The Big Thirst, page 36
An economics of water should be liberating—both for people and for water itself. It doesn’t mean turning water supplies or water infrastructure over to remote, self-interested, profit-driven corporations. It means putting not just a price, but a value, on the most important substance in our daily lives, and putting a price, and a value, on the work necessary to make sure that substance is available in the quantity and quality that sustains the kind of communities we want to have.
Price is incredibly potent. Indeed, if you had to pick one thing to fix about water, one thing that would help you fix everything else— scarcity, unequal distribution, misuse, waste, skewed priorities, resistance to reuse, shortsighted exploitation of natural water resources—that one thing is price. The right price changes how we see everything else about water.
Mike Young thinks this moment in our relationship with water is as rich with energy, invention, and possibility as the water breakthroughs of a hundred years ago. “I think we’re at an exciting threshold,” he says. “In twenty or thirty or forty years, water management won’t be the exciting, intellectually challenging stuff it is now. We’ll have water largely sorted out, in both the developed and the undeveloped world. We’ll be using water to be prosperous, and water management will be autonomous. And boring.”
A century ago, our forefathers had to create a vast engineering system for delivering water, and then get it funded and constructed. Our task is far easier. All we have to do is change how we value that system and the water it delivers. All we have to change is how we think about water, so that a hundred years from now, a bottle of water with a tag that says “It’s water. Of course it’s free,” won’t be charming, it will be absurd.
10
The Fate of Water
The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.
—Mark Fuller,
CEO, WET Design,
a fountain design company
IN THE MODERN AND AIRY TERMINAL A at Detroit’s Metro Airport sits a smooth black slab of granite. It looks something like a black river rock, except for its size. Positioned on the floor, the disk is an oval, the height of a low table, and about forty feet across.
The top of the disk is covered with an inch of water that spills smoothly off the edges and down the sides, which bulge outward, softening the granite, making it seem more like a cushion than a rock. Since there is no lip, the black skirt of water slips with perfect ease over the edges, following the bulging stone like liquid silk, disappearing beneath the disk. It’s as if a spring has bubbled up in the hectic travel terminal.
The disk is never at rest. Jets of water shoot up from the surface and land at random spots across the black oval. Everything about the streams of water is a little curious. They don’t fire off in any pattern. Some streams are continuous for long moments, like the arc from a hose. Some are clipped bursts, sending up discrete slugs of water. Sometimes just a couple arcs of water are firing, sometimes twenty or thirty crisscross the disk at once.
The jets have a playful quality—sometimes firing off together, creating great splashing clusters of landing water, sometimes firing off separately with a mischievous call-and-response quality. The fountain and its water have a personality. And there is no railing or barrier. You can walk right up and trail your hands through the water.
What is most intriguing about the fountain is the water itself. The arcing water is clear, ripple-free, and bubble-free. The water in the continuous arcs is so smooth that even though you know it’s flowing, you can’t see any motion in the stream. The water has an unearthly quality; it looks heavy, like a breeze wouldn’t bother it.
The behavior of water is so familiar to us that we sense any oddity quickly, even if we don’t quite get it. The arcs of water shooting over the black disk seem to have their own relationship with gravity. Indeed, the fountain as a whole bends the space around it—people hurrying distractedly along the concourse spot it and alter their trajectory to circle in, often coming to a complete halt, head tilted in alert wonder.
The Detroit Terminal A fountain is the creation of a group of people who think about water all the time, about how water behaves, about its texture, its sounds, about how water reflects light, about how water moves, and about how water moves us. They work for WET Design, a company based in Los Angeles that specializes in fountains, but not of the decorative carved-fish-spouting-streams-of-water variety.
“The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment,” says Mark Fuller, CEO and cofounder of WET. “Then we’ve succeeded. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.”
