A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 38

38th of a Series

“Water is the true wealth in a dry land . . . .[I]f you control the water, you control the land. . . .”

- Wallace Stegner

Property rights and the public interest

In 2022, in the midst of California’s three-year drought, the Merced River went dry. The river, which arises in Yosemite National Park and flows through the Central Valley, is essential to the valley’s farmers who produce over half the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

Subsequent reporting by The New York Times focused my attention on three astonishing facts: (1) the farmers who depend on the river’s water were the very people who drained it; (2) the river had been dry for four months before the state’s water regulators learned about it; (3) nobody broke any laws.

The farmers were exercising their legal rights, some of which go back more than a century, to their shares of the water. Consequently, during the drought the total number of allocated shares remained unchanged; but the total amount of water did not, and so the river went dry.

In the United States, nobody owns the water in rivers, streams, and lakes. These “surface waters,” belong to the people collectively.* But individual landowners and corporations can acquire the right to “manage, divert, use, or sell the water.” I don’t know about you, but the right to sell something you don’t own seems a bit sketchy to me. The only comparable thing that comes to my mind is the stock market, where you can buy and sell shares and options you don’t own. But on Wall Street, they are not considered a public good. Somebody owns them. Otherwise, it’s called a Ponzi scheme.

As with the stock market, beliefs about natural resources are often as important as the underlying fundamentals. So as long as people believe there is plenty of water, few will worry too much about its allocation. But beware when the rains stop, and the people keep coming, and the demand for water exceeds its supply. 

In this country, there are basically two systems for allocating surface waters:

1. Riparian rights, under which landowners abutting a stream, river, or lake have the right to take its water for their own use.

2. Prior appropriation, under which the first to use and claim the water establishes a right in perpetuity (“first in time, first in right”).

Generally, the East, where water has historically been plentiful, operates under the riparian-rights doctrine, while in the drier West, prior appropriation dominates. No permit is required for the former, and the landowner’s rights are not contingent on “using” the water. Under the rules of prior appropriation, however, permits are generally required, and permit holders can lose their right if they fail to “use” the water. “The only requirement for holding on to this privileged status [is] to keep putting the water to work. In short, use it or lose it.”

And that’s exactly what happened to the Merced River.

*Unlike surface water, individual landowners, corporations, or the public at large can own groundwater, including that which has been stored for millennia in deep aquifers, although state laws generally determine its allocation. Needless to say, the matter of water rights is a tricky business.

For a succinct summary of the issue, see “Whose Water Is It Anyway? Comparing the Water Rights Frameworks of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida,” by M. D. Smolen, Aaron Mittelstet, and Bekki Harjo.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 37

37th of a series

Five Years Later: Three Weeks That Changed Their Lives

“He recognized something essential about moving water, which is not merely a conveyance but an equalizer – an urbanizing force on the prairie and a rural belt in the city.”

- Ben McGrath, Riverman: An American Odyssey

On July 7th, 2007, 12 high-school students set off from Belleayre Ski Resort in the Catskill Mountains on the journey of a lifetime. Three weeks later, exhausted, exhilarated, and malodorous, they walked into New York City’s Central Park to the applause of families, city officials, and startled onlookers.

They had hiked and paddled over 200 miles, through wooded wilderness, open water, and paved suburb, following the route of the city’s water from its sources in the Catskill Mountains to the reservoir in the center of Manhattan, from Mountaintop to Tap.

Five years later, we set out to find them and to ask them what impact the trek had had on their lives.

TREKKERS

Asha Armstrong, New York Harbor School

Asha in 2007

I am currently a senior enrolled in the semester-by-the-sea program at Stony Brook Southampton. I am also an environmental studies major with a marine science minor. I am engulfed in trek memories. The trek perked my interest in environmental studies. Before the trek, my goal in life was to become an oceanographer; I have changed my focus to environmental science with a focus on marine science. In addition, I would like to pursue a career in environmental education, primarily with youth, instead of oceanography.

Leydi Basilio, New York Harbor School

Leydi in 2007

I recently graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a bachelor’s in communications. The trek changed my perspective about NYC water completely. So many families lost everything for us to have water, and I think that, out of respect, the least we can do is conserve that precious resource before it disappears. I am thinking about going into education now, and for life after City Year, I will be applying to NYC Teaching Fellows and Teach for America.

Natalie Bloomfield, New York Harbor School

Natalie in 2007

I am currently a junior at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. My most memorable moment on the trek was the view of the valley from the top of Slide Mountain. It was breathtaking. I will also never forget Margaret Smith Dolan and the horrors she lived through as a child, as her home and those of other members of the Neversink Valley were taken by eminent domain to create a reservoir to supply NYC with clean drinking water. After five years, I still remember the early morning hikes and Asha’s huge heart! Every morning she started us off with a song to lift our spirits. Before this trek, I never once questioned where the water I drink came from; but after learning what so many people gave up in order for New Yorkers to have clean drinking water, I am so conscious of preserving water.

Robert Loibl, Sidney High School

Rob in 2007

Sometimes I catch myself thinking back and wondering, “Did I really do all that?” It’s just surreal. The trip definitely helped shape my opinions about the connection between both major parts of New York state. It also solidified my views on the environment and its conservation. One recommendation I would give to anyone reading this is to go out and experience where you live. I lived in upstate New York for most of my life, but I didn’t really experience it until I went to the Catskills to hike the mountains and to the Hudson to row down the river. . . .

Marissa Morton, Sidney High School

Marissa in 2007

My favorite memory was when we sat in the middle of the forest by ourselves, with no clocks or cell phones, and were asked to reflect on how we felt. I remember feeling so relaxed, and I knew right then that I was where I wanted to be. The thing that stands out the most, after five years, is the friendship I built with Leydi. It is amazing that two people who grew up in completely opposite environments can have so much in common. I will always carry a special bond with my fellow trekkers. The trek honestly changed my life. I still tell stories about when I got home and went to the doctor, both my feet were broken from the impact of walking on pavement and about how we got stuck in the pouring rain rowing down the Hudson, and I brag about how we were able to walk down into the old aqueducts.

Sarah Pate, Sidney High School

Sarah in 2007

I am currently studying psychology and neuroscience at SUNY Albany, working on my undergraduate thesis in psychology to graduate with honors. Quiet times hiking or resting at night caused me to notice the little things — to notice what the world has besides shopping malls and highways paved through the forests.

