Snowpack: The Canary in a Coal Mine - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 167

formulation. After so many years, it's still a fight about dams versus no dams. But if that
was really the solution, then why haven't our problems gone away before?”
Even if Schwarzenegger succeeded in funding the Sites and Temperance Flat Reser-
voirs, Gleick predicted, California's water problems would remain. “Our water problems
will be exactly the same tomorrow, only we'll be billions of dollars poorer,” he said, eyes
blazing. “My question is, why hold up other solutions just because you want to make
dams part of the package?”
As he zips from water conferences in California to Senate hearings in Washington,
DC, and global forums in Sweden, China, and Dubai, Gleick's mantra is always the
same: “Almost everything we do on earth, we could do with less water.”
Humans cannot prosper without a clean, reliable supply of H 2 O. But is there enough
freshwater to sustain the world's growing population?
In a 2006 report, the UN declared, “here is enough water for everyone” but added
a caveat: “Water insufficiency is often due to mismanagement, corruption, lack of ap-
propriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia, and a shortage of investment in both human
capacity and physical infrastructure.” These human failings are not likely to disappear,
and as water stress grows, they will have exponentially greater impacts than ever before.
Water is unevenly distributed and strategically important, and it confers great
temptations of power: it will almost certainly be at the center of rising political, eco-
nomic, and environmental tensions this century. The imbalance between water supply
and demand has already led to societal unrest around the world, and experts fear that
as the effects of population growth intersect with those of global warming, tensions will
ratchet up further and could become violent.