The Big Thirst: Chapters 9–10

Four Points underscores the idea on its Web site, where it has a page dedicated to the free bottled water it offers. Underneath the slogan “It’s water. Of course it’s free” is the line “What’s next? Paying for air?”

The water bills most people in the developed world get each month from their local utility are nominal—in the United States, it’s $1 or $1.50 a day for always-on, never-fail, unlimited water service at home.

Water may be the most vital substance in every aspect of human endeavor, but the economics of water is a mash-up of tradition, wishful thinking, and poor planning.

On the surface, Las Vegas somehow seems “unnatural,” a frivolous use of precious water; the farmland, on the other hand, seems smart, a judicious use of the precious water.

It was a typhoid outbreak in Emlenton in 1912 traced to the water supply that motivated construction of the filtration plant. For water that didn’t make you sick, $1.97 a month might have seemed a bargain.

The president of El Dorado’s board wrote a piece for the Sacramento Bee, explaining that he and his colleagues were simply trying to make up for years of neglect of the district’s pipes and pump stations by past boards, but apologized for “the upheaval caused by the proposed rate increases.”

As an epigrammatic summation of water, Plato’s is hard to beat: the very best of all things, and the cheapest.

If the water gets more expensive, then it pays to retrofit your irrigation system, or your soup-cooking system, with equipment that costs money to install, but reduces the amount of water you use.

The largest apartment complex in New York City is Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, a parklike urban enclave on eighty acres along Manhattan’s East River.

Indeed, the Murray River has just such a nascent water-trading market—which has helped, even with the tiny allocations in the Big Dry, as some farmers sell what little water they have and others buy enough water to keep some crops in the ground.

In an attempt to mollify the anger caused by the water fountain removal, the Cavaliers set up temporary water stations around the arena for the games scheduled before new water fountains were installed, so thirsty fans wouldn’t have to stand in line at the concession stand.

Vast national water circulation systems that were installed a century ago are crumbling and need to be upgraded. The cost to refurbish them is modest compared with their value, it’s modest even compared with what we spend on bottled water, but it’s still tens of billions of dollars a year for many years.

We won’t use purified drinking water to flush our toilets and water our lawns. We won’t hesitate to tap the most readily available source of water for most cities—our own waste water. And that layering of water uses dovetails perfectly with Mike Young’s economic framework for water: different waters, different prices.

That water was “free” only in the most pinched sense; in fact, water you have to walk for, water you have to stand in line for, is the opposite of free—it’s a kind of water bondage that desiccates the whole rest of your life.

“In twenty or thirty or forty years, water management won’t be the exciting, intellectually challenging stuff it is now. We’ll have water largely sorted out, in both the developed and the undeveloped world. We’ll be using water to be prosperous, and water management will be autonomous. And boring.”

Some streams are continuous for long moments, like the arc from a hose. Some are clipped bursts, sending up discrete slugs of water.

Indeed, the fountain as a whole bends the space around it—people hurrying distractedly along the concourse spot it and alter their trajectory to circle in, often coming to a complete halt, head tilted in alert wonder.

They release water’s innate sense of humor—two fans of water that seem to dance cheek-to-cheek, while in the background Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” plays.

WET fountains evoke the texture of water, the sensuousness, the sounds.

No bubbles, no eddies, all the molecules of water in the stream moving at the same speed, in the same direction.

No bubbles, no eddies, all the molecules of water in the stream moving at the same speed, in the same direction. It's analogous to a laser, says Fuller.

The whole creation has what Fuller calls a “fugitive nature. It has the allure of a sunset. The forms we weave in the air are fleeting. They are there for a split second and gone.”

Far from being decorative or frivolous, in fact, a particularly brilliant fountain can restore, however briefly, your full appreciation for water, can instill a sense of respect and humility, along with a smile, for the lubricant of our lives.

Far from being decorative or frivolous, in fact, a particularly brilliant fountain can restore, however briefly, your full appreciation for water, can instill a sense of respect and humility, along with a smile, for the lubricant of our lives.

But for one of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate—a man who then sat on the judiciary and appropriations committees, and also on the Senate’s environment and public works committee—for Arlen Specter to say flatly, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water,” is astonishing, even outrageous.

Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. The chance that there’s something hinky about your drink of water is actually greater with a commercially packaged bottle of water than with a glass of tap water.

But water problems are eminently solvable, in an era when so many problems seem insurmountable.

But water problems are eminently solvable, in an era when so many problems seem insurmountable.

This book isn’t a polemic on behalf of urgent water activism, or a sober warning about the future of water supplies.

There is, in fact, an encyclopedia of water, first published in 1972, called Water: A Comprehensive Treatise.

There’s no way of producing a book about water that is exhaustive without also producing a book that is exhausting.

Looking downstream toward the main falls, the water betrays no hint of the precipice to come right up to the last moment.

Each of us individually, and all of us together, have a huge reservoir of goodwill about water, even a sense of proprietorship. The water that comes out of the kitchen faucet—that’s my water.

Climate change may or may not be caused by human activity, it may or may not be remediated with a cap-and-trade system, but in terms of the public conversation, it’s hard to muster much affection for the atmosphere, or for polar ice caps.

Water itself will be fine. Water will remain exuberantly wet.