Sarah Place, Sidney High School

Sarah in 2007

I am currently living in New Jersey and am almost finished with my B.S. in psychology. I remember most vividly hiking through the mountains in both cold misty rain and dreaded heat, having our tent flooded by a passing rainstorm while we slept, sailing down the Hudson feeling so incredible and free, staying the night by a shipyard and listening to the students at West Point chant from the other side of the river, making the most ridiculous concoctions for dinner and actually liking it, walking down abandoned train tracks, singing folk songs with Molly Mason and Jay Ungar, staying in the basement of a giant old house in the Bronx and swearing it was haunted, and finally arriving in Central Park where all our families and friends were waiting to see us. I can say with confidence that the trek changed my life. It taught me so much — from perseverance to teamwork to not taking myself too seriously. Now I have more courage to challenge myself and my limits, and if I ever have doubt, I many times find myself saying in my mind, “Hey, I climbed three mountains and rowed 40 miles; I can do this.”

Jeriel Stafford, New York Harbor School

Jeriel in 2007

Right now, I am in my senior year of college, pursuing a double major in applied math and statistics and economics. What stands out to me the most was that I got to experience a whole different world from what I was used to. Coming from the island of Grenada to living in the city of New York to living in the woods, all are different worlds, and I got to experience them all.

Trek Partners and Organizers: Stroud Water Research Center; New York Harbor School; Catskill Center for Conservation and Development; Riverkeeper; Catskill Mountainkeeper; New York City Department of Environmental Protection; New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 36

36th of a series

“We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.”

- Hernan Cortes (1485–1547)

The bus ride from Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incan empire, to Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon rain forest, takes over 10 hours, although the distance is not even 300 miles, and you can fly in under an hour. Such is the precipitous majesty of the Andes, where travel can feel like falling off a cliff and landing in a different ecosphere. Set among the peaks of the Vicabamba mountains, Cusco is 11,152 feet above sea level. Puerto Maldonado lies at the confluence of the wonderfully named Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers, near the western edge of the 2.7-million square-mile Amazon basin. Its elevation is 600 feet. Its rivers flow northeast for 2,700 miles, part of the Amazon River’s long journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Averaging nearly seven feet of rain a year, Puerto Maldonado is as hot and humid a place as I have ever been.

In the markets, the fish have an incandescent red color – not the vibrant, festive colors of the flowers and birds of the rainforest, the macaws and toucans, orchids and passion fruit flowers –  but the sickening color of stunted development and death. For this red is the sign of mercury in the food chain, the byproduct of thousands of gold mining operations in the rainforest and along the rivers’ banks.

When I was there, about 15 years ago, most travel occurred by boat, and you could hear the discordant sound of heavy machinery long before you rounded a bend in the river and came upon a group of people, often a family with the children waist deep in the water, as the machine sifted dirt in search of gold. Mercury is used to adhere to the tiny gold pieces, which are extracted by vaporizing the mercury, which then ends up in the water and soil, absorbed by the insects, the fish, and the workers’ lungs.

I have long thought that the most diabolical fate to come out of the Industrial Revolution was that of a chimney sweep in an English city. Boys (and some girls) were taken from that country’s plentiful poorhouses at the age of six or younger, and shoved up chimneys into which only they were small enough to fit.

“The fate of these people seems singularly hard,” wrote Percival Pott in Chirurgical Observations (1775). “In their early infancy, they are most frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger; they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies,  where they are bruised, burned, and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become peculiarly liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease”, namely cancer of the scrotum and testicles, from which they die. Thomas Hobbes did not need to look to a more primitive age to see human life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

What I witnessed on the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers was a world away from England’s dark, satanic mills. Here, 30-50,000 miners work in one of the planet’s most biodiverse areas, amid the breathtaking grandeur and vibrancy of nature. And yet their often illegal operations are destroying millions of acres of rainforest, polluting the vast Amazon river system, and poisoning the people too poor and vulnerable to escape.

Maybe the next time we’re tempted to buy gold, we should think of those children in the river and remember the words of Martin Luther (1483-1546), that “every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 35

35th of a series

“They both listened to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming.”

- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

The Mekong: Letter from an Old Friend

Jamie,

Sara and I just returned from a three week trip to Vietnam (the area around Saigon – which they still call it) and Cambodia. 

It included a boat cruise on the Mekong River from Vietnam up to Siem Reap in Cambodia, with numerous stops along the way to see and experience what life along the river looks and feels like.

As we made the trip, your words about how rivers define life along their banks came alive. It was truly fascinating to see, and the experience was just so different from that of the major rivers –  Susquehanna, Hudson, Delaware, etc. – that I know. 

All aspects of life revolve around the Mekong. I don’t say that lightly. Folks eat the fish and vegetation, irrigate their fields, swim to get away from the heat, gather socially, drink the water, wash their scooters, clean their clothes, use it as a highway, live on and next to it, and more.  It was almost totally true in the rural areas and remains true for many, even in places like Phnom Penh.

Photo by John Kirkpatrick

Despite its importance to daily life, the river clearly has a growing plastic pollution issue and a basic pollution problem (many people put allium salt in a container of water to get rid of the silt and then boil the water so they can drink it). Keeping the river clean is clearly not a priority for the governments of either Vietnam or Cambodia. In fact, in large parts of rural Cambodia there is no recycling or trash removal, so roadways and vacant land can be full of litter. 

It was a fascinating trip, and the river captured my almost constant attention. It was stunning to see, given how important the Mekong is to the lifeblood of the people and how taken for granted it is by seemingly everyone. 

A long way of saying again, your words came alive on this trip.

---

Editor’s note: The 3,050-mile Mekong has been called “the world’s most important river.” Arising in the Tibetan highlands, it runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before flowing into the South China Sea. It is second only to the Amazon in its biodiversity, and hundreds of millions of people depend on it for their survival, particularly on its fish. The Mekong produces one-fifth of the world’s annual freshwater catch and provides the entire protein consumption for 60 percent of the people of Laos and Cambodia.

Reinforcing John Kirkpatrick’s observations, Stefan Lovgren writes in Yale Environment 360, the Mekong is a “troubled” river. It “may look healthy on the surface but has grown increasingly sick from a wide range of problems, including dam building, overfishing, deforestation, plastic pollution, and the insidious impacts of a changing climate.”

The primary culprit, at least for the moment, is dams, primarily hydroelectric dams, with 13 on the Mekong’s main stem, 160 more on its tributaries, and hundreds more being planned. China, the country farthest upstream, has long been the worst offender, and its complete lack of concern over the impacts of its dams on the five downstream countries seems to have caught on in the rest of the neighborhood, where dam building is surging.

