Our domestication of water has always been an illusion-it’s all on our side of the relationship. ![]() The starting point should be a fresh respect for water, and a renewed curiosity about it. ![]() That’s the key of the next era of water: our own resilience in how we use it. All the water on the planet has been here forever we use it over and over again. We often forget that the chief quality of water is its resilience. In the next century, we’re going to have to rethink everything we do with water: how we grow our food how we build our homes, our parks, our cities how we get the water we need every day for showers, and what we do with it when we’re done and also how we live, safely, alongside water. If we’re going to succeed in the next hundred years, we’re going to have to pay attention to water in a way that we haven’t had to in a long time. The invisibility it created is a luxury we can no longer indulge. It has been unlimited, virtually free, and unthinkingly safe.īut that golden age of water is over. The past 100 years have been a golden age of water, particularly in the developed world: We’ve put it where we wanted it. We have this unspoken intimacy that leads us to think we know what to expect from water. And we gravitate to it: Just 10 percent of the United States’ counties touch water, but 40 percent of Americans live in those counties. Water is also a source of comfort we swim in it, sail on it, and baptize our children with it. It is essential to making nearly everything from concrete to microchips. Water has become the key utility in our personal lives-we use it to brush our teeth and wash our clothes-as well as in the world’s economy. We have built our civilization-our cities and towns, our roads and reservoirs, our farms-based on our understanding of water, and our relationship with it, our ability to manage it. Except for the danger from extreme heat waves, every element of climate change is about water: too much, too little, melting glaciers, rain instead of snow, rain that falls in one place when we’re accustomed to it falling in a slightly different place. A dozen Charleston officials recently spent a week in the Netherlands to see what it looks like for a place to re-engineer, to re-imagine its relationship with water. The city of Charleston, South Carolina, now floods more than 50 times a year-twice the rate of a decade ago-and the flooding is changing daily life in the city. The water supply for Miami could be permanently contaminated as sea-level rise forces salt water into what has been the city’s pristine drinking water aquifer. The slower-moving changes are equally arresting. towns destroyed by water-caused disasters in less than a month. That happens 29 days after hurricane-driven storm surge reduces to splinters an entire community in the Florida Panhandle. Drought-fueled wildfire in California burns down most of two towns. Our mastery of water allowed us to mostly ignore it.īut now, every week, there is a disaster that comes from water. That water revolution did something surprising: It gradually made water invisible. Much of that progress owed to a simple revolution: clean water. and Europe went from being an odious font of disease to a source of health, providing a foundation for big cities to flourish.įrom 1900 to 1940, life expectancy in the U.S. In the space of 10 years, drinking water in cities across the U.S. Most important, at the start of the 20th century, we figured out how to make water reliably clean and safe: run it through a sand filter, add a little chlorine. That can make it seem as if, all of a sudden, we don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to water. Everywhere we look, on every continent, water is reasserting its power to shape how we live and also, sadly, how we sometimes die.
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