The Water Transition: A Conversation with Author Peter Gleick

Brett Walton

Welcome to Speaking of Water, an occasional podcast that explores big topics in the world of water. I’m Brett Walton, a reporter for Circle of Blue. You’ve probably heard about the energy transition, but what about the water transition? That’s a key theme in a new book called The Three Ages of Water. The author is the scientist Peter Gleick, who joins me today. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Gleick

Thanks for having me on, Brett.

Brett Walton

I’ll start with the disclosure that Peter is a Circle of Blue board member, but those duties and his other professional activities didn’t prevent him from writing what is quite a fabulous book Three Ages of Water. There’s a lot in this book. It’s a history and it’s a blueprint. It starts with the Big Bang, continues through the ages and ends with a vision for the future. A key theme, like I said, is transition, just as the energy sector needs to get away from fossil fuels, the water sector, as Peter explains in his book, needs to move away from the current model into something that is more sustainable for the coming centuries. You convey this, Peter, in a message describing water in three ages. So I’m wondering if you can start by just giving us an overview of these ages of water and how you conceive of them?

Peter Gleick

Yeah, sure. So I think the first age of water, I describe the first age of water, as really the period of time from, as you said at the beginning, from the Big Bang when the very first molecules of hydrogen and then oxygen and ultimately water itself were created through the formation of our own solar system and the distribution of water not just on Earth, but actually on almost every planet that we can see in the solar system, through the evolution of humanity, which I argue was an evolution driven in part by the availability of water, the changes in climate and ultimately the ability of Homo sapiens, our own species, to manage and manipulate the hydrologic cycle to our benefit. The first age includes the first empires, the invention of intentional agriculture, the first efforts to build dams, to control water or aqueducts, to bring water from distant watersheds, and the first institutions around water and the first water wars. So the first efforts of humanity to manipulate the hydrologic cycle.

The second age of water, which I describe as our age, had to come about when it was no longer enough just to take water where we found it and deposit our wastes wherever we were. We really had to build the science and the technology and the institutions to manage water for a much bigger world, for a larger population, for growing economies. And the second age of water is the Islamic golden age and the cultural revolutions of the Renaissance. And the first science that told us what water was and how water-related diseases were created and formed and how they were solved. And the first technologies to really bring the modern society into being: the first technologies to treat water to drinking water standards, the first big dams to produce hydroelectricity and aqueducts to move water, not hundreds or tens of kilometers long, but thousands of kilometers long. Now, this is really our age, and the second age of water is coming to an end now, I argue. As you note in the introduction, I think we’re in a transition. We got all the benefits of the second age of water, but it also brought bad things. It brought liabilities and the water crises that we see around the world today, the water poverty and climate change and conflicts over water. And that leads to my call for what I think of and hope will be a sustainable, positive future third age of water, which I describe in the last third of the book.

Brett Walton

Yeah, we’ll get to some of those transitions and the blueprint that you present here in a bit. But as I was reading the book, I was trying to, you know, encapsulate these ages in a word or two. And I think you use some of these too, in the book. But the first age of water I described as survival and some basic understanding. And then the second age we’re in now is more of control and one of applying scientific advancements to provide some level of certainty to our environment. Does that seem like a fair reading of these ages?

Peter Gleick

I do. I think that that’s very good. I probably should have been much more pithy, but just, you know, the first age was the simplest one and the creation of the first human civilizations and empires and the second age is really our age of manipulation and control, as you put it, which is unfortunately, the unintended consequences, the bad parts that are now the water crisis we’re dealing with.

Brett Walton

And in reading, I was reminded of a William Gibson quote while reading the book and you mentioned this several places within the text, too. William Gibson is a speculative fiction author. He said the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. I’m wondering if you think or think it’s accurate to say that these three ages of water exist simultaneously today just in different areas and in different formats?

Peter Gleick

Well, it’s absolutely true that part of the nature of the water challenges we face is a result of the fact that water, the water on Earth, which is the same water that’s been here for billions of years, is badly distributed in space and time. Water poverty is the difference between the haves and the have nots and the people who have not just access to water, but the technology to treat and clean and deliver water or access to hydropower as a relatively clean source of energy. Yes, there are still pockets on the planet where we’re struggling with massive amounts of water poverty, where ecosystems are really being devastated by the choices we’ve made and the technologies we’ve applied, blindly in some cases. And part of the third age of water, the ultimate, more positive future that I envision, addresses those inequalities as a key part of moving forward.