Today, there are lots of people who think about water all the time— oceanographers and engineers designing offshore oil rigs, people who manage water treatment plants on land and who make ice sculptures on cruise ships; businesspeople who sell water filters and project managers who specialize in constructing city-size desalination plants; plumbers, politicians, and people who lay water mains; farmers who get too little water or too much, meteorologists who predict water’s behavior in the atmosphere, and planetary scientists who study water’s behavior on the Moon, on Mars, and on Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn that geysers water vapor and ice hundreds of miles straight up off its surface into space.1
But there are few places where people consider water from the perspective that Mark Fuller and his team of engineers, architects, designers, and computer programmers do. WET now employs two hundred people, and they think of water as a means of artistic expression. For them water is both an essential collaborator and an untamable force.
“The medium we’ve chosen to work with is much more independent than any other sculptural material, Michelangelo and his limestone included,” says Fuller. “What we do at WET, from a scientific standpoint, is we play with the unnatural state of water. We try to control water. We go to absurd lengths to organize how we start with water—sweeping arcs of jets, grids that are strongly geometric—but the second the water comes out of a nozzle, nature takes over. The hand of God is present. It’s the wonderful juxtaposition of the control of man, and absolutely relinquishing control.”
That’s actually a bit modest. The fountain at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which is an attraction all its own on the Strip, knits elaborate tapestries of water in the air, choreographed to music. When it was turned on in 1988, the Bellagio fountain was unlike any that had come before, in scale, or in the ways its water performed. It was WET’s first truly grand-scale fountain. More than a decade later, the fountain still attracts thousands of spectators every day, and the hotel charges $50 a night extra for rooms that overlook it.
The Bellagio fountain was until December 2009 the largest in the world. That’s when WET debuted a fountain in Dubai, at the base of the tallest building in the world. WET’s Dubai Fountain is set in a thirty-acre lake (four times the space of the Bellagio fountain) and sends water five hundred feet in the air, across a span of three football fields. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa—taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of the Sears Tower—is now fronted by the largest fountain in the world. At any given moment, WET’s Dubai Fountain has 22,000 gallons of water dancing in the air. The fountain alone cost $218 million.2
The Bellagio and the Dubai, and the dozens of other signature water features WET has created—from the newly restored fountain in front of New York’s Lincoln Center, which forms patterns and moods with nothing but dozens of perfectly vertical jets of water, to the fountains in Branson, Missouri, which shoot water and balls of fire simultaneously, timed to music—all rely on technology that Fuller and his colleagues created, technology that has revolutionized what water can do.3 WET fountains make use of an underwater mount that Fuller named an “oarsman,” because it has pivots—gimbals and armatures—that allow it to aim water through three dimensions, with a range of motion and a nimbleness greater than the human wrist. The jets of water come from shooters powered not by pumps but by compressed air, giving WET’s water choreographers more control, more precision, and more power when unleashing their water, and giving the jets themselves a surprising oomph and crispness.4
The designers at WET use the technology (which is always invisible to the viewer) to coax remarkable performances from water. They can make a circle of oarsmen spin and spray water to create a ring of whirling dancers in flaring skirts. They release water’s innate sense of humor—two fans of water that seem to dance cheek-to-cheek, while in the background Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” plays. WET fountains evoke the texture of water, the sensuousness, the sounds.
Mark Fuller has, in fact, taught water new tricks. Growing up in Salt Lake City, in the winter he would create ice dams in the gutters, “to see how far I could flood the water out into the street.” Sitting in the back of a fluid mechanics class in college one day, “we were watching this 16 mm film, and it included a picture of this little stream of water that was so clear, it didn’t look like water. If you turned the faucet off slowly, slowly, slowly, you got water that looked almost like a liquid icicle. Like the stem on a martini glass.”
That’s called laminar flow—water that is moving utterly without turbulence. No bubbles, no eddies, all the molecules of water in the stream moving at the same speed, in the same direction. “It’s analogous to a laser,” says Fuller.
Inspired by the 16 mm film, Fuller and some classmates built a laminar-flow nozzle as an undergraduate thesis project—a nozzle that creates that crystalline flow, but with force and authority instead of the thinnest little stream. Fuller, who was an Imagineer for Disney before founding WET, took the idea to Epcot and used it to create the leaping fountain outside Epcot’s Imagination Pavilion in 1982, where the solid, clear beams of water still chase each other through planters in the park. “The Detroit [Airport] fountain is based exactly on that thesis project,” says Fuller.
