Charity: Water always works with local partners. The community is charged with looking after the well, while the organization contributes to a fund every month so there is money to pay for parts and repairs when the well breaks down. Responsibility stays local.
This is not just a story of clever marketing. Harrison is literally trying to reinvent how charities operate for his generation. From his perspective, it all starts with the brand: “Design is so important to me. Just because you’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean you have to have bad design.” Everything about Charity: Water has a clean, sharp look about it. It has a fashion sense, from the black labels on the bottled water to the organization’s website. People magazine had a feature on him in its article “Super Heroes,” and the teaser headline read, “Think all the Good Ones Are Taken? Meet Three Hot Humanitarians.”
But it goes beyond image: “Charities were so bad at proving what they did.” Harrison found that his friends wanted to donate but were cynical about their money going to administrative costs or corrupt locals. He decided to show that every penny went to help people: “Every project we funded had to have a GPS coordinate. We partnered with Google Earth so people can see exactly where their well is.” He posted videos of the wells actually being built. “Our plan is to go back in five years to audit every water point.” Donors can track their donations on another continent. Harrison is committed to full transparency in all aspects of operation. The group’s audit reports and tax forms for every year are easily downloadable from the website.
Harrison runs a lean operation and separately solicits donations to cover administrative costs and overhead—that way every dollar Charity: Water raises from the public goes directly to projects. Harrison understands that guilt doesn’t sell nearly as well as the satisfaction in making a difference to other people’s lives.
“I would have called myself a very noncreative person during the decade of nightlife. I mean, we just did the same thing over and over again, and it was banal and just boring. With water, I mean, oh, my gosh, I have twenty years of ideas. It’s such an exciting space. You can tell people stories. If your goal is trying to get people to understand what you’re seeing, I mean, I walk between two worlds. I’m in remote villages in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and then I’m at fancy dinners hanging out with millionaires. And constantly going through my mind is, how do I get the millionaire to understand what the woman just said? I mean, how do I get him to understand about leeches in the water? That’s just so foreign.”
Surrounded by students after the talk, he is still brainstorming. One student talks about a creative engineer she knows. He picks up a plastic jerry jug and starts showing her how they need a new design so that straps can be put on to carry it more easily. “Maybe it can curve this way,” he wonders aloud.
Harrison is a visionary, but he’s realistic, as well. Working with local partners, Charity: Water claims to have provided clean water for two million people in its first five years of operation. But, Harrison readily acknowledges, the challenge of providing safe drinking water in much of the developing world remains a daunting challenge. “This only will have solved one-tenth of 1 percent of the problem.”
Despite the scale of the challenge, though, there is real progress on the ground. The UN currently estimates that most regions of the world will meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the population without safe drinking water by 2015. Increased adoption of POU strategies holds out great hope. And if anyone can make a difference in addressing this intractable problem, you get the feeling Scott Harrison will lead the way.
DOES DOWSING WORK?
Where surface sources for water are not available, locating groundwater is as important for a wealthy vineyard in California’s Napa Valley as for a poor village in rural Botswana. Digging a well requires a serious commitment of time and labor, so you want to hit water the first time. Today, those seeking to dig a well can rely on sophisticated technologies ranging from low-frequency sensors and ground penetrating radar to geophysical tomographs. Prior to the advent of advanced geological sensing technologies, however, how did people know where to dig when water may (or may not) be ten feet or even lower beneath the ground?
One of the oldest techniques that persists through today is known as dowsing, divining, or water-witching. Depending on the technique, a dowser holds a forked stick (preferably willow or hazel, one fork in each hand), a pendulum, or L-and Y-shaped rods in front, parallel to the ground. He then walks around searching for the presence of water underneath him. When the stick dips sharply, the pendulum shifts position, or the rods cross one another, and the dowser knows he is over water.
Dowsing has also been used to search for mineral deposits at least since 16th century Germany and likely earlier. A founder of the American Society of Dowsing describes the technique as “the exercise of a human faculty, which allows one to obtain information in a manner beyond the scope and power of the standard human physical senses of sight, sound, touch, etc.”
Not surprisingly, skeptics have long challenged whether there are any modes of detection “beyond the scope and power of the standard human physical senses of sight, sound, touch, etc.” One could imagine, for example, that a dowser is unconsciously aware of subtle physical cues in the landscape suggesting groundwater. Another cause may be what psychologists call the “Ideomotor Effect,” unconscious motion that is consistent with the person’s expectations.
While many adherents swear to dowsing’s effectiveness, scientific studies have yet to confirm this. In a comprehensive and clever experiment in Germany, researchers buried a plastic pipe a foot and a half below the ground. With the flick of a switch they could turn on the flow of water through the pipe. Dowsers were shown the location of the pipes and asked to determine whether water was flowing. Thirty dowsers from Germany, Denmark, Austria and France volunteered to participate. For the first ten tests, they were told the water was flowing and asked to confirm this. The control was important because it provided a baseline and ensured there were no “anomalies” in the landscape that might disrupt the dowsers’ detection ability. All the dowsers agreed that water was, in fact, both present and flowing. This was followed by three days of tests when the water flow was turned on and off based on a random pattern. The dowsers’ predictions matched what would be expected by pure chance. Other studies have reached similar results.
