National Drinking Water Clearinghouse
West Virginia University
P.O. Box 6064
Morgantown, WV
26506-6064


Until Next Time...

Water, Geography, and Politics

by Mark Kemp-Rye
On Tap Managing Editor

It’s true confession time: When I started working at the National Drinking Water Clearinghouse three-and-a-half years ago,
I took drinking water completely for granted. When I turned on the tap for a glass of water or to run a bath for my children, I didn’t give it a second thought. Living in a water-rich area like West Virginia it’s an easy thing to do. It’s also symptomatic of how many of us consider water, as a resource, and how under-valued it is in much of the world.

Taking water for granted, though, may soon be a luxury we can ill afford. In a new book titled Resource Wars, Michael Klare, director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, argues that resources—especially oil, but, increasingly water—will replace ideology as the main cause of strife in the post-Cold War era.

In an interview with Tamara Straus, a reporter with the AlterNet news service, Klare predicts “… a much higher level of international conflict over access to critical sources of oil and water, such as the Persian Gulf area, the Nile River basin, the Jordan and so on. Conflict will also erupt within many countries, as various groups (whether defined by class, ethnicity, tribe or religion) fight over the control of arable land, energy supplies, water and so forth. We could also see unprecedented levels of international migration, as people move from overpopulated and drought-stricken areas to countries with adequate supplies of land and water.”

Water as a valuable commodity and possible source of conflict is also a concern to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), reports syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. George Tenet, CIA director, notes that the world’s population will reach 7 billion by the year 2015 and that most of the increase will occur in Africa and Asia, where, the CIA expects the “primary fallout will be a lack of water.”

And, it’s not just a problem for “other” parts of the world. Increasingly, water will be a point of contention in the U.S., particularly in the West where water is scarce. (On Tap Assistant Editor Jamie Knotts explores this subject in more detail in “Water Wars” on page 18 of this issue.) Students of resource and political geography will be tempted to say “we’ve been talking about this for decades.”

In his 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau, for example, writes “The(water scarcity) problem is simply stated: the thin strip of the Pacific shore along the Coast and Cascade Mountain ranges from Northern California to southern Alaska is the only place in the West with enough water. Everything else for a thousand miles in any direction is basically desert.”
While all of this might seem like nothing but gloom and doom, I believe that there are encouraging signs. If successful movies can serve as one measure of public interest, then water issues can be seen as a growing part of our societal consciousness. Witness the popularity of films such as 1988’s The Milagro Beanfield War—the tale of a small community fighting a huge development over water rights—or 1998’s A Civil Action—where a lawyer investigates deaths associated with contaminated water—and it seems fair to say that awareness of water’s importance is on the rise.

The bottom line, I’ve come to realize, is that water is a precious resource and we should treat it as such. We can’t survive on this planet without it. As Garreau points out, “You can make gasoline out of cow manure if you have
to, but you can’t make water.”