There is nothing “natural” about the presentation of water in the black disk—there is no place where we encounter jets of water with laminar flow, that’s why the fountain’s arcs of water are so arresting. The Detroit airport fountain is unpredictable—you never know where the water is going to come from, where it’s going to land, how long it’s going to last, what other streams one arc might trigger.
The fountain’s leaping arcs of water aren’t quite random. They are meant to evoke flying from one place to another. The Detroit fountain looks like nothing so much as an abstract, idealized version of the route maps in the back of the airline magazines. The whole creation has what Fuller calls a “fugitive nature. It has the allure of a sunset. The forms we weave in the air are fleeting. They are there for a split second and gone.”
The fountain is so appealing to travelers that there are seventy videos of it on YouTube—including one person who has filmed it four separate times—and 46,000 people have watched them (not including the 25,000 people who have watched WET’s own video of the fountain). You can watch the Terminal A fountain online for ninety minutes.
WET creates fountains that irresistibly change your mood, refresh both your sense of wonder and your sense of balance.
Far from being decorative or frivolous, in fact, a particularly brilliant fountain can restore, however briefly, your full appreciation for water, can instill a sense of respect and humility, along with a smile, for the lubricant of our lives.
The designers at WET think about water differently. They try to understand not just water’s qualities and power but the emotions those qualities evoke, and why. They treat water as a sculptural medium, but also as something truly natural, something wild, independent, ultimately untamable.
The modern world allows us to approach water in strictly utilitarian terms—it is literally at hand when we need it. Our domesticated water requires zero work, zero thought, and comes with zero risk (and zero magic).
As for water’s power, its wildness, we do get the occasional reminder of that—in a particularly dramatic downpour, or a hurricane, or when we see news reports of flooding. In fact, part of the appeal of water parks is that they unleash water’s wildness in ways that are thrilling and uncommon. Because unless we’re sightseeing somewhere like Niagara Falls, we’ve mostly insulated ourselves from water’s power.
What the people at WET understand about water is precisely what is absent from our whole approach—whether in suburban Las Vegas or urban Delhi. There isn’t really a word for exactly what’s missing in our relationship to water, but it’s an ingrained sense of cherishment, almost of reverence. Why wouldn’t we revere water, of all the things we could revere?
IN APRIL 2009, Senator Arlen Specter hosted a town hall at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Specter—since defeated in a Democratic primary for reelection—wasn’t just Pennsylvania’s senior senator in April 2009, he was the longest-serving U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history, elected to five terms starting in 1980.
The Muhlenberg appearance was utterly routine, and Specter was relaxed and candid. Students asked questions about the impact that the drilling for natural gas that is growing dramatically in Pennsylvania will have on the safety of water supplies in the state.
“Which side are you on, the natural gas companies, or the people who have to drink poisoned water?” one student asked.
“That’s certainly not a loaded question,” Specter said, to chuckles. “I have never taken a position in favor of drinking poisonous water, and I don’t intend to this afternoon.”
The question-and-answers moved in the direction of drinking water, and Specter said, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water.”
A few moments later the senator said, “On a very serious level, I want to have clean drinking water, and I’ve supported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But I think there is a natural inclination”—and here the senator shrugged his shoulders to say he understood the inclination—“for people to want to be a little extra-sure on the water. Where I can have access to a bottle of water, I’m going to use it.”5
Arlen Specter, the person, is entitled to any view he wants to hold. But for one of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate—a man who then sat on the judiciary and appropriations committees, and also on the Senate’s environment and public works committee—for Arlen Specter to say flatly, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water,” is astonishing, even outrageous.6 The United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world, a tap water system that is responsible in part for the extraordinary leaps in life span in the United States in the last hundred years.
It would be like Specter standing up before a group of college students, shrugging, and saying that he avoids bridges because he “doesn’t trust” the bridge building system in the United States, or that he always drives because he “doesn’t trust” U.S. air traffic controllers. If there’s something so dangerous about U.S. tap water that a senior U.S. senator takes pains to avoid it, he should tell us what the danger is, and he should be leading the fight, loudly, every day to rehabilitate the system. Otherwise, Specter’s comment is both corrosive and irresponsible. If he doesn’t drink the tap water, where does that leave the people he represents?