As the famed skeptic, James Randi, observed, “It is perhaps significant that the German word for the dowsing rod is Wünschelrute, which translates as ‘wishing stick.’”
8
Finding Water for the Twenty-first Century
A dead Prime Minister.
A country in turmoil.
A battle for Canada’s most precious resource—water.
On the eve of testy discussions with the U.S. Secretary of State, Prime Minister Matthew McLaughlin is killed in an accident. His son, Tom McLaughlin, returns to Canada to attend his father’s funeral where he delivers a eulogy that stirs the public and propels him into politics and ultimately the Prime Minister’s office. The investigation into his father’s death, however, reveals that it was no accident, raising the possibility of assassination. The trail of evidence triggers a series of events that uncovers a shocking plot to sell one of Canada’s most valuable resources—water.
THUS READ THE PUBLICITY MATERIALS HYPING H2O, one of the top dramas on Canadian television in 2004. It leaves out the most exciting part, where American troops invade Canada to plunder their water supply. The two-part miniseries, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was nominated for a series of awards and won a Golden Nymph for Best Actor. A son succeeding his father as prime minister seems plausible enough, but would anyone really care enough about Canada’s water to assassinate its head of state? Would the United States really invade its neighbor to the north for water? From the high ratings, the Canadian public seemed to think so, and with some justification. At the time, the country was embroiled in a contentious national debate over pl
ans to sell and ship off water from the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes come by the name honestly. They are the largest bodies of freshwater on the planet, comprising about 20 percent of the total accessible water (most freshwater is locked in glaciers and icebergs, but more on that later). Given so much water for the taking, there has been a series of proposals over the past fifty years to transport water from the Great Lakes to Texas, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other water-scarce regions. None of these previous proposals have gone very far, though, either because of the sheer costs involved or political opposition. None have gotten very much public attention, either.
That all changed in 1998 with a permit application by a company called the Nova Group to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Nova requested a five-year permit to fill up to six hundred million liters of water from Lake Superior in tankers. These ships would then transport the water to Asian markets where freshwater is scarce. The business concept seemed a clever way to satisfy the increasing global demand for clean drinking water. In concept, it was little different than shipping grain from Alberta, timber from British Columbia, or oil from the tar sands of Athabasca—moving a scarce commodity from its point of origin in Canada to a foreign market.
While six hundred million liters sounds like a lot of water, keep in mind that Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, holds roughly twelve thousand cubic kilometers of water. Nova’s permit allowed the company to withdraw one five-hundred-millionth of the lake’s volume. That’s pretty small by any measure. The ministry granted the permit with little fanfare or concern. When the deal became public, officials were in for a surprise.
The public reaction was swift and harsh on both sides of the border. Opposition arose primarily over the treatment of water as a commodity. Maude Barlow, the Canadian campaigner for a human right to water and chair of the Council of Canadians, warned that Canada would lose control of its resources: “Once the tap is turned on, we can’t turn it off.” While there are no cases on point, she cautioned that international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) would leave Canada powerless to restrict bulk water exports if water were viewed as a commodity under trade law.
Part of the opposition to bulk transfers of Great Lakes water has been proprietary on both sides of the border—it’s ours and you’re not going to get any. Having seen too many of their jobs, population, and prosperity move South and West, America’s Rust Belt states were not feeling generous, either. As the governor of Illinois, Jim Thompson, declared, “There has been no effort by Sun Belters to give up their climate or by California to give up its redwoods. That’s all right. We don’t want that. But fair is fair, and Great Lakes water is not available for export.” Highway billboards put up by Citizens for Michigan’s Future, a nonprofit group formed to oppose diversions, put it simply. Showing caricatures of a Texas cowboy, a California surfer, and a Utah skier drinking with straws from a trough in the shape of the Great Lakes, the billboard’s message read, “Back off Suckers. Water Diversion … The Last Straw.” North of the border, some of the opposition, and certainly the driving force behind the television series H2O, was latent anti-Americanism.
Concerns were also raised over the environmental impacts by continuous withdrawal from lakes that had been formed by glacier and slowly replenished. Lake Superior’s level has fallen to the lowest levels since measurements were first taken in 1918. Other opponents claimed that the use of Great Lakes water was unworthy. As one critic wrote, “California suburbs also use taxpayer-subsidized water to create gardens that would be the envy of gardeners in rain-soaked England—while living in an area that receives forty centimeters of rain a year. … Canada has no interest in feeding this wasteful and inappropriate consumption of water.” Another argued that “water shipped halfway around the world will only be affordable to the privileged and will deepen inequities between rich and poor. International trade in bulk water will allow elites to assure the quality of their own drinking water supplies, while permitting them to ignore the pollution of their local waters and the waste of their water management systems.”