Dams on the main stem of the Mekong River, 2020

Still, “the Mekong is not dead,” says Sudeep Chandra, director of the University of Nevada’s Global Water Center. “We’ve seen huge environmental pressures causing the Mekong to dry up and fisheries to almost collapse. And yet we also see the incredible resilience of this river in the face of those threats.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 34

34th of a series

“I must compliment you on this series as the topic is of great interest and I am learning stuff as I read. Who knew we were selling our water to foreign governments? I also believe the Hudson is now a great deal cleaner than it was twenty years ago, although my friend who still swims in races under the George Washington bridge says it is not quite pristine yet!”

The Clean Water Act became law on Oct. 18th, 1972. Its impact has been extraordinary:

“Over the past half century, the Clean Water Act has brought our waters back to life – turning rivers and lakes from dumping grounds into productive, healthy waterways again,” wrote the National Wildlife Federation in a recent review of the EPA report, ‘Five Decades of Clean Water.’ “It keeps 700 billion pounds of pollutants out of our waters annually, has slowed the rate of wetland loss, and doubled the number of waters that are safe for fishing and swimming. Levels of metals like lead in our rivers have declined dramatically. Ultimately, the cost to clean our drinking water is lower because the entire system is healthier.”

In a political environment that now seems so long ago, the bill passed unanimously in the Senate and by a vote of 346-11 in the House. Richard Nixon, who gets so much posthumous credit for being an environmental visionary, promptly vetoed it. But later that same day, the Senate overrode his veto, 55-12. When the next day the House followed suit, 247-23, the bill became law.

So what’s the problem? Let me paint with a broad brush:

• The act regulated so-called “point-source” pollutants. These come from an identifiable source, mostly some kind of a pipe. That alone made a huge difference because industries and municipalities had long been discharging their sewage directly into our waterways. However, “non-point-source” pollutants, which materialize primarily as run-off across the land, are much harder to isolate and regulate. Agriculture, which was largely exempted from the original act, is the primary source of such pollution.

• What’s a river anyway? While the Hudsons, the Colorados, and the Mississippis get all the headlines, it’s the millions of small streams, many of them nameless and some even intermittent, that do most of the work, carrying the water into ever larger streams until they get to a big river and head for the ocean. More than 70 percent of our water is in those small streams, which remain largely unregulated.

• We have expanded our definition of pollution to include phosphorus and nitrogen, which cause nutrient overload that can quickly kill stream life. Agriculture annually discharges millions of tons of nutrients into streams in the form of runoff. This wasn’t contemplated in the original act.

• A lot of powerful interests have always loathed the Clean Water Act: business and industry; agriculture; developers; property-rights advocates, opponents of government regulation, and the list goes on. These groups use their money to buy a lot of things, including politicians.

• The Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of “the waters of the United States” several times, most recently last year in Sackett v EPA, and the current Republican party actively seeks to roll the regulations back.

In summary, the Clean Water Act clearly demonstrated that it’s possible to clean up our streams and rivers, that the benefits of doing so are universal, and that it pays enormous economic as well as environmental dividends.

We should be trying to strengthen the Act, not undo it.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 33

33rd of a series

Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

- James Carville

Homo economicus: is a hypothetical person who “behaves in exact accordance with their rational self-interest [by seeking] to maximize utility as a consumer and economic profit as a producer.” The concept, which dates back to John Stuart Mill and the Utilitarian school of philosophy in the 19th century, is the foundation of modern economic theory. In this view, humans are ascendant, economics holds the key to happiness, and nature is a treasure chest to be exploited by humans, for humans. It’s what drove the Industrial Revolution and what continues to drive both modern capitalism and modern politics.

But even if you measure the value of the earth’s natural resources solely in economic terms, shouldn’t you at least look at the whole picture? Yet how often have you seen a corporate balance sheet that accounts for the true worth of those resources – of the benefits they provide and of the costs our activities impose on the ecosystem? “That’s a staggering omission,” write Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken in A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. “The economy, after all, is embedded in the environment.”

How staggering? In their 1997 article, “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital,” Robert Costanza and his colleagues wrote, “The economies of the Earth would grind to a halt without the services of ecological life-support systems, so in one sense their total value to the economy is infinite.” The authors estimate the monetary value of these services is at least $33 trillion, which was almost twice the world’s gross domestic product. And that was 25 years ago.

Factoring in the real costs of these services would change literally everything. Over the last 50 years, the value of global GNP has increased dramatically – due largely to the “free” services nature provides. On the other hand, the value of the world’s total natural capital has declined significantly – due largely to the overuse, extraction, and pollution of the “free” goods nature provides.

For millennia human have turned to technology in an effort both to insulate themselves from the arbitrary forces of nature and to control those forces. But it’s hard to escape from an essentially closed system in which technology ultimately depends on the ecosystems it also degrades. Because of the pressures of both economic and population growth, we now annually “lose three to five trillion dollars’ worth of natural capital, roughly equivalent to the amount of money we lost in the financial crisis of 2008–2009.”

 “Unfortunately,” note the Lovins and Hawken, “the cost of destroying ecosystem services becomes apparent only when the services start to break down. . . .What’s more, for most of these services, there is no known substitute at any price, and we can’t live without them.” Most of all, these resources belong to all of us – and to every living being whose life depends on them. Yet we continue to allow individuals, corporations, and governments to dig up the earth, pollute the air, and dam the rivers. Where did some of us get the power to divvy up and pass around the global commons that belongs to all of us?

Finally, while there are many reasons – from the ecological to the aesthetic – to protect nature and preserve the earth, the argument in this post is not about hugging trees or communing with druids. It is about the hard science of economics, appealing not to our altruism, but solely to our self-interest.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 32

32nd of a Series

“[The removal of the Klamath River dams] is historic and life changing. And it means that the Yurok people have a future. It means the river has a future; the salmon have a future.”

- Amy Cordalis

“If you build it, he will come,” the disembodied voice tells Joe Kinsella in an Iowa cornfield in “Field of Dreams.” What river restoration people across the country are increasingly discovering is that if you unbuild a dam, the fish will come back – fish that have been unable to return to their spawning grounds for generations.

The latest and most spectacular example is the Klamath River in the Pacific Northwest, where the last of four dams will soon be removed, and the river will flow free for the first time in more than a century. It is the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

On the other side of the country, dam removal has been going on for over 25 years in the state of Maine, and its “rivers are experiencing an incredible comeback.”

The first to go was the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River on July 1, 1999. According to a timeline from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the river was first dammed in 1837, just “below the head of tide” in Augusta – even though residents had already spent three years protesting against the proposed dam’s impact on the state’s fisheries. In the 1990s NRCM assembled a diverse and unlikely coalition of environmental groups, Indigenous tribes, state and federal agencies, and even energy producers to form the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which, after long and difficult negotiations, hammered out an agreement to remove the 162-year-old dam.

