Module 4: "The Big Thirst"

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

Water service is so reliable that it has become completely inconspicuous.

But unlike the time we spend at the gas pump—where we can see the gallons as they are pumped, and the instant impact on our credit card bill—the way we handle water use insulates us not just from the wonders of water, but from any sense of how much water daily life requires, or the work and expense required to deliver that water.

The last century has conditioned us to think that water is naturally abundant, safe, and cheap—that it should be, that it will be. We’re in for a rude shock.

We are entering a new era of water scarcity—not just in traditionally dry or hard-pressed places like the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, but in places we think of as water-wealthy, like Atlanta and Melbourne.

We are entering a new era of water scarcity—not just in traditionally dry or hard-pressed places like the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, but in places we think of as water-wealthy, like Atlanta and Melbourne.

We are on the verge of a second modern water revolution—and it is likely to change our attitudes at least as much as the one a hundred years ago.

We have ignored water—neglected our water supplies and our water systems, taken for granted the economic value of abundant water, and become blasé about the day-to-day convenience of easy water.

Poor farming practices around the world squander huge quantities of water. Agriculture uses two-thirds of all the water people use—and especially in developing countries, half that water is wasted.

One of the most startling, inspiring, and least well-known examples involves the United States.

The brilliant invisibility of our water system has become its most significant vulnerability. That invisibility makes it difficult for people to understand the effort and money required to sustain a system that has been in place for decades, but has in fact been quietly corroding from decades of neglect.

So when Australian sheep get sheared—and Australia is still the largest producer of wool in the world—the fresh wool is grubby.

So when Australian sheep get sheared—and Australia is still the largest producer of wool in the world—the fresh wool is grubby.

Wool scouring is as gritty and demanding as the name suggests, and it is a water-intensive business.

Wool gets unbaled and dumped into a tank at one end of the scour. It is washed in cold water, lightly agitated, wrung out, and moved up belts into successive tanks, pronged along gently to avoid damaging the fibers and ultimately washed in water that is 150°F, hot enough to dissolve off the lanolin.

The tickle of water insecurity turned out to be almost scarily prescient.

Just by worrying, by starting to think differently about its water needs and its water supply, Michell Wool and Salisbury have created a virtuous water cycle whose benefits seem astonishingly simple and self-reinforcing.

Salisbury makes money cleaning up polluted water, and the mangroves of Barker Inlet on the Indian Ocean don’t struggle to survive against urban runoff.

Salisbury makes money cleaning up polluted water, and the mangroves of Barker Inlet on the Indian Ocean don’t struggle to survive against urban runoff.

You use water of a quality and a cleanliness that’s good enough for the task at hand. In fact, Salisbury is home to a large residential development called Mawson Lakes, where every one of the 4,500 homes, and every business, has purple-pipe water, along with potable water.

Arthur is a rice farmer in the basin of Australia’s Murray River, with 10,450 acres of fields in the wide-open rangeland called the Riverina.

Arthur, like all the farmers for hundreds of miles around, is an irrigator—rain is essential, but the rain needs to fall to fill the Murray River. Water comes into the river from reservoirs five hundred miles away, and then to Arthur’s fields in irrigation channels designed to rely on gravity flow to get the water delivered.

In the Big Dry, Laurie Arthur is both a water baron and a water prisoner.

Beyond conservation—Perth residents ultimately scaled back per person consumption enough to save 45 gigaliters a year, which is equivalent to what an entire desalination plant produces—there were really only two options for adding water that didn’t depend immediately on rainfall: tapping a vast aquifer called the Yarragadee and building a desalination plant.