trust for the residents of the (City or Town) and the ecosystems within the (City or Town). It shall be unlawful for public water systems and/or public water system infrastructure within the (City or Town) to be owned by any entity other than the (City or Town),unless a proposed transfer of an ownership or other financial interest in that system or infrastructure is submitted to a referendum vote of the people of the (City or Town),and approved by them
Whodecides.net
All in all, let's take a holistic look at the complete water cycle of our cities.