Brett Walton

And moving into that third age of water, as you described, what are the problems of the second age of water that need to be addressed?

Peter Gleick

Well, there are lots of them, of course. And of course, Circle of Blue has tackled many of these over the years. Probably the most significant is what I describe as water poverty. That is the failure to provide safe water and sanitation to everyone on the planet. Again, we know how to do this. There is no magical new technology that needs to be invented. There’s plenty of money to solve this problem. But we have failed for billions of people around the world to provide what most of us are fortunate enough to take for granted. That is, access to inexpensive, cheap, safe, clean drinking water and adequate sanitation. And that water poverty is associated with water-related diseases that, again, we figured out how to solve in the second age of water. We learned the causes of cholera and dysentery and typhoid and malaria and guinea worm. We know how to prevent and cure those diseases. But water poverty means we’ve failed to do so.

Another crisis of the second age is violent conflicts over water, again, partly associated with the unequal distribution of water or the unequal distribution of access and control of water. One of the things I’ve done for many years at the Pacific Institute is we maintain the water conflict chronology, which describes water conflicts where water has been a weapon or a trigger or a casualty of conflicts, going all the way back to that first water conflict in the first age of water in ancient Sumerian and ancient Mesopotamia. But unfortunately, conflicts over water are increasing in number and severity, as we saw in the Middle East during the Syria Iraq conflict. And as we’re seeing now in Ukraine. And of course, climate change, a terrible crisis facing the entire planet, which is as much a water problem as it is any other kind of a problem. And climate change is real and it’s happening and it’s already affecting our water resources. These are some of the crises that affect human health, that affect ecosystem health that I think mark, really the end of the second age of water and the need for this new transition.

Brett Walton

Now, I’ll get to the transition question, the blueprint here in a second. But one more question that looks back historically. This is a book with big themes and historical sweep, conflict and violence and groundwater depletion and scientific advances, but it’s also populated by a lot of fascinating characters, little vignettes of people who were influenced by or had some influence on water in some form throughout history. Some of these are well-known people, especially to water folks like John Snow, who did some modern epidemiology in London to pinpoint cholera, and some are largely unknown. I’m wondering, in researching and writing the book, if any of these stories or these people really stood out to you, and if there’s someone that made you say, ‘Wow, this person should be better known for contributions connected to water?’

Peter Gleick

Well, the fun part of writing this book was researching all of the history and digging into the stories, some of which I knew and some of which I had hints of. And the John Snow story is a wonderful one about really the ability to figure out what the cause of cholera was in England in the 1850s. And that led to a whole new set of technologies that permitted us to treat water, to clean water, to address water related diseases. And maybe one of the characters that most people haven’t heard of is another John, a guy named John Leal, who in the early 1900s in Jersey City on the East Coast in New Jersey, was also faced with a terrible outbreak of water-related diseases in the city, in Jersey City. And he was convinced that it was because of contaminated water. And he then pushed to develop what ultimately became the first version of a modern water treatment plant that treated the water supply for Jersey City with chlorine, ending the outbreak of typhoid and setting the stage for what in a very short period of time led to almost every major city in the United States to replicate that design of a water treatment plant. And basically the modern water treatment plants that we have today are based on this innovation that John Leal did in basically 1909 that now provides safe water, clean water for almost every urban population in the United States. And it led to almost the disappearance of cholera and typhoid and dysentery in the United States, huge advances in public health. And he was just one smart public health engineer in New Jersey.

Brett Walton

Right. That connection between water and public health is so clear and made quite evident by an eye-opening chart that’s in the book about the death rate per 100,000 people before and after chlorination was introduced to public water supplies. And it just plummets downward to near zero. And a lot of that is attributed to, you know, better stewardship of our water and better public health.

Peter Gleick

Yeah, that’s right. At the time, I think these water-related diseases around 1900 were absolutely in the top few of the killers of Americans. And you look at the death rates and the causes of death, those water-related diseases were on the top. And after we implemented smart water and sanitation systems, in part because of the insight of John Snow and then John Leal, those water related diseases, they’re not in the top hundred now of causes of deaths in the United States. And we could wipe them out worldwide if we just addressed water poverty more clearly and more aggressively.