No one really knew if, when, and in what numbers fish would return to spawn. They quickly found out – almost immediately fish were gathering at the river’s mouth. A decade later, “the river has totally come alive,” NRCM reported, “the water quality . . . has improved,  millions of fish are returning to long-lost spawning habitat, Osprey and eagles soar along the river, and Maine people and visitors paddle on what feels like a wilderness river.”

Before the removals, Atlantic salmon were on the brink of extinction, while herring swimming upstream to spawn numbered in the hundreds, sometimes the thousands. Last spring their number exceeded six million.

I can’t shake this image of fish – from eels to salmon – swimming around the Atlantic, trying desperately to find their way home. Millions die, but not all, and somehow, when a dam is removed, they know to come back. I‘m not the only one in awe: “I’ve already seen a river come back before my own eyes,” said Laura Rose Day, who led the project at NRCM and is now director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. “Just a day or two after the Edwards Dam came out, we had sturgeon swimming up the Kennebec River. The fish know what to do.”

The return of the fish resurrected the river’s ecosystem. “The lower Kennebec River is now teeming with life,” reports American Rivers, “including the largest restored river herring run in the U.S., the largest natural aggregation of bald eagles ever recorded in the East, leaping sturgeon and thousands of American shad in downtown Waterville.”

The impact is economic as well as environmental and esthetic, as groups ranging from the Penobscot nation to Maine’s lobstermen depend on the Kennebec’s fish for their livelihood.

Amid all the debates over the importance of technology and the power of artificial intelligence, I’m reminded by stories such as these that it is only life that is miraculous.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 31

31st of a series

Readers Weigh In, Part 2

“Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . .The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

- Henry David Thoreau

• Warren Cook, an old friend, recommended Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, Kerri Arsenault’s memoir of growing up in a small town on Maine’s Androscoggin River.

  Editor’s note: Here is what Robert Macfarlane, the author of Underland, wrote: “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” 
  And here is how the book itself begins: “Mexico, Maine, is a small paper mill town that lies in a valley, or ‘River Valley’ as we now call the area because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. . . .Rivers are living bodies that need oxygen, turn sick, can be wrecked by neglect like human bodies, which we often think of as separate, not belonging to the landscape that bore them out. They tell a story, these bodies. They are the story.”

• “I don't like Trump either,” wrote a reader about my post on “Wasting Water,” “but Biden has had four years to take action on the Colorado River. Sometimes I think liberals hold Trump responsible for all bad things in this country, but there is plenty of blame to go around.”

  Editor’s note: We need to think differently about rivers. We’ve had over 60 years to act since the Colorado first stopped flowing regularly to the ocean. In John McPhee’s portrayal of the encounter between Floyd Dominy and David Brower, Dominy was often the more compelling figure, and their intense rivalry was the beginning of Brower’s demise. But looking back, Brower was right. The issue isn’t about “fixing” the Colorado or any other river; it’s learning to think about rivers differently. My takeaway from the “River Continuum Concept” is that a river is not a funnel for water to be used, extracted, mined, and sold; it’s an organism, just as our bodies are organisms, and it must be nurtured as such, for it is the foundation of life on earth, from microscopic life to human life.

• Finally, my daughter Annie turned me on to this story:

Editor’s note: You can read more about this, including a response from the owners, in The Guardian.

Here is a link to a map of the shipping route the ice takes, which includes a treacherous leg down the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden, which is currently the site of a hot war between Houthi rebels and western forces.

Of course, long before Greenlanders were shipping glacier cubes to the bars of Dubai, New Englanders were making fortunes selling ice to enslavers in the Caribbean. The first was Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor, who delivered still frozen water to Cuba and Martinique in 1806. In 1833, having improved insulation of the ice blocks through thicker coats of saw dust, he began shipping them to Calcutta, 14,000 miles and two equator crossings away. One source of the ice was Henry Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond.

The Greenland entrepreneurs may want to increase sales while they can because a study published last week in the journal Nature, determined that the island’s glaciers have lost 20 percent more ice than previously believed – 6,000 gigatons in all since 2,000 – enough, the report says, to cover all of Texas in a sheet of ice more than 30 feet high.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 30

30th of a series

Readers Weigh In, Part 1

“There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.”

- David Brower

• I love your columns on water,” wrote David Yeats-Thomas, “and to show you I read them to the very last paragraph, I’d like to refer to and comment on this end note in your last column (#28): 

It’s worth noting that Nirvana literally means “blowing out or becoming extinguished, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” Armageddon, on the other hand, refers to the “place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history.” I have to admit that the difference between the two is completely lost on me.

“The same Britannica definition you mentioned goes on to give a more nuanced and positive meaning. Buddhism’s ultimate goal is to end (extinguish) the state of suffering, which causes nirvana. ‘(Nirvana) is used to refer to the extinction of desire, hatred, and ignorance and, ultimately, of suffering and rebirth. Literally, it means “blowing out” or “becoming extinguished,” as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.’

Somehow I think the end of suffering and the extinction of desire, hatred and ignorance is definitely a better goal in life than Armageddon.

• In response to the post on John McPhee’s article (#25) about rafting the Colorado with David Brower and Floyd Dominy, Murray Fisher, founder of New York Harbor School and former Riverkeeper staff member, wrote:

“The Hudson River and New York City’s thirst for energy provide an interesting case study for this issue. Indian Point nuclear power plant is being phased out because of its negative environmental impacts and apparent threat to safety, etc. The effort to shut it down was led by Riverkeeper.

But what is replacing that energy generation?

A new hydroelectric dam being built on a river in Quebec on indigenous land. And then a 400-mile-long cable is being run underneath the Hudson River to NYC. 

“What's greener?

“There is no new ‘green economy,’ really. It’s a myth. Any production of energy has some cost to global ecology.”

• “I’m confused by your last post about water and rivers,” wrote a reader about last Thursday’s blog. “Why are Trump’s comments so far off base? Is it because he thinks the river should be diverted? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing to rivers all along? Is the point that we’ve been screwing around with rivers for so long, that we’re on the brink of their being almost extinct?”

Just after I opened that email, I read a New York Times article, “California Farms Dried up a River for Months. Nobody Stopped Them,” about the Merced River, which begins in Yosemite National Park and provides water to the state’s Central Valley. During the three-year drought of 2020-22, farmers continued to exercise their rights of withdrawal even as the Merced turned into “a series of intermittent pool.”

“A dry river is a catastrophe,” said a spokesperson for Friends of the River in Sacramento.

It was once considered a contradiction in terms.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 29

29th of a series

Wasting water

“If you save one drop of water, you’ve saved the world.”

