Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the National water news Category
Click here to view all posts

Present U.S. water usage unsustainable: an interview with Dr. Peter Gleick

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 9, 2008 at 7:24 am

From the Circle of Blue:

In an interview with Circle of Blue, the Pacific Institute’s Dr. Peter Gleick discusses water resource challenges the U.S. faces in the near future. As co-founder and president of one of the nation’s leading water think tanks, Gleick served as an academician at the International Water Academy in Oslo, Norway in 1999 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003. He was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C in 2006. Gleick currently serves as a science advisor for Circle of Blue. For partial audio excerpts of this interview, click here.

We’re coming into the summertime, which is traditionally when we have droughts, fires, and fads in the media covering water. What are the big issues facing the U.S. regarding water coming into this summer and even in the next three to five years?

I think we see a lot of interest in water. At the moment not just because it’s the summer and because summers are hot, but because this appears to be a particularly dry summer in many parts of the United States. We are in an officially declared emergency drought in California. The Southeast continues to be dry; the reservoirs in the Southwest around the Colorado River have been dry for many many years now. I think what we’re seeing is a combination of events that for water means we’re moving into a new era of water crisis. We are moving into a new era where we can no longer take water for granted.

Here in the US water is a challenge that has mainly been seen as “over there” in Africa, in Southeast Asia, but we’ve seen a lot of dots growing on the U.S. map. What are we missing here in the United States, what’s the big story?

We’ve done a great job in the United States in reducing our vulnerability to drought by building massive infrastructure for storing water in wet periods, so we can use it in dry periods. The downside is it’s made us in a sense ignore water as an issue for far too long. We now see growing water shortages not just in places that we used to think were dry, but in places that we used to think were wet. We’re ignoring the way we use water. We’ve stopped thinking about how to use water efficiently and effectively because we’ve always assumed that it would always be there. That no longer is the case. We’re moving into an era truly I think of water scarcity throughout the United States and that by itself is going to force us to move to an era of more efficient management techniques.

My favorite excerpt - Peter is asked what the outlook is for the United States in five years:

We know that in five years we’ll be in trouble, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If there was more education and awareness about water issues, if we started to really think about the natural limits, about where humans and ecosystems have to work together to deal with water, if we were to start to think about efficient use of water, we could reduce the severity of the problems enormously. I’m just not sure we’re going to.

Read the rest of this interview with Peter Gleick from the Circle of Blue by clicking here.

July 9, 2008 · Filed Under National water news

Comments

Leave a Reply