Introduction

Barbara Rose Johnston and John M. Donahue

Water

Water is essential to life. The earth is a world of water, yet it is also a world where freshwater is relatively scarce. Only some 2.5 percent of the total volume of water on earth is freshwater, and large portions of the global supply are inaccessible.

The water cycle, driven by the sun, lifts purified water from oceans and land and releases it as rain and snow—some 10 percent of this over land and the remainder over seas. A bit more than two-thirds of the global freshwater supply is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. The remaining freshwater (0.77 percent of all water) is held in aquifers, soil pores, lakes, swamps, rivers, plant life, and the atmosphere. Thanks to seasonal and geographic variabilities, that which is accessible for human use is an even smaller figure. For example, the Amazon River alone accounts for some 15 percent of global runoff, and an estimated 95 percent of its flow is inaccessible (Czaya 1981).

Of all the water on earth, only one one-hundredth of 1 percent is available for human use as fresh, drinkable water, provided by stable runoff from rivers and lakes and a small amount stored in dams (Postel et al. 1996). Even so, this supply would support many times our present population if it all could be exploited (Meyers 1993, 102-103). However, both the water and the world's peoples are unevenly distributed (Middleton et al. 1994, 141–143).

According to estimates by the United Nations Environment Programme, at least 1.7 billion people living on earth do not have an adequate supply of drinking water, and an estimated 40 percent of the world's population faces chronic shortages. Many of these people live in arid regions, water-stressed countries where rain is limited and they must rely on rivers and groundwater for their freshwater needs. Nine of the fourteen countries of the Middle East, for example, face water scarcity (Postel 1992, 287). Population growth in water-scarce regions exacerbates the problem. By the year 2000, some 300 million people living in fifteen countries in Africa—one-third of the continent's population—will struggle with water scarcity (Postel 1993, 106). Many of those facing water shortages live in degraded watersheds where deforestation, erosion, increased runoff, and microclimatic change contribute to water scarcity. And across the world, in all zones and settings, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the forces of global climate change as weather becomes increasingly chaotic and unpredictable and crops freeze, rot, or wither on the vine (Ohlsson 1995).

Water scarcity, however, is more than a matter of disturbed terrain, increased population, and climate change. Water scarcity can also be a by-product of water management projects: the building of dams, canals, and complicated delivery systems may provide water for some at the cost of others, with short-term gains that wreak long-term ecological havoc (Gleick 1993; McCully 1996; Postel 1992; Reisner 1986). Moreover, water scarcity can be a product of the social systems. Many of those facing water shortages live in the world's cities, where water is often supplied to the rich by municipal systems while the urban poor, living on the fringes of cities, are forced to purchase water from vendors at rates as much as forty times higher (Meyers 1993, 103). Many people have access only to water that is unfit for consumption—contaminated by sewage, agricultural runoff, and industrial waste (Hu and Kim 1993).

Finally, the artificial nature of geopolitical borders influences water quality and water scarcity. Many of the important water basins of the world straddle political borders. Water containment and diversion schemes in one country affect supply and quality in other countries. The Nile River basin, for example, embraces parts of nine countries; conflict results as sovereign nations claim competing rights to use, store, divert, and pollute (Homer-Dixon 1996; Lowi 1996; Ohlsson 1995). Water allocations based on political and economic interests often exceed actual water availability, leaving downstream (or less powerful) users with a trickle of salty, contaminated water (Reisner 1986).

In short, water scarcity is more than a matter of decreased supply or increased demand. Water scarcity is influenced by a variety of factors, including topography, climate, economic activities, population growth, cultural beliefs, perceptions and traditions, and power relationships.

Culture and Power

The Chinese word for crisis is written with two characters, one that suggests danger and another that suggests opportunity. In many ways, the story of water at the end of the millennium is a story of the tension between danger and opportunity. The dangers of flood and drought can be transformed into economic opportunities as rivers are dammed, waters are diverted into distant fields, and power is generated to feed factories and towns. Yet such transformations imply other changes as well. Nature is dominated and turned into a commodity, complex bioregions are destroyed (Abramovitz 1995), and human social and cultural systems are dramatically, sometimes drastically, altered. Thus, the story of water is all too often a story of conflict and struggle between the forces of self-interest and opportunities associated with "progress" and the community-based values and needs of traditional ways of life.

In every community, people value water for different reasons and use water in different ways. The quest to capture, store, and distribute a reliable supply of water (or energy) implies the capture of a commons resource and the building of structures and institutions to enclose, commodify, and control it. This process of politicizing and commodi-fying nature requires centralized institutions of power and a reliance on technology to conquer natural forces. Systems for controlling resource access and use typically reflect the ways in which society is organized and thus recreate and reproduce the inequities in society (The Ecologist 1993).

In this book, we present a series of case...