Like Water for War

By Scott Thill, May 21, 2007

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No natural resource has more potential to affect the prospects of future generations than the substance that makes up 65 percent of the human body. Are we heading towards a water-insecure future?

"The human race has taken water for granted and massively misjudged the capacity of the earth's water systems to recover from our carelessness."
-- Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, "Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water"

The road to Las Vegas from Los Angeles is a stark lesson in Earth's reliance upon that most precious of resources, and I'm not talking about the oil that drives our cars and planes, as well as our current campaigns in Iraq, Iran and the rest of the Middle East. I'm talking about water, which comes out of your taps, in bottles from behemoth corporations like Pepsi and Nestle, and out of the sky on those lucky days when we need to refresh our reservoirs and other capture strategies. One jaunt up the I-15's searing, stark desert landscape to a place aptly named Sin City will show you all you need to know about how badly we need water and how far we will go to get it.

Before the new millennium dawned, the idea of wars over water probably sounded like science fiction to the average American. But in places all over the world, from Bolivia to Israel to Lebanon to Africa and onward, governments, corporations and citizens were already trading bullets and treaties over access, commodification and more.

In 1999, the World Bank mandated water privatization as a condition of its bailout loan to Bolivia, which eventually granted access to its essential resource to American engineering monolith Bechtel Corp., which summarily raised rates by 200 percent and was eventually forced out of the country due to massive public protest. Trying to save face and recoup its losses, Bechtel sued for more than $25 million, only to settle for, no lie, a mere 30 cents after further mass protest. And it's not over: The same conflict continues in Bolivia's El Alto with a new privatization giant, this time the French energy titan Suez.

The same process exponentially replicated worldwide between governments or multinationals or both. At the end of the 20th century, Ethiopia and Egypt were battling over Addis Ababa's proposed dams of the Nile, a river already stressed to the point of exhaustion over serving the needs of not just the exploding populations of those two countries but also Sudan, which has experienced nothing but resource wars, power conflicts and unrestrained bloodshed ever since. According to a 1999 report from the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), one in two people living in the those countries and others on the continent dependent on the Nile, Niger, Volta and Zambezi basins were in danger of experiencing water scarcity or stress by 2025. Eight years later, Africa has descended into intercontinental warfare over not just water, but oil as well. Middle Eastern nations are not faring much better.

In 2000, Israel's retiring water commissioner Meir Ben Meir forecasted water scarcity conflicts between Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan and Syria within five years. In 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stated that Lebanon's attempt to divert water from the Hasbani, a river Israel controlled during its occupation of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000, from a newly opened pumping station was an "act of war." Lebanon called its pumping station the "first step towards liberating our water, a symbol of sovereignty and simple rights." Four years later, the two nations traded bombs and firepower for other stated reasons, but nevertheless attempted to destroy each other's water tanks, pipes, pumping stations and facilities.

Meanwhile, Suez's lock on water rights in regions of South America was further complicated by protests and operational failures in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Mexico. That track record promises only to get worse given that Suez holds concessions in nearly 100 countries. And they're not alone: In South Africa and the Philippines, water privatization bids by the World Bank and others led to skyrocketing rates, cholera outbreaks and worse among those, almost always the poor, who can't afford to pay rich multinationals for Earth's most precious resource.

The beatdown goes on. India and China have been fighting over the Brahmaputra River for years now. Turkey and Syria have been doing the same over the Euphrates. Droughts and declining stores have brought hell on earth to Darfur, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. The entire Asian continent could throw down over everything from rerouting the Mekong to eroding riverbanks. Water may be the source of life on Earth, but it's also the source of Earth's most up-and-coming conflicts.

In other words, it may come as a surprise to some Americans that water wars are real-time horrors coming next to their municipalities and city halls, but nowhere near as many as it used to. After all, water privatization may be a hard sell in poor countries who can barely afford food much less water, but it is an exceedingly easy pitch for relatively wealthy Americans -- and if you live in America, by the world's standards, you are wealthy -- already used to paying water bills and handing off responsibilities for such things to someone else. But for how long?

According to a 2003 report from the U.S. Department of the Interior, moderate to highly likely potential water supply crises are in store by 2025 for every pretty much every major metro in the American West, from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento to Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe and, of course, Las Vegas. Indeed, as I reported in an earlier piece for WireTap called "Earth's Altered States," the entire West is headed for permanent drought. The same dystopian thirst is in store for the rest of the country. The Great Lakes may possibly be a flashpoint for water wars between American and Canada, which houses a majority of its population near its shores. The Colorado River, which feeds a great majority of the American West, is drying up by the year. Small towns like California's McCloud are battling corporations like Nestle, who are hustling into town and trying to open plants trafficking in bottled water, that most pernicious form of water commodification.

Speaking of bottled water, there is probably no greater sign that globalization and capitalism have lost their way. Although prices vary greatly by region, Americans usually pay cents per gallon for water from their municipal services, but will pay dollars for the same from Nestle, Pepsi and other mammoth corporations in search of profit. And those are just the over-the-counter costs: Factor in the oil, another resource at the heart of global conflict, needed to make each plastic bottle and the overall cost dramatically increases.

Meanwhile, climate change promises to blow the whole powder keg wide open. Everyone from the U.S. military to the science establishment agrees that it will inflame water conflicts into full-blown wars. Some have even modified the term "World War" by one word -- "World Water War" -- to describe the incoming conflagration.

And so we return to Sin City and its glowing, growing metropolis, where I am right now as I sit and write this lengthy call to arms. There is no greater example of excess in America, perhaps the world, than Las Vegas, which right now is looking to accommodate the water needs of the thousands that migrate here monthly to find their fortune on golf courses and in casinos, lost in a synthetic desert oasis that prides itself on zero income tax. It is a region, like Los Angeles before it, walking a nefarious tightrope between extinction and distinction. But like L.A., it will have to tap the aquifiers and springs of faraway places to stay alive, and still may not when the decreased snow packs, drying rivers and emptied reservoirs promised by climate change come to pass. In the end, the fastest-growing city in America may be the first casualty of water war.

But the problem has a solution and that solution is simple as ever: money. And when your local politician or global multinational complains about the price for fixing this forthcoming nightmare, give them the facts. Here's one: The EPA argues that the United States needs upward of $150 billion to fix the nation's water problem and systems. Here's another: Our boneheaded escapade for oil in Iraq has already cost us $400 billion and rising -- and that's a seriously modest estimate. Last time I checked, Iraq can't be found on a map of the United States. In other words, money is not an issue and never has been. If America stopped wasting money on waste, we'd have plenty of money to tackle the resources we'll spend the rest of our lives as we know them trying to conserve, down to the last life-giving drop.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.