The absurdity is only magnified by Specter’s saying that because he wants to be “a little extra-sure,” he drinks bottled water when he can. Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. The chance that there’s something hinky about your drink of water is actually greater with a commercially packaged bottle of water than with a glass of tap water.7
At the opposite end of the silliness spectrum, Apple’s iPhone App Store offers an application called “Water Your Body,” which both recommends how much water you need each day and offers to keep track of your water consumption. “Water Your Body” even gives you “a daily and overall average grade on how well you are keeping up” on your water drinking. Because of “revolutionary research,” the app’s makers say, “we have learned just how critical it is, for your health, to maximize your individual water intake.”
Of course, “Water Your Body” is absolutely absurd. Leave aside for the moment the question of what kind of person can manage the intricacies of an iPhone but has trouble remembering to drink water. No one who is not recovering in a hospital needs to track her daily water consumption. There is no proven need to “maximize your individual water intake.” In a healthy person, you simply can’t.
The finely tuned chemistry of your body quickly turns “extra” water you drink into pee—and your body regards extra as 1 percent excess water. “Water Your Body” simply maximizes your time in the bathroom, and takes 99 cents from you. Your body already has an exquisite, built-in, water-tracking app: thirst.8
The senator and the iPhone app both trade on our water illiteracy. The cost of “Water Your Body” is just 99 cents, the cost of having leaders who don’t understand our tap water is much greater.
The world of water is changing dramatically, as we’ve seen. There is increasing talk from activists and NGOs, from companies like GE and Monsanto, and from the occasional forward-thinking elected official, of a “global water crisis.” We hear routinely, from those trying to rouse the world to action, and from nonprofit groups trying to help, that on this very day, more than 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and that before the calendar turns on another day, five thousand children will die because they lack clean water, or from an illness they got from tainted water.
And we hear that over the next forty years, the problem is going to get catastrophically worse: Between 2010 and 2050, the world will add 2.4 billion new people, equal to the populations of China and India combined.9
Price is incredibly potent. Indeed, if you had to pick one thing to fix about water, one thing that would help you fix everything else— scarcity, unequal distribution, misuse, waste, skewed priorities, resistance to reuse, shortsighted exploitation of natural water resources—that one thing is price. The right price changes how we see everything else about water.
Mike Young thinks this moment in our relationship with water is as rich with energy, invention, and possibility as the water breakthroughs of a hundred years ago. “I think we’re at an exciting threshold,” he says. “In twenty or thirty or forty years, water management won’t be the exciting, intellectually challenging stuff it is now. We’ll have water largely sorted out, in both the developed and the undeveloped world. We’ll be using water to be prosperous, and water management will be autonomous. And boring.”
A century ago, our forefathers had to create a vast engineering system for delivering water, and then get it funded and constructed. Our task is far easier. All we have to do is change how we value that system and the water it delivers. All we have to change is how we think about water, so that a hundred years from now, a bottle of water with a tag that says “It’s water. Of course it’s free,” won’t be charming, it will be absurd.
10
The Fate of Water
The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.
—Mark Fuller,
CEO, WET Design,
a fountain design company
IN THE MODERN AND AIRY TERMINAL A at Detroit’s Metro Airport sits a smooth black slab of granite. It looks something like a black river rock, except for its size. Positioned on the floor, the disk is an oval, the height of a low table, and about forty feet across.
The top of the disk is covered with an inch of water that spills smoothly off the edges and down the sides, which bulge outward, softening the granite, making it seem more like a cushion than a rock. Since there is no lip, the black skirt of water slips with perfect ease over the edges, following the bulging stone like liquid silk, disappearing beneath the disk. It’s as if a spring has bubbled up in the hectic travel terminal.
The disk is never at rest. Jets of water shoot up from the surface and land at random spots across the black oval. Everything about the streams of water is a little curious. They don’t fire off in any pattern. Some streams are continuous for long moments, like the arc from a hose. Some are clipped bursts, sending up discrete slugs of water. Sometimes just a couple arcs of water are firing, sometimes twenty or thirty crisscross the disk at once.