While overwhelming, opposition to bulk transfers was not unanimous. Supporters pointed out that freshwater was a valuable commodity and Canada should take advantage of its natural good luck just as it had with timber, oil, and other resources. And echoing the plot of the H2O television series, the cover story in the popular magazine Maclean’s argued Canada should “sell them our water before they take it.”
There was also a good deal of hypocrisy about the sanctity of Great Lakes water at play, though few wanted to hear about it. The Nova Group received a permit to withdraw six hundred million liters over five years. Consider, however, that Toronto withdraws 1.7 billion liters every day from Lake Ontario for its use. Chicago withdraws even more from Lake Michigan, more than two billion gallons of water a day, and transfers it into a shipping channel that flows into the Mississippi River. Allegedly this would fill a tanker every two hours. Nor does this include the billions of liters that are diverted from the lake for agricultural use. In the public drama playing out in the media, the Nova Group was the bad guy, threatening the future of the lakes. Local use—orders of magnitude greater and happening right now by cities and farmers bordering the Great Lakes—was scarcely mentioned. As Maclean’s columnist Steve Maich wrote, “If it’s okay to use water to irrigate crops that are then shipped across national borders; if it’s okay to bottle millions of litres a year for sale in corner stores around the world; if it’s okay to divert water to make steel or refine oil that is then shipped across national borders, then why not the water itself?”
The Nova Group was as surprised as anyone. This was no sophisticated multinational. The company shared an office with an accounting firm above a hairdresser. Trying to respond to the media and political onslaught, the company issued an apologetic PR statement explaining that “what started to be a simple idea to help Third World Asian countries in need of freshwater and in turn possibly help the economic climate in northern Ontario has turned into an international incident. That was not our intention.” Not surprisingly, the Nova Group never shipped any water.
Just as we saw with the battle over Nestlé’s bottling plans in McCloud, commercialization of drinking water provokes strong reactions. The furor over the very idea of shipping a negligible amount of water from the Great Lakes laid bare a tender and angry range of concerns—from fear of privatization of water and environmental harm to resentment over other regions squandering their treasured local water. It catalyzed a broad public debate on both sides of the border over whether Great Lakes water should be exported to thirsty markets at all.
Responding to the public’s opposition, governors of the eight Great Lakes states, from New York across to Minnesota, joined with the premiers of Ontario and Quebec to announce a ban on large-scale water transfers. Legislation passed by Congress now permits the governor of any Great Lake state to veto a water diversion for use outside of the basin. Canadian law similarly prohibits water diversions outside of the boundary water basins. Amendments to the international Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact reinforced these national laws. The net result makes it virtually impossible for a business to ship large amounts of Great Lakes water outside of the watershed. The legal obstacles created to block transfers, however, include an interesting loophole. There is no restriction on the transport of water in containers of twenty liters (5.7 gallons) or less for human consumption. Either politicians or lobbyists, or likely both, were unwilling to shut down the potential bottled water market for Great Lakes water. The danger of depleting the Great Lakes one bottle at a time seems not to have been a concern.
Patricia Mulroy, the general manager for the Las Vegas Valley Water District and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, has earned an international reputation for the innovative and tough water conservation measures she has put in place for one of the fas
test-growing and most arid cities in the United States. She has little patience for the Great Lakes saga. “We take gold, we take oil, we take uranium, we take natural gas from Texas to the rest of the country. We move oil from Alaska to Mexico. But they say, ‘I will not give you one drop of water!’ … They’ve got 14 percent of the population of the United States, and 20 percent of the freshwater in the world—and no one can use it but them? ‘I might not need it. But I’m not sharing it!’ When did it become their water anyway? It’s nuts!” Or maybe not. Mulroy, who has seen more than her share of political grandstanding, describes the core problem bluntly: “Nothing makes better cheap politics than water.”
AS THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS HAVE MADE CLEAR, MANY PARTS OF THE world are getting thirsty. Access to reliable, clean drinking water is no longer a given in some places and has never been an easy option in others, where assuring water to drink remains a daily challenge. Even for those with currently adequate supplies, access to safe drinking water will only become more difficult as climate change increases the incidence of droughts, pollution despoils existing supplies, and population growth increases demand. These regions, encompassing most of the global population, will need to increase their supplies of safe drinking water. To call this a critical challenge to humanity’s future is no exaggeration.
In some respects, the challenge is quite straightforward. There is no “new water” to create. Our planet’s atmosphere traps our moisture, so the water we can draw from is fixed. It’s the same water that the dinosaurs drank, the same as the primordial soup that served as the incubator for the emergence of life on earth. Given that, there are two basic strategies to provide more drinking water. The first is to move it from water-rich to water-scarce regions. Think tankers full of Great Lakes water plowing the seas toward the Middle East or icebergs towed from the poles. The second strategy relies on generating new supplies of water locally. Think desalination plants or so-called “toilet-to-tap” efforts—capturing, treating, and distributing sewage water.
Drinking Water Page 23