Brett Walton

So I guess this is the point now where we talk about the transition and how that vision of the future can come about. There’s lots of transition components that you write about changes in policy and law, changes in worldview, changes in the type of technology that we use. So what are the steps you see as leading into this third age of water?

Peter Gleick

Well, maybe the key point to start with is that I really believe that a positive, sustainable third age water is going to happen. I’m an optimist. And, you know, some people say an optimist is just a badly informed pessimist. But I don’t believe that. I look around and I see successful, innovative strategies already being tested, being applied around the world that solve the problems we face around water, and that, if scaled up, can move to this positive third age of water. And they include improving the efficiency with which we use water, doing more of what we want with less water, smarter toilets and dishwashers and washing machines and better irrigation systems that grow more food with less water. And again, we see this happening all over the world where we’re using less and less water to do more and more. And that’s a key point.

Another one is rethinking supply. You know, in the past, in the second age of water, water supply meant taking more water out of the environment, draining our rivers, overpumping our aquifers. But now there is new thinking about supply of water being highly treated wastewater that we already collect and treat to a very high standard, often, but then throw away, and Singapore and Israel and California and other places around the world are already moving to use highly treated wastewater as a reliable, drought proof, high quality source of supply. Ultimately, desalination can be a very reliable source of supply too, and 97 percent of the water on the planet is salt water. It’s still very expensive, but it does provide a new option that doesn’t require draining our rivers and overpumping our aquifers.

Another strategy is better institutions to manage water. You know, our institutions were designed 150 years ago. They ought to be designed for modern times. They ought to integrate energy and food and climate together instead of treating those issues as separate. They’re not separate. And institutions that manage them together are going to be much more efficient and much more sustainable in the long run. A smarter economics is important, you know, pricing water properly, but also acknowledging the human right to water. Our strategies for solving the problem of water, poverty, all of these things together. There’s no silver bullet, but all of these things together can help us move forward to this positive vision.

Brett Walton

It’s a big menu, and I want to end here on an implementation question, kind of a conceptual question, but I’ll read here a passage from the preface to the book.

You write, quote, “Humanity has a decision to make. We can become another extinct species, a blink in time in the natural history of the earth. Or we can recognize that water is so vital to our continued existence that we must find a new way to live with it, manage it, and protect it. A bad future is possible. It’s just not the future we would choose if we had a choice. The good news is that we have that choice. We can envision a positive future, a path to get there, and we can take the steps along that path.” So this is the vision that you’ve laid out here, the changes along this water transition. But I’m wondering how you think about the “we” in these sentences, and it comes up repeatedly through the book, the things that “we know” and “we can do,” but this gets to the political part of it. And so why these things haven’t been done is, how do you think about “we” and, you know, putting these things into practice?

Peter Gleick

Yeah, that’s absolutely a key point. As I try to say over and over in the book, we don’t need to invent any new technology. It’s not as though we can’t afford economically to make this transition to solve these water problems. In fact, I would argue we can’t afford not to solve them. And ultimately, it’s up to “we,” it’s up to us. And the “us” is everybody. There are things that we can do as individuals to change the way we use water, to change the technologies we have and the equipment in our homes, and the way we grow our gardens that can affect how much water is required to do the things we want to do. And we can run for school boards, for water boards, and for local governments to raise the issue of water. The truth is people really care about water. And the more that we pay attention to that, the more likely we are to push these transitions forward.

But there’s also a role for corporations and there’s a role for governments at all levels to address these questions. And just as there’s no magic technology, there’s no single set of individual organizations or communities that are responsible for solving the water problem. It’s a collective problem, and solving the water challenge and moving in the transition to a third age of water is going to require collective action on the part of all of us.

Brett Walton

And it’s something that we will be watching. Peter, thanks for a great conversation.

Peter Gleick

Thank you very much, Brett. It’s great to talk to you. I’ve been speaking with Peter Gleick, author of The Three Ages of Water, which is in print now. For Circle of Blue, I’m Brett Walton. You can listen to more Speaking of Water podcasts at circleofblue.org.