The jets have a playful quality—sometimes firing off together, creating great splashing clusters of landing water, sometimes firing off separately with a mischievous call-and-response quality. The fountain and its water have a personality. And there is no railing or barrier. You can walk right up and trail your hands through the water.
What is most intriguing about the fountain is the water itself. The arcing water is clear, ripple-free, and bubble-free. The water in the continuous arcs is so smooth that even though you know it’s flowing, you can’t see any motion in the stream. The water has an unearthly quality; it looks heavy, like a breeze wouldn’t bother it.
The behavior of water is so familiar to us that we sense any oddity quickly, even if we don’t quite get it. The arcs of water shooting over the black disk seem to have their own relationship with gravity. Indeed, the fountain as a whole bends the space around it—people hurrying distractedly along the concourse spot it and alter their trajectory to circle in, often coming to a complete halt, head tilted in alert wonder.
The Detroit Terminal A fountain is the creation of a group of people who think about water all the time, about how water behaves, about its texture, its sounds, about how water reflects light, about how water moves, and about how water moves us. They work for WET Design, a company based in Los Angeles that specializes in fountains, but not of the decorative carved-fish-spouting-streams-of-water variety.
“The ultimate test for one of our fountains is, if you walk by it, do you say, I’ve just gotta watch this for a moment,” says Mark Fuller, CEO and cofounder of WET. “Then we’ve succeeded. We don’t do babbling brooks. We try to actively engage the conscious part of your mind.”
Today, there are lots of people who think about water all the time— oceanographers and engineers designing offshore oil rigs, people who manage water treatment plants on land and who make ice sculptures on cruise ships; businesspeople who sell water filters and project managers who specialize in constructing city-size desalination plants; plumbers, politicians, and people who lay water mains; farmers who get too little water or too much, meteorologists who predict water’s behavior in the atmosphere, and planetary scientists who study water’s behavior on the Moon, on Mars, and on Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn that geysers water vapor and ice hundreds of miles straight up off its surface into space.1
But there are few places where people consider water from the perspective that Mark Fuller and his team of engineers, architects, designers, and computer programmers do. WET now employs two hundred people, and they think of water as a means of artistic expression. For them water is both an essential collaborator and an untamable force.
“The medium we’ve chosen to work with is much more independent than any other sculptural material, Michelangelo and his limestone included,” says Fuller. “What we do at WET, from a scientific standpoint, is we play with the unnatural state of water. We try to control water. We go to absurd lengths to organize how we start with water—sweeping arcs of jets, grids that are strongly geometric—but the second the water comes out of a nozzle, nature takes over. The hand of God is present. It’s the wonderful juxtaposition of the control of man, and absolutely relinquishing control.”
That’s actually a bit modest. The fountain at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which is an attraction all its own on the Strip, knits elaborate tapestries of water in the air, choreographed to music. When it was turned on in 1988, the Bellagio fountain was unlike any that had come before, in scale, or in the ways its water performed. It was WET’s first truly grand-scale fountain. More than a decade later, the fountain still attracts thousands of spectators every day, and the hotel charges $50 a night extra for rooms that overlook it.
The Bellagio fountain was until December 2009 the largest in the world. That’s when WET debuted a fountain in Dubai, at the base of the tallest building in the world. WET’s Dubai Fountain is set in a thirty-acre lake (four times the space of the Bellagio fountain) and sends water five hundred feet in the air, across a span of three football fields. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa—taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of the Sears Tower—is now fronted by the largest fountain in the world. At any given moment, WET’s Dubai Fountain has 22,000 gallons of water dancing in the air. The fountain alone cost $218 million.2
The Bellagio and the Dubai, and the dozens of other signature water features WET has created—from the newly restored fountain in front of New York’s Lincoln Center, which forms patterns and moods with nothing but dozens of perfectly vertical jets of water, to the fountains in Branson, Missouri, which shoot water and balls of fire simultaneously, timed to music—all rely on technology that Fuller and his colleagues created, technology that has revolutionized what water can do.3 WET fountains make use of an underwater mount that Fuller named an “oarsman,” because it has pivots—gimbals and armatures—that allow it to aim water through three dimensions, with a range of motion and a nimbleness greater than the human wrist. The jets of water come from shooters powered not by pumps but by compressed air, giving WET’s water choreographers more control, more precision, and more power when unleashing their water, and giving the jets themselves a surprising oomph and crispness.4
The designers at WET use the technology (which is always invisible to the viewer) to coax remarkable performances from water. They can make a circle of oarsmen spin and spray water to create a ring of whirling dancers in flaring skirts. They release water’s innate sense of humor—two fans of water that seem to dance cheek-to-cheek, while in the background Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” plays. WET fountains evoke the texture of water, the sensuousness, the sounds.
