The Defining Resource - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 5

Programme, has declared. Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank's leading environmental
expert, put it even more bluntly: “The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought
over water.”
How did this happen? How did the United States, the world's most powerful, wealthy,
and technically savvy country, find its water supplies becoming more,not less, polluted
in the nearly forty years since the Clean Water Act of 1972? How did the nation find
itself running dry in some historically wet regions, while suffering devastating floods in
historically dry regions? How is water being turned into an expensive commodity, such
as oil or gas, and why is it a flash point for conflict? What kind of solutions can we—as
individuals, and collectively—build? These were some of the questions that intrigued
me, and that this topic seeks to answer.
The beginning of the answer lies in a simple, obvious fact: the earth contains the
same amount of water it always has— some 332.5 million cubic miles of H 2 O—but the
number of people using it, how they use it, and where they use it has dramatically
changed. While water is the most abundant substance on the planet (it covers 71 percent
of the globe), 97 percent of it is too salty for consumption. Only 3 percent of the world's
H 2 O is fresh, and most of that is frozen: just 0.3 percent of it is accessible and clean
enough for people to use.
We recycle and reuse water, but the more times we do so, the more our supplies be-
come “worn-out” and filled with salts, metals, chemicals, and other particulate matter.
So water is a limited resource. It is also an essential one.
While bacteria can survive for centuries without water, and desert tortoises can go
for years without a drink, and camels can walk the desert for six months without a sip,
all organisms eventually require water for sustenance, procreation, and movement. Hu-
mans are especially water dependent; in fact, you could say water defines us. A human
fetus gestates in amniotic fluid. he body weight of an adult is about 70 percent wa-
ter (roughly forty-five quarts). Human bones are about 22 percent water. The brain is
about 75 percent water, while blood is 82 percent water, and the lungs are 90 percent
water. Water carries oxygen to cells, allows us to breathe, lubricates joints, helps to cool
the body with perspiration, promotes digestion, and flushes away toxins. People can live
without food for a month, but most can survive only a few days without a drink.
Yet humans tend to take water for granted. We pollute it unthinkingly, price it too
cheaply, and take too much of it from the environment too quickly—usually in the ser-
vice of short-term gains. Consequently, freshwater is the earth's most undervalued re-
source. Since Copernicus, economists and philosophers have observed that while no
substance is more precious than water, none is more likely to be free. In heWealth
ofNations,Adam Smith famously labeled this the “diamond-water paradox” (aka “the