The Big Thirst: Chapters 5–6

As it happened, the city of Salisbury was worrying about water, too, but from the other end: how to dispose of storm water runoff more effectively, storm water that it was collecting in drains and culverts and piping untreated into the ocean six miles west, along a sensitive stretch of coastal mangroves and sea grass.

And so the town of Salisbury started a kind of upstart water utility, and Michell Wool became its biggest customer.

Michell Wool started taking purple-pipe water in 2003, after investing $1 million to jumpstart Salisbury’s reclamation effort, and just as Australia’s Big Dry drought began to take unrelenting hold.

If there is one truly arresting sign that our relationship to water is about to shift in fundamental ways, it comes not from the world of science, or climatology, not from United Nations officials or the people who run water utilities or the aid workers desperately trying to get water to people in developing countries.

No, the most unequivocal signal about what’s happening with water comes from the people like those who run Michell Wool, in a quiet suburb north of Adelaide, it comes from Monsanto, the agri-conglomerate, and from Royal Caribbean, the cruise-ship company, it comes from Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup and Intel, from Levi Strauss and IBM, from GE and MGM Resorts.

Coca-Cola, whose reputation has been doubly stung by controversy over its withdrawals of groundwater in India and by a backlash against its growing Dasani and VitaminWater bottled-water business, has vowed, in the words of CEO Muhtar Kent, that by 2020 Coke will become “the first major global corporation where we will be water neutral.’’

The word “water” does not appear in the “raw materials” explanation of Coke’s business operations, as detailed in 2003, and the filing does not mention water supplies, water scarcity, water effluent, or water quality even once.

As demand for water continues to increase around the world, and as water becomes scarcer and the quality of available water deteriorates, our system may incur increasing production costs or face capacity constraints which could adversely affect our profitability or net operating revenues in the long run.

Sometimes the water consciousness percolating all over the world of commerce results in efforts that are less revealing than they are slightly silly.

One of the great symbols of indulgence on cruise ships is the dining, and nothing captures the onboard culinary culture quite like their prodigious buffet lines, offering dozens and dozens of items, often available fourteen hours each day to provide anytime dining.

It had a high-fashion flair—distinctive black rock instead of prosaic clear ice.

It’s not about saving water per se—it’s about understanding how you use water; where the costs are, and reducing them; where the value is, and preserving that.

As IBM has discovered, the measuring alone creates an imperative for curiosity and innovation, for changing behavior—just like when you keep track of every calorie you eat, you start cutting back, just like when there’s a real-time miles-per-gallon number on a car’s dashboard, you can’t help but drive in such a way as to keep the mpg number high.

(One crucial difference, of course, is that iTunes is a closed system, valuable but hermetic; water is the original open-source system.)

For the moment, water seems to be inspiring not just a mind-flip at IBM but also a burst of creativity and cross-pollination that is a reminder of how spartan water technology really is, despite a hundred years of modern water systems.

Bottled water, in that sense, is often simply an indulgence. The problem is that it is not a benign indulgence.

The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us in the developed world an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need.

Water evaporates into the clouds in white buckets. A huge white bellows turns the water into cloud vapor.

So while it’s important that companies are leaping into the water business, while it's impressive that they are providing leadership and pursuing innovation and even a vision for the future, it’s also vital not to let business get so far ahead that we cede the future of water to commercial interests.

Yes, luxury hotel guests in Las Vegas will take the trouble to grouse about the showerheads in their rooms, particularly if they don’t feel like the showerheads do a good job of rinsing off soap and shampoo.

In a devastating event that triggered national headlines and a coroner’s inquest, a Sydney schoolboy out for a three-day hike with two friends in the Blue Mountains, just a few miles from Sydney’s western suburbs, in the summer heat of December 2006, got separated from his friends.

A self-made woman—she started out cooking in pubs, eventually starting her own catering company in Toowoomba—Mayor Di has no college, but at one point in a varied work life she did work in an abattoir.

She talked with the enthusiasm of someone unveiling the solution for an intractable problem, a solution so obviously persuasive it will carry everyone along.

Whatever his critics think of him—the opponents of drinking recycled water took to referring to Flanagan derisively as “Kevvie”—Flanagan conveys a visceral sense that it is his responsibility to make sure water always flows when Toowoombans turn on the kitchen tap.

Clive Berghofer, the richest man in Toowoomba, the 118th-richest person in all of Australia, dropped out of school at age thirteen. “I could barely read or write,” he says with a lopsided smile of perverse pride.

Berghofer, who is now a cantankerous seventy-four years old, spent almost two decades on the Toowoomba city council, the last ten years of that as mayor.

The opponents were better at the politics, and better at the populism.

That meeting, which drew five hundred Toowoombans, including both Clive Berghofer and Mayor Di, was presided over by Snow Manners, a patrician entrepreneur who became Morley’s partner in dedicated opposition to the recycling plan.

Asked at the meeting if the recycling plan was open for debate or reconsideration, Mayor Di told the crowd it was “nonnegotiable.” She was booed.
“It got boisterous,” says Manners.

Toowoombans may not have been idiots, but their acrimonious debate and vote provided no answer, no deliverance.

Toowoombans may not have been idiots, but their acrimonious debate and vote provided no answer, no deliverance. It provided no water.

Water is a topic of daily conversation, debate, worry, and speculation.

The Swan River winds through downtown Perth, wide and placid, with a miles-long greenway along its banks crowded with runners, skaters, strollers, and bikers.

Residents are exhorted to “Target 155”—use only 155 liters of water per day per person, 41 gallons, about what an American would use with a single bath.

The Murray River runs for 1,591 miles, and with its main tributary, the Darling River, the Murray-Darling Basin drains one out of every seven acres on the continent.

But as the political fight over the water rescue plan in the city of Toowoomba shows, the politics of water scarcity often turn out to be surprising, emotional, and confounding.

The tumult of Toowoomba’s yearlong water battle obscures something important, something that connects Toowoomba not just to its much bigger sister cities with water troubles in Australia, but to cities around the world that are nonchalant about water now, but may not be for long.

Toowoomba was totally unprepared for the surprising, and surprisingly caustic, politics of water.

For Americans, for anyone with a secure supply of water they never question, the fractiousness of water politics can seem unexpected, even bemusing.

Even Toowoomba’s Mayor Di started out skeptical about drinking recycled wastewater. But she gave herself the time, along with hands-on visits to actual water purification facilities, to get comfortable with purified wastewater. What she didn’t do was give her constituents the same space to get comfortable—she wanted them to take the water she was giving them on faith.