- Pete Seeger

On August 5, 2018, then-President Donald Trump tweeted: “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fire, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water. Nice! Fast Federal govt. approval.” That Tweet, said Brown, “doesn't merit a response." LeRoy Westerling, who studies wildfires and climatology, wrote that Trump’s tweet “boggles the mind,” noting that the real culprit is the huge moisture loss caused by climate change.

Several weeks ago, we began this series with a discussion of the Colorado River, which has not flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. This is pretty universally considered a problem of some magnitude. But in Trump’s worldview, this is perfect river management – the Colorado isn’t wasting a single drop. In fact, not only does the river not make it to the Sea of Cortez, it generally peters out before it even gets to the border, leaving Mexico with a dry bed and the polluted dregs of its 1,500-mile journey. Surely, in Trump’s mind, this is an added benefit. After all, why should Mexico be entitled to our water?

All this is a bit hard to square with American Rivers’ designation of the Colorado as the most endangered river in the United States. It is, the organization declared, “on the brink of collapse.”

What’s at issue here is the definition of “wasting water”. Particularly in the East, where water was historically plentiful, we have associated waste with overconsumption, and so we take steps to cut back, from turning off the tap while brushing our teeth to installing meters to encourage conservation. In the West by contrast, where water has always been scarce, waste is allowing even a single drop to escape to the ocean. One side focuses on the efficient use of water to protect its sources, both for ourselves and for the ecosystem. The other believes that water unused is water wasted.

The plight of the Colorado, and almost all of the world’s rivers, demonstrates the utter folly of the latter approach. We know – or at least, we should – “the importance of natural flow for ecosystems.”

But don’t take my word for it. Read what Jacob Dreyer, a native of Muynak, Uzbekistan, wrote last November in The New York Times:

“Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. . . .[as] over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth-largest inland body of water – which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan – gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways.”

Rusting boats in the sand in Muynak, Uzbekistan. Muynak was once a thriving port on the Aral Sea but is now a desert town since the sea disappeared. Credit: Carolyn Drake/Magnum

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 28

28th of a series

“Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called rain.”

- Mike McAlary

In the last post we discussed scarcity. Today we consider abundance, specifically the possibility of producing much more fresh water. There is a lot of water in the ocean – 352 quintillion gallons (352,000,000,000,000,000,000) more or less. All we have to do is remove the salt.

Humans have been doing that on a small scale for a long time. The Ottoman Empire began providing desalinated water to Mecca pilgrims in the 1890s; and in 1951, Kuwait, which has no – zero – rivers and almost no groundwater, built the world’s first distillation plant; today Kuwaitis get 90% of their drinking water from desalination. Saudi Arabia, as the story goes, was actually drilling for water when it discovered the massive Abqaiq oil reserves in 1939. While that’s a fable, Saudi oil is critically connected to Saudi water. It has enabled the dry desert kingdom to desalinate so much water that it now trails only the U.S. and Canada (which has ironically been dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of fresh water”) in per-capita water consumption.

Today, desalination is a big and ever-growing business. Some countries rely on it almost entirely for fresh water; others, including the U.S., are ratcheting up their efforts. Yet it accounts for just 1% of the world’s freshwater consumption. Why?

1. Cost: the process is very expensive – and essentially unaffordable for poor countries, where almost no desalination is occurring.

2. Energy: much of the cost is due to the massive amounts of energy required to produce it. Saudi Arabia uses 15% of its oil production (down from 25% a decade ago) to desalinate its water.

3. Environmental concerns: most of the required energy comes from fossil fuels. The brine that is the waste byproduct of desalination is twice as salty as seawater, contains toxic chemicals used in its treatment, and is destructive to marine ecosystems. To produce one gallon of fresh water results in 1.5 gallons of brine.

Twenty-five years ago, Bern Sweeney, who taught me pretty much all I know about the science of rivers and water, told me that, for him, desalination represented less a solution to the problem than a manifestation of it. But it’s clear now that desalination is here to stay. And  with public promises to reduce costs, switch from fossil fuels to green energy, and develop constructive uses for brine, it is going to get much bigger. It will need to, the argument goes, because so are the earth’s water shortages.

Amid the debates about desalination’s environmental impact – and about whether technology is the solution to every human problem – the fact is that we don’t know what the future holds. So, at least for now, the debate is less about science than it is about personal philosophy. Ultimately, I believe it’s a theological debate. Will progress, at least as we have defined it in the West, lead to Nirvana or to Armageddon?* Should we embrace technology as the means to subdue nature? Or should we recognize ourselves as an integral part of the natural world? Immanence or transcendence? Control or balance? More or less?

Like Pascal’s Wager on the existence of God and Einstein’s faith that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, this is a cosmic bet. Its outcome may determine our future.

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*It’s worth noting that Nirvana literally means “blowing out or becoming extinguished, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” Armageddon, on the other hand, refers to the “place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history.” I have to admit that the difference between the two is completely lost on me. 

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 27

27th of a series

NAWAPA . . . and other wild ideas

“NAWAPA . . . is the most grandiose water-engineering project ever conceived for North America. It's both a monument to the ingenuity of America and a monument to the folly of the 20th century.”

- Peter Gleick

Even if we can desalinate sea water in the quantities required to continue our profligate ways, how do we then get that water to the desert and other dry lands? Over the years there have been any number of plans to move vast quantities of fresh water from places where it is plentiful to places where it is scarce. Although they were not the first, the Romans were building wondrous aqueducts three centuries before Christ.

Pont du Gard Aqueduct in France, built in the 1st century AD (Robert Harding Picture Library) Licensed under the GFDL by the author; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

But nothing, perhaps, has ever compared to NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, an idea the US Army Corps of Engineers gave birth to in the 1950s. It would take water from rivers in Alaska and Canada, send it to the U.S. through the Rocky Mountain Trench and elsewhere, recharge our aquifers and rivers, and eventually arrive in Mexico. Initially, the idea met with enthusiastic support, particularly among western politicians, but its considerable financial, energy, and environmental costs eventually doomed the project, although they did not kill the idea. “The main drawbacks,” Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert “are that it would largely destroy what is left of the natural West and it might require taking Canada by force.” Ultimately, the project died, wrote historian William duBuys, “a victim of its own grandiosity.”

There have been a myriad of other schemes, from towing icebergs from Antarctica to sending water in submersible plastic sausages to San Diego to recharging the Ogallala Aquifer with water from the Great Lakes. The latest idea is to build a desalination plant on the shores of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez and pipe the newly fresh water 200 miles to Arizona. It “will seem crazy and ambitious until it’s complete,” a state official told The New York Times, “And that’s our history in Arizona.” While most of these plans were ballyhooed and then dismissed as too expensive, too energy intensive, too environmentally destructive, one method endured: “you can ship [water] out in vessels,” said Great Lakes advocate Dave Dempsey, “it just has to be in bottles.”