Mark Fuller has, in fact, taught water new tricks. Growing up in Salt Lake City, in the winter he would create ice dams in the gutters, “to see how far I could flood the water out into the street.” Sitting in the back of a fluid mechanics class in college one day, “we were watching this 16 mm film, and it included a picture of this little stream of water that was so clear, it didn’t look like water. If you turned the faucet off slowly, slowly, slowly, you got water that looked almost like a liquid icicle. Like the stem on a martini glass.”
That’s called laminar flow—water that is moving utterly without turbulence. No bubbles, no eddies, all the molecules of water in the stream moving at the same speed, in the same direction. “It’s analogous to a laser,” says Fuller.
Inspired by the 16 mm film, Fuller and some classmates built a laminar-flow nozzle as an undergraduate thesis project—a nozzle that creates that crystalline flow, but with force and authority instead of the thinnest little stream. Fuller, who was an Imagineer for Disney before founding WET, took the idea to Epcot and used it to create the leaping fountain outside Epcot’s Imagination Pavilion in 1982, where the solid, clear beams of water still chase each other through planters in the park. “The Detroit [Airport] fountain is based exactly on that thesis project,” says Fuller.
There is nothing “natural” about the presentation of water in the black disk—there is no place where we encounter jets of water with laminar flow, that’s why the fountain’s arcs of water are so arresting. The Detroit airport fountain is unpredictable—you never know where the water is going to come from, where it’s going to land, how long it’s going to last, what other streams one arc might trigger.
The fountain’s leaping arcs of water aren’t quite random. They are meant to evoke flying from one place to another. The Detroit fountain looks like nothing so much as an abstract, idealized version of the route maps in the back of the airline magazines. The whole creation has what Fuller calls a “fugitive nature. It has the allure of a sunset. The forms we weave in the air are fleeting. They are there for a split second and gone.”
The fountain is so appealing to travelers that there are seventy videos of it on YouTube—including one person who has filmed it four separate times—and 46,000 people have watched them (not including the 25,000 people who have watched WET’s own video of the fountain). You can watch the Terminal A fountain online for ninety minutes.
WET creates fountains that irresistibly change your mood, refresh both your sense of wonder and your sense of balance.
Far from being decorative or frivolous, in fact, a particularly brilliant fountain can restore, however briefly, your full appreciation for water, can instill a sense of respect and humility, along with a smile, for the lubricant of our lives.
The designers at WET think about water differently. They try to understand not just water’s qualities and power but the emotions those qualities evoke, and why. They treat water as a sculptural medium, but also as something truly natural, something wild, independent, ultimately untamable.
The modern world allows us to approach water in strictly utilitarian terms—it is literally at hand when we need it. Our domesticated water requires zero work, zero thought, and comes with zero risk (and zero magic).
As for water’s power, its wildness, we do get the occasional reminder of that—in a particularly dramatic downpour, or a hurricane, or when we see news reports of flooding. In fact, part of the appeal of water parks is that they unleash water’s wildness in ways that are thrilling and uncommon. Because unless we’re sightseeing somewhere like Niagara Falls, we’ve mostly insulated ourselves from water’s power.
What the people at WET understand about water is precisely what is absent from our whole approach—whether in suburban Las Vegas or urban Delhi. There isn’t really a word for exactly what’s missing in our relationship to water, but it’s an ingrained sense of cherishment, almost of reverence. Why wouldn’t we revere water, of all the things we could revere?
