The Coming Wars Over Water … and a Local Skirmish

A pretty good social, political, cultural, and scientific blog could be written simply on issues related to water.

To start with, roughly 60 percent of our body consists of water, though that varies a lot with our different body parts and how we take care of ourselves. Adipose tissue -- fats that store energy and provide cushioning and insulation -- is only 10 percent water, while muscles contain 75 percent (although you might have been tempted to think it’s the other way around).

Another fact that goes against common sense is that men tend to have a higher percentage of water in their bodies (average of more than 58 percent) than women (less than 49 percent), despite the complaints of the latter. Other factors that can make our internal water levels diminish include disease and age.

Although we tend not to feel thirsty until our inner water content is down by 2 to 3 percent, researchers have shown that mental and physical performance can begin to suffer after as little as 1 percent water depletion. (Forgetting to bring my own water to auditions, rehearsals, and performances has probably been my biggest consistent weakness as an actor.)

For decades, individual commentators have intimated that water will be the next cause of wars around the world. Those warnings have picked up slightly in recent years, but probably not enough to have made much of an impact on the average American’s brain.

If people in the U.S. monitor their water consumption -- while washing cars and homes and sidewalks, keeping green lawns hydrated, turning off the faucet or shower while brushing and scrubbing -- it’s more likely their water bill that’s on their mind, not the future of the planet.

The UN reports that 780 million people across the world do not have dependable access to safe drinking water, and nearly half the world’s population will be living in high water stress areas by 2030. So wars will likely result.

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon went on record as saying Israel attacked armies in neighboring Arab nations in 1967, in the “Six-Day War,” because of water. Senegal and Mauretania went to war in 1989 over grazing rights along the Senegal River.

(Oddly enough, I was traveling in both countries at the time, but was only dimly aware of the situation. I recall rumors that the border would be closed, which would have prevented me from visiting a friend in Mauretania. Because of my own experiences, though, it was perhaps the first time I became aware of how precious water can be, and I wrote about it shortly after returning to the U.S.)

Water wars and political, social, and economic stress due to overconsumption are not a recent phenomenon. Mark Twain once wrote that “whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” The so-called California water wars, which form part of the dramatic backdrop to the classic 1974 movie Chinatown, commenced before the end of the 19th century.

Challenges faced by Mono Lake due to the demands of Los Angeles for water started almost exactly a century ago and led to court battles at the conclusion of the 20th century. The lake level had fallen two dozen feet, its surface area shrank by nearly a third, tufa towers (which I first saw in the cover art for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here) were exposed, the salt content rose and threatened the survival of briny shrimp in the lake, and migratory birds became more vulnerable.

Oregon has seen a near-water war over the past decade in the Klamath River Basin, on the California border, as white farmers and ranchers saw the state shut off their irrigation to ensure Klamath Indians got their historic share and salmon runs didn’t die off from the overheated low streams, which happened dramatically in 2002.

California periodically floats the idea of buying and piping a portion of the six billion gallons of water that flows out of the mouth of the Columbia River into the Pacific on the average each day. This year California faces a potentially unprecedented drought, with heightened wildfire conditions.

I see another symptom of coming change, I think, in the much less dramatic form of a City of Portland ballot measure. Ballot Measure 26-156 aims to wrest control of water and sewer utilities from the city council and create an independent water district.

Last fall I saw quite a few earnest folks collecting signatures for this measure at the main library (three blocks north of my apartment) and the Saturday farmer’s market at Portland State University (four blocks south).

And it sounds very sensible, doesn’t it? It’s not hard to make the case that the City of Portland has been clumsy, wasteful, and unresponsive to the electorate in administering water and sewer utilities. And public utility districts can work very well.

But follow the money here. The substantial corporate backers of this measure, including Portland Bottling Company and a silicon wafer manufacturer based in Germany called Siltronic, stand to benefit in a huge way. Plus, as local newspapers have pointed out, as written the measure gives citizens less access to the process, not more; and the city auditor would be blocked from examining the books for the new district.

Stringent no-conflict rules for people who can run for the district board, which sound good on the surface, will end up guaranteeing that pretty much only independently wealthy folks and retirees will be eligible. That’s not so good.

What all this tells me is that private companies are waking up to the fact that water will be one of the next highly valuable commodities. We’ve taken it pretty much for granted here in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s going to become more rare, and more valuable, and more expensive.

So corporations, comparing future projections against the bottom line, are looking to get control of water resources -- kind of the way they snapped up oil and mineral rights and land in the 19th century -- before the rest of us realize what’s happening. As with last year’s anti-fluoridation measure here in Multnomah County, there’s been an awful lot of heat and noise about this ostensibly sedate proposal.

So I’ll be voting no on Measure 26-156, and I urge everyone else in Portland to do the same. As for the bigger picture, keep your eye open for more symptoms of water stress across the U.S. and the globe.