For me, the underlying issue is simple: is clean fresh water a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace, a product that can be shipped thousands of miles and sold for a profit? Or, since no one can live without it, is it a basic right, not just for humans but for all living beings? In either case, what is the obligation of those who have plenty of water to those have very little? Should Canada, the “Saudi Arabia of fresh water,” share its good fortune with a thirsty world? And who should pay? Senator Joe Mancin has discussed selling West Virginia’s water to parched western states. “I don’t think we’d be quite as expensive as oil,” he said, “but we’d get a pretty penny for it.”

And finally, what of the streams and rivers themselves, whose own wellbeing – and therefore ours – depends on maintaining the health of their ecosystems? Who speaks for them ultimately speaks for us.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 26

26th of a series

Readers respond.

“The destruction of my own paradise is what made me think we need a revolution.”

- Konglian Yu

1. “Just as WWII was upramping, my father was part of a navy team that had been created in response to the capture of Nazi intruders crossing into upstate New York, supported by Nazi sympathizers in New York City. It was well known in the intelligence community that the city drew untreated water from upstate reservoirs that were essentially unguarded and thus could be poisoned by Axis saboteurs. My father’s team tried to calculate how much of the metro population would die if the first knowledge of poisoning didn’t come until its fatal effects were already in the city.

   “The consequences, it emerged, would be beyond catastrophic: simply alerting city residents NOT to use tap water or fountains far exceeded the city’s capabilities. Panic would be inevitable as millions tried to flee to wherever water was safe, overwhelming nearby cities and towns.

   “This was a very sobering study which, of course, was buried: too much info for German attack planners; too much fright for city dwellers; too much exposure of incompetent elected officials; and far too much cost to fix the problem.”

   Note: Stroud Center scientists were completing the first year of their six-year New York study when, without warning, the entire watershed was suddenly locked down, and everyone was kicked out. It was September 11, 2001.

2. Dev Devereux, who is also an architect, sent me this fascinating 4.5-minute video on the Chinese architect Konglian Yu, designer of “Sponge Cities:” https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzbonkWsHPO/

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 25

25th of a series

“If you are against a dam, you are for a river. . . . Let the mountains talk, let the rivers run. Once more, and forever.”

- David Brower

“In the view of conservationists,” writes John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid, his wonderful three-part profile of David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth, “there is something special about dams, something . . . disproportionately and metaphysically sinister.

“The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force,” he continues, “and rivers are the ultimate metaphor of existence, and dams destroy rivers, humiliating nature.”

In “Part 3:The River,” McPhee joins Brower and Floyd Dominy, the equally-larger-than-life director of the Bureau of Reclamation, on a raft trip down the Colorado River. In a nation of huge dams, Dominy is their primary builder and most powerful cheerleader. Brower hates them.

“The Bureau of Reclamation engineers are like beavers,” he says. “They can’t stand the sight of running water.”

“Reclamation is the father of putting water to work for man,” Dominy counters, chewing on a gigantic cigar. “Irrigation, hydropower, flood control, recreation. Let’s use our environment. Nature changes the environment every day of our lives – why shouldn’t we change it. We’re part of nature.”

Their conversation, by turns combative and respectful – and always lively – epitomizes the two sides of a critical social and environmental dispute: the relative merits of a natural vs. an engineering approach to providing water to humans while also protecting its sources. The river itself frames the conversation: as their raft makes its way downstream, they pass through the Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and then on toward the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, and still one of the seven engineering wonders of the world.*

New York City’s water system represents an effort to combine the two approaches: an enormous infrastructure of reservoirs, pipes, dams, and aqueducts in a landscape kept undeveloped to protect the sources of the water. But it’s a stretch to think of the system as natural when you consider how much earth moving and heavy equipment it took to create it – until you compare it to other enormous engineering solutions, from dams to desalinations, whose primary aim is to overwhelm natural “obstacles.”

Dams are an interesting case. They have provided many benefits to humans, including hydropower, irrigation, flood control, and water storage. But a half century after their heyday, when Dominy was heralding them as the pathway to the future, we have learned much about the harm they cause, from sediment build-up to fish extinction to greenhouse gas emissions. “The environmental consequences of large dams are numerous and varied,” reports International Rivers “and include direct impacts to the biological, chemical and physical properties of rivers and riparian environments.” Here we are, back at Robin Vannote’s River Continuum Concept, which proposed that all riverine life is connected. “Fundamentally,” reported the state of Vermont, “the dam is a barrier that interrupts the natural river dynamics.”

In McPhee’s telling, Floyd Dominy is the P.T. Barnum of progress, David Brower the Cassandra of doom. Looking back over the years, as scientists have discovered more and more about the dynamics of streams and rivers, Brower, the curmudgeon trying to hold back the future, seems less and less a troglodyte and more and more prophetic.

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*Seven natural wonders of the world: Aurora Borealis; Harbor of Rio de Janeiro; Grand Canyon; Great Barrier Reef; Mount Everest; Victoria Falls; Parícutin, Mexico.

Seven engineering wonders of the world: International Space Station; Golden Gate Bridge; Channel Tunnel; Burj Khalifa, Dubai; Great Wall of China; Hoover Dam; Millau Viaduct, France.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 24

24th of a series

“Please, Sir, I want some more.”

- Oliver Twist (click here)

Although all of us need to use less water, changes in personal habits are not in themselves sufficient to reverse our current trajectory toward scarcity and pollution. Not when agriculture accounts for 70% of worldwide consumption and almost half of that is lost to evaporation and bad management. Not when thermoelectric power production and manufacturing directly withdraw almost 10 billion gallons a day from our aquifers. Not when the heavy metals required for batteries and other green energy infrastructure require enormous amounts of water – almost 600,000 gallons to produce a ton of lithium (which has also been linked to water contamination).

Of the countless ways for individuals and communities to use less water, two deserve special mention: tearing up our lawns and planting trees. In particular, years of research have shown that planting trees along a streamside has an unexpected double benefit for water health: it not only stops many pollutants from getting into the water, it puts the stream in a position to neutralize many that do. Diet matters, too: raising animals for meat and dairy products takes far more water than growing grains and vegetables – and over a third of the food we buy ends up in a landfill anyway. More efficient household appliances have also made a big difference.

On a more macro level, since farming is by far the most prolific user – and waster – of water, more efficient technologies, such as sprinkling systems and drip irrigation, make a big difference. As does recycling: almost half Israel’s agricultural water, for example, is treated wastewater.