IN APRIL 2009, Senator Arlen Specter hosted a town hall at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Specter—since defeated in a Democratic primary for reelection—wasn’t just Pennsylvania’s senior senator in April 2009, he was the longest-serving U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history, elected to five terms starting in 1980.
The Muhlenberg appearance was utterly routine, and Specter was relaxed and candid. Students asked questions about the impact that the drilling for natural gas that is growing dramatically in Pennsylvania will have on the safety of water supplies in the state.
“Which side are you on, the natural gas companies, or the people who have to drink poisoned water?” one student asked.
“That’s certainly not a loaded question,” Specter said, to chuckles. “I have never taken a position in favor of drinking poisonous water, and I don’t intend to this afternoon.”
The question-and-answers moved in the direction of drinking water, and Specter said, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water.”
A few moments later the senator said, “On a very serious level, I want to have clean drinking water, and I’ve supported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But I think there is a natural inclination”—and here the senator shrugged his shoulders to say he understood the inclination—“for people to want to be a little extra-sure on the water. Where I can have access to a bottle of water, I’m going to use it.”5
Arlen Specter, the person, is entitled to any view he wants to hold. But for one of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate—a man who then sat on the judiciary and appropriations committees, and also on the Senate’s environment and public works committee—for Arlen Specter to say flatly, “I don’t like drinking tap water because I don’t trust tap water,” is astonishing, even outrageous.6 The United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world, a tap water system that is responsible in part for the extraordinary leaps in life span in the United States in the last hundred years.
It would be like Specter standing up before a group of college students, shrugging, and saying that he avoids bridges because he “doesn’t trust” the bridge building system in the United States, or that he always drives because he “doesn’t trust” U.S. air traffic controllers. If there’s something so dangerous about U.S. tap water that a senior U.S. senator takes pains to avoid it, he should tell us what the danger is, and he should be leading the fight, loudly, every day to rehabilitate the system. Otherwise, Specter’s comment is both corrosive and irresponsible. If he doesn’t drink the tap water, where does that leave the people he represents?
The absurdity is only magnified by Specter’s saying that because he wants to be “a little extra-sure,” he drinks bottled water when he can. Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. The chance that there’s something hinky about your drink of water is actually greater with a commercially packaged bottle of water than with a glass of tap water.7
At the opposite end of the silliness spectrum, Apple’s iPhone App Store offers an application called “Water Your Body,” which both recommends how much water you need each day and offers to keep track of your water consumption. “Water Your Body” even gives you “a daily and overall average grade on how well you are keeping up” on your water drinking. Because of “revolutionary research,” the app’s makers say, “we have learned just how critical it is, for your health, to maximize your individual water intake.”
Of course, “Water Your Body” is absolutely absurd. Leave aside for the moment the question of what kind of person can manage the intricacies of an iPhone but has trouble remembering to drink water. No one who is not recovering in a hospital needs to track her daily water consumption. There is no proven need to “maximize your individual water intake.” In a healthy person, you simply can’t.
The finely tuned chemistry of your body quickly turns “extra” water you drink into pee—and your body regards extra as 1 percent excess water. “Water Your Body” simply maximizes your time in the bathroom, and takes 99 cents from you. Your body already has an exquisite, built-in, water-tracking app: thirst.8
The senator and the iPhone app both trade on our water illiteracy. The cost of “Water Your Body” is just 99 cents, the cost of having leaders who don’t understand our tap water is much greater.
The world of water is changing dramatically, as we’ve seen. There is increasing talk from activists and NGOs, from companies like GE and Monsanto, and from the occasional forward-thinking elected official, of a “global water crisis.” We hear routinely, from those trying to rouse the world to action, and from nonprofit groups trying to help, that on this very day, more than 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and that before the calendar turns on another day, five thousand children will die because they lack clean water, or from an illness they got from tainted water.
And we hear that over the next forty years, the problem is going to get catastrophically worse: Between 2010 and 2050, the world will add 2.4 billion new people, equal to the populations of China and India combined.9
