Threats to Our Diminishing Water Supply

There is little doubt the world is facing one of its most serious crises when it comes to fresh water shortages.

Countries throughout the Middle East are being destabilized because of a lack of water, sparking civil wars in Syria and Yemen, providing a preview of what might happen here, if we can’t establish a workable water conservation program throughout the Americas.

“Water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences,” according to a 2009 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche in Yemen as water riots erupted across the country. Seche soon cabled again, stating that 14 of the country’s 16 aquifers had run dry.

In Syria, a devastating drought beginning in 2006 forced many farmers to abandon their fields and migrate to urban centers. There’s some evidence that the migration fueled the civil war there, in which 400,000 people have died, 1,800,000 have been injured. “You have a lot of angry, unemployed men helping to trigger a revolution,” says Aaron Wolf, a water management expert at Oregon State University, who frequently visits the Middle East.

Nestlé believes one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Compare Nestlé’s findings with the CIA Global Trends 2015, report, published in 2000. “By 2015 nearly half the world’s population—more than three billion people—will live in countries that are “water-stressed”—have less than 1,700 cubic meters of water per capita per year—mostly in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and northern China . . . as countries press against the limits of available water between now and 2015, the possibility of conflict will increase.” – at p.27

Water loss documented by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a pair of satellites operated by NASA and Germany’s aerospace center, “suggests water-related conflict could be brewing on the riverbank again. GRACE measured groundwater usage between 2003 and 2009 and found that the Tigris-Euphrates Basin—comprising Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran—is losing water faster than any other place in the world except northern India. During those six years, 117 million acre-feet of stored freshwater vanished from the region as a result of dwindling rainfall and poor water management policies. That’s equal to all the water in the Dead Sea.”

GRACE’s director, Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, calls the data “alarming.” According to NASA, “it will take about 11-trillion gallons of water – around 1.5 times the maximum volume of the largest U.S. reservoir – to recover from California’s continuing drought.”

These shortages have forced Governor Brown to issue a new Executive Order that aims to “Make Water Conservation a Way of Life in California.”

In the Governor’s press release, he points out that “while the severity of the drought has lessened in some parts of California after winter rains and snow, the current drought is not over. For the fifth consecutive year, dry conditions persist in many areas of the state, with limited drinking water supplies in some communities, diminished water for agricultural production and environmental habitats, and severely depleted groundwater basins.”

Current data indicates that “California droughts are expected to be more frequent and persistent, as warmer winter temperatures driven by climate change reduce water held in the Sierra Nevada snow pack and result in drier soil conditions.” Recognizing these new conditions, “the executive order directs permanent changes to use water more wisely and efficiently, and prepare for more frequent, persistent periods of limited supply.”

The executive order calls for “long-term improvements to local drought preparation across the state, and directs the State Water Resources Control Board to develop proposed emergency water restrictions for 2017 if the drought persists.” The full-text of the Executive Order is available online here.

Commercial Threat -- Bottling of Our Water

In North America, bottled water companies like Nestlé Waters, which controls more than 70 bottled water brands, have been able to “secure control over underground aquifers and streams by taking advantage of an archaic patchwork of regulatory regimes. One of these is called the ‘rule of capture.’ According to this law, ‘groundwater is the private property of the owner of the overlying land’ and they ‘have the right to capture the groundwater beneath their land.’ It is also known as the ‘law of the biggest pump’ because the landowner with the largest pumping capacity “can dry up the adjoining landowner’s well.”

In March of 2015, Ian James, wrote in the Desert Sun, “The U.S. Forest Service hasn't been keeping an eye on whether Nestlé’s taking of water is harming Strawberry Creek or the surrounding watersheds that wildlife depend on.” In fact, “Nestlé’s permit to transport water across the national forest expired in 1988,” and “[it] hasn't been reviewed since,” nor has the Forest Service “examined the ecological effects of drawing tens of millions of gallons each year from the springs.” The Forest Service is now considering giving Nestlé Waters a new five-year permit, despite the protests of the various California environmental groups.

With California deep in drought, “the U.S. Forest Service has not assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustains sensitive habitats in the national forest.” This “lack of oversight” is further compounded by California’s failed “regulatory system that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.”

In the meantime, the state has imposed strict water rationing on us, the residents of the state, while apparently ignoring the battle occurring over our groundwater in the San Bernardino National Forest. Nestlé Waters—the largest bottler of water in the world—is drawing millions of gallons of water a year from the San Bernardino National Forest, and they are not alone. There are a half-dozen or more bottling companies up and down the state that are taking OUR water. Will Governor Brown’s Executive Order apply to Nestlé Waters and the other bottlers, as well?

Nestlé claims to be a good neighbor, but a search of their relationships with various states where they operate, indicates that they are far from being a good neighbor. During extended periods of lower precipitation and aquifer recharges, Nestlé continues to pump at higher rates.

Nestlé sees water as a commodity, not a human right, and it opposes the United Nations declaration that “All peoples, whatever their stages of development and social and economic conditions, have the right to have access to drinking water in quantities and of a quality equal to their basic need.” The UN has reaffirmed this principle many times in the subsequent decades.

Nestlé claims to be a good neighbor company to our area, yet it continues to pump at high rates during periods of lower precipitation and recharge. Unfortunately, throughout the order there is no specific mention of water lost through the bottling of OUR water, for resale in and outside the state of California, nor is there any mention of the water lost due to our growing reliance on unconventional well stimulation technologies known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), hi-rate gravel packing, and acidizing, which poses a significant threat to our food and water supply.

Commercial Threats -- Hydraulic Fracturing and injection Wells

Fracking consumes literally billions of gallons of OUR water, ignoring the fact that we are in an extended "severe" to "exceptional" drought. Water, which then becomes toxic, and must be safely disposed of.

Abrahm Lustgartenm writing in the June 21, 2012 issue of ProPublica, states that “[o]ver the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.”

The most common method of disposal is to inject the toxic water deep into the ground. However, this procedure is proving to be quite dangerous. In Oklahoma, annual earthquakes went from two to more than 900.

Here in California, NBC reported that “State officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of wastewater into underground aquifers that had been used for drinking water or irrigation. The aquifers were supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, protected by the EPA,” but once again the state failed the good people of California. According to NBC, the “state admits that in nine wells, oil and gas companies were allowed to dump toxic waste water into protected aquifers that could have been used by people to drink or irrigate.”

The question is, “were these simply oversight errors, or a case of those responsible being bribed to look the other way?”

CA Frack Facts reports that “California is the second most seismically active state in the United States, after Alaska. The state contains over 15,000 fault lines, including the San Andreas Fault, which stretches for 810 miles and has been responsible for earthquakes up to 7.9 in magnitude.

In general, regulations on wastewater disposal have been primarily concerned with protecting drinking water, not with mitigating the potential for seismic activity.”

Furthermore, “because of insufficient seismic monitoring data, geologists do not know how close wastewater injection or fracking can occur to an existing fault without presenting a hazard, and there is currently no regulation about the distance wells must be from a fault line in California.”

William Ellsworth, reported in the 12 July 2013 issue of Science, a peer-reviewed journal, that “the injection of large volumes of water into the earth at high pressures – such as in hydraulic fracking – has been directly linked to inducing seismic events.” It’s estimated that half of all 4.5 magnitude or above earthquakes in the past decade may have been induced by injection of water into the earth.”

There are solutions, but the question facing us is “do we have the political will to implement the solutions.” There is much diversity in our culture, but in that diversity, there is strength and hope. We can become an unstoppable force for change and the common good if we put our irrational differences aside and unite as one. One thing is clear, “without safe drinking water, we will all parish from the face of the Earth.”