Charging for water also increases efficiency. New York City didn’t get around to installing meters until the 1980s. Since then, per capita water use has declined by 94%. Cities can do many other things: reuse stormwater runoff, repair system leaks, and encourage water efficiency. Through a combination of innovations and fines, Las Vegas has reduced per capita water consumption by 48% since 2002.

And that brings us face to face with two ethical issues:

1. As an old friend once said to me: “I know how much is enough. . . .Just a little bit more than I have right now” – a sentiment that has driven economic growth for a very long time. Questioned about their endless thirst for more water, too many industries (i.e., National Association of Homebuilders) and governments (e.g., Arizona) say they are simply responding to the demands of consumers and the marketplace. Moreover, Chris Neel of Oklahoma Water Resources Board told the Times, that just the act of publishing data on declining water tables can immediately depress property values. So even as we work to reduce water use, the mantra seems to have become: we need to use less so we can keep on using more.

2. The second issue is one of social justice. It’s fine to talk about charging prices that will encourage water conservation. But what about the billions of people who are already forced conservers, either because they live in water-stressed parts of the world, or the water they have access to is contaminated, or they are poor? What is our obligation to provide water to them?

And that brings up the most fundamental question of all: Is water a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace or is it a basic human right?

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This seemingly endless series (which I am really enjoying) will continue after the New Year. In the meantime, let us pray for work for peace and justice. Happy Holidays to all.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 23

23rd  of a series

"That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It sometimes puzzles me that humankind made it to the top of the food chain.”

- Julie Dietrich

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith posed the “diamond-water paradox,” in which the price of water, which is essential to human life, is a fraction of the price of diamonds, which  are not. In Smith’s words, “Nothing is more useful than water: but it will scarcely purchase anything; barely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce value in use;* but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”

And so, modern economic theory began with a conundrum that stumped its own founder. Several theories have since sought to resolve this paradox.

• The “Labor theory of value,” which Smith conceived and Karl Marx enshrined, holds that the value of something is based on the cost of the labor to produce it. Obviously, diamonds are harder to get than water. Or at least they used to be. Or are they? Consider some of the vast projects humans have built to store water or to move it from one place to another.

The construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, required “enough steel to build 63 Eifel Towers.”

Moreover, a diamond is only hard to get when it is dug up and refined. As one economist asked and answered, if a hiker happens upon a perfectly cut diamond by the side of the trail, is it less valuable because the only labor he added was bending down to pick it up? “Clearly not.”

• “Marginal utility,” which argues that because water is so plentiful, the additional satisfaction of consuming a bit more is low, while the opposite is true of diamonds. Tell that to Meliyio Tompoi, a 35-year-old Kenyan mother of six who walks six hours every day to fetch water for her family. They need 40 liters a day, but Meliyio can only carry half that (which weighs about 40 pounds), which means that the family never has enough water for its basic needs. Does her marginal utility for water not exceed that for diamonds?

• “Conspicuous Consumption.” Thorstein Veblen would undoubtedly have considered diamonds the epitome of conspicuous consumption, which, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, he defined as buying things you don’t need as a public display of your wealth and status. “Such “useless activities,” he wrote, “[provide] a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”

Adam Smith did add a few wrinkles, such as the fable of the thirsty merchant in the Arabian desert, whose predicament makes him realize the true value of water and who is probably quite willing to exchange all his diamonds for a cup of the stuff.

But the real paradox is not one of economic theory; it is an evolutionary enigma: we are surely the only species on the planet dumb enough to consider diamonds more valuable than water. And the consequence is that, while we are not running out of diamonds, we are running perilously short of potable water.

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*Particularly before the industrial and information revolutions discovered new uses for diamonds.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Parts 21 and 22

21st and 22nd of a series

“New York City’s water is treated like gold, and for all the right reasons.”

- Marissa Morton, Sydney High School, age 17

“I can still here Jeriel saying, ‘I’m going to tell my mom to stop buying bottled water.”

- Christina Medved#

Today’s post is a link to Kent Garrett and d.b. Roderick’s film, “Mountaintop to Tap”, which also features local musicians Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, composers of the tenderly relevant “Ashokan Farewell”.*

Because Kent and d.b. had only a couple of days lead time, they were unable to film the entire trek. One of the days they missed included the trekkers’ visit with an elderly woman named Margaret Smith Dolan, whose family had been evicted when New York City took their home by eminent domain. Its site now sits at the bottom of the Ashokan Reservoir. Margaret was not – or at least is no longer – bitter about what she called “the price of progress.” But the kids were deeply moved by her story, and it was at that point that they began to understand the larger story of New York’s water in a wholly new light.

In my mind, the film is enchanting, warm spirited, and, both poignant and filled with hope . . . documenting one of the most positive stories I know about bringing diverse people together to understand and protect their collective sources of fresh water, even in the shadow of a history of removal and displacement. Because the film is 37 minutes long, it will be both posts this week.

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* Built between 1907 and 1915, the Ashokan Reservoir submerged thousands of acres of farmland, destroyed 12 communities, and displaced 2,000 people.  

# So many people worked really hard to make the trek happen, but no one worked harder, longer, or more warmheartedly than Christina Medved, Education Programs Manager at the Stroud Center, a special person.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 20

20th of a series

“I saw the stars last night. We don’t have stars in Brooklyn. We have streetlights.”

- From the journal of Sean Soto, New York Harbor School, age 14

Mountaintop ➡ Tap

A 3-week Trek Across the New York City Water Supply System

July 7-28, 2007

As I wrote earlier, 90% of New York City’s drinking water comes from streams that feed into large reservoirs in the Catskill  mountains. To protect its water the city has asserted broad powers over those distant watersheds, including fencing off the reservoirs and having the New York Police Department patrol the area. Once-thriving villages lie beneath these huge reservoirs, and upstate animosities remain strong. On the other hand, most New Yorkers have no idea where their water comes from. Many think it comes from the Hudson River; one of the Brooklyn trek students told me, looking at me as if I were some kind of bumpkin, “from the tap”.

Part of the Stroud Center’s six-year New York mandate was to educate people up and down the watershed to understand: (1) the sources of their water; (2) the importance of protecting those sources; and (3) the critical connection between the upstream watersheds and the city. And so, in the summer of 2007, we brought together six students from the New York Harbor School in inner-city Brooklyn and six from Sidney High School in rural Delaware County for a three-week trek, dubbed “Mountaintop ➡ Tap.”

Part Outward Bound course, part scientific laboratory, and part community outreach, the trek was physically, intellectually, and emotionally challenging. “It was,” said one of the students, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But they did it. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment was learning to trust each other, as one group of students had grown up in an upstate farming community, while each of the urban kids had been born on a different island in the Caribbean. The oldest was 17, the youngest 13.

At the most basic level, the students had a unique wilderness and educational experience. They traveled the length of the water system on foot, by canoe and inner tube, and in rowboats, carrying their belongings on their backs. Along the way, they assessed the quality of the water in streams, rivers, and reservoirs; documented their findings with photographs and journal entries; talked to public officials, scientists, conservationists, and park rangers; and hosted press conferences to share with the public what they were learning in the woods and waters.

Rowing on the Hudson River in a boat built by students at the New York Harbor School. The city’s drinking water actually travels to the city in pipes beneath the river.

In the end they became the representatives of all the people who live and work in the 2,000-square-mile watershed. They also became friends, highlighting in their own differences both the diversity and the community of the watershed’s nine million people, people who don’t know each other, trust each other, or understand their dependence on each other.

Bob Caputo, a long-time photographer, writer, and filmmaker for National Geographic, taught the students how to take pictures and turn them into a coherent story, and then helped them organize their photos for the exhibits. Kent Garrett and d. b. Roderick, who between them have won five Emmys and a Peabody award, produced a film of the trek for public television.

Stroud Water Research Center was the lead partner on the project. Other organizations included New York Harbor School (a public high school founded in 2003 by my friend Murray Fisher), Riverkeeper, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, and Catskill Mountainkeeper.

For more on the trek, visit: https://www.stroudcenter.org/education/nytrek2007/index.shtm

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 19

19th of a series

Sing me the legends of the river.

Tell me a story of the sky.

Because I want to grow.

Because I want to know.

Because I want to understand.

- Author Unknown

I answered the ringing phone.

“Is this Jamie Blaine,” a voice asked?

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

“My name is Kent Garrett. I’m a dairy farmer up in Delhi, New York, and I read in our local newspaper about the trek you are organizing.”

After discussing the project for a while, he said, “Sounds interesting. I’d like to film it.”

I scraped my face off the desk. I had spent well over a year putting together a three-week expedition that would bring together six students from inner-city Brooklyn and six from very rural Delaware County, of which Delhi is the county seat. Together, if they made it, they would follow the course of New York City’s water supply, from its source in Catskill mountain streams to its arrival in the city. They would travel on foot, by canoe, and in rowboats. They would carry their supplies on their backs, camp out along the way, and interview local officials, residents, and reporters. The idea was that these 12 high-school kids, from incredibly different backgrounds, would come to understand and embody the interconnectedness of the whole watershed.

Putting this project together had been way harder than I had anticipated. I’m not much for details, and this was all about details. When Kent called I was trying to resolve what I hoped was the last issue – one so complicated and so essential that I was astounded I hadn’t thought of it till just before go time: Insurance, all kinds of insurance. Insurance to protect the kids and insurance to protect people and places from the kids. Medical insurance, accident insurance, liability insurance, insurance on insurance, and on and on and on.

And now, a dairy farmer wants to tag along and film the project. This was a distraction I didn’t need.

We agreed to meet the next morning at the Bellayre Mountain resort in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other people there were two Black men talking quietly. Fewer than 200 African Americans then lived in Delhi, and it seemed improbable that one of them was an organic dairy farmer. After a while, the taller of the men approached me and asked if I was Jamie Blaine. I said I was. He said he was Kent Garrett.

It turns out that Kent Garrett was no ordinary dairy farmer . . . or filmmaker, for that matter. Born in the Brooklyn housing projects, he had made his way to Harvard, a story he tells in The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever: “In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented 18 ‘Negro’ boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later, they would graduate as African Americans.” From Harvard he had gone on to a career in film and television, first as a producer of the pioneering public television program, “Black Journal”, and later as a documentary filmmaker at NBC and CBS, where he won two Emmy Awards. In 1997, he left what he called “the rat race” to become a dairy farmer in upstate New York.

He was getting out of farming (“It’s a young man’s game”). He wanted to film our project . . . for free. He had called me out of the blue.

Some guys have all the luck.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 18

18th in a Series

“A river is more than an amenity,”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Although it is enclosed by three rivers – the East, Harlem, and Hudson – Manhattan Island has always suffered from a lack of fresh water. In fact, two of the three are not rivers at all: the East River is a saltwater estuary and the Harlem River is an eight-mile tidal straight. The Hudson is tidal almost as far upstream as Albany and too brackish to drink below Poughkeepsie. According to one chronicler of the city’s water history,* it was the island’s dearth of water that enabled the English to take New Amsterdam from its Dutch inhabitants in a “waterless coup” in 1664.

Continuing scarcity, exacerbated by exponential population and commercial growth in the early 19th century, drove New York to subsidize a series of mammoth engineering projects north of the city. By the time that system was completed in 1911, its 12 reservoirs and three controlled lakes were already inadequate to its needs. So, the city moved northwest, into the Catskill mountains and the Delaware River. Because New Jersey and Pennsylvania already took a lot of water from the Delaware, a 1931 Supreme Court decision was required to allocate distribution among the three claimants. “A river is more than an amenity,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “it is a treasure [that] offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

The cost of getting all this water to New York was enormous, both in dollars (billions) and in human disruption (dozens of communities flooded, thousands of people removed, hundreds of workers killed). That the land and homes were condemned through eminent domain enraged the upstate communities, and their animosity toward the city continues to this day.

Still, the city got its water – by 1980, 7.1 million people were using 1.5 billion gallons a day. Even though 90% of it was unfiltered, it was considered among the cleanest water of any city anywhere. But the EPA questioned New York’s ability to continue to provide clean water without filtration and threatened to make it install a plant that would cost billions to build and hundreds of millions to operate. The city didn’t have the money, and the upstream communities were in open revolt against any new watershed regulations, so the state convened all the stakeholders and eventually hammered out an agreement, which included everyone’s input and pleased no one. But it has held. In return for guarantees to protect the distant reservoirs, the city will fund sustainable economic development in the region. Part of that process involved a six-year agreement with the Stroud Water Research Center to analyze all the water sources with the goal of ensuring their future health.

Yet for all the expense, all the displacements, all the hardships, the story of New York’s water is in many ways one of hope.

• By protecting its upstream sources, the city continues to have some of the cleanest drinking water in the world without requiring a filtration plant.

• Through infrastructure improvements (including installing meters, which the city hadn’t bothered to do until the 1980s) and conservation efforts, New York has reduced its water consumption by 34%, even as its population grew by 20%.

• Most important is the recognition that the vast region is a single watershed in which everyone has a common interest. For years, the sheer size of the system and the geographic and demographic differences among its people blocked the development of a unified watershed community, which is the only way to protect both the city’s water and the upstream economies.

  *David Yeats-Thomas, “Mountain Water for a City”

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com