This is an excerpt from the documentary: Blue Gold: World Water Wars about how much human development is harming rivers, emptying aquifers, polluting rivers and possibly causing desertification. This clips includes short interviews with scientists, farmers, activists and researchers who are concerned about how we are managing our water resources.
TRANSCRIPT
We’re entering into a unique stage of history
Water, which is the source of life itself, instead of being common and universal to everybody, because we all depend on it, profit is made out of the running of and the delivery of water to people and to communities
Those that have the ability to pay will have access to the water, those who do not have the ability to pay, will go without
and therefore it’s a life-and-death situation, in the final analysis, on the basis of profit
Thank you very much, and it’s a great honor to be on the stage with you
I want to talk, comrades and friends, about, uh, a global water crisis, in which we know that the world is actually running out of water
And that wasn’t supposed to happen, it wasn’t supposed to be able to happen — because we were all taught, back in, I don’t know, grade 3 or 6 or whatever, that, … there’s a fi- … there’s a cycle
When it rains, the water falls from the clouds, down all the way to the ground
It soaks into the ground and then the grass and trees grow
Sometimes there’s so much water underground that lakes and rivers just pop up, like when you squeeze a box of apple juice
The rivers carry the water back to the ocean
Inside the ocean, the water floats up to the sky as clouds again
Then the wind pushes the clouds towards land, and it rains again
This all happens over and over, forever and ever
How is our water being polluted?
Agriculture uses chemicals to increase farming productivity
Ironically implemented to counter a diminishing water supply, these chemicals pollute the groundwater
Automobile gas emissions pollute the clouds but perhaps the most damaging culprit is industry
Water pollution has been linked to the rising miscarriage rates in women, lower sperm counts in men, and it is so globally severe that the Malaysian government proposed the death penalty for anyone caught contaminating water
[2:43] This is the, uh, the most polluted river in the United States
Um, there’s active polio, uh, tuberculosis, hepatitis
Well, we try and, and reason with the aliens, and, you know, tell them what’s in the water, and try and get them out
None of the agents are going to get into that water to get any of these aliens, they’re just contaminated
We have a gate that we deploy across the river, down the ways a little bit, and um
We’ll deploy that gate, and then, they’ll all pretty much go back into Mexico
We already have a battery of shots that we take care here, um, at the local hospital
It’s about eighteen different shots for, … if any agent falls in that water, to keep from getting, … contracting something
What we saw today was a river of human sewage. The water smells like nothing you could
ever imagine, as much as twenty-five thousand litres per second flow…
It goes into the northeast where people grow crops that, later on, are sold into Mexico City Market so we are being poisoned. Our wastewater is returning to us in the form of food
When you look into the rivers you can see bubbles. That means that the rivers are losing oxygen
Contamination and pollution of the water systems is creating cholera, and, and … water diseases, killing more children today than malaria or AIDS or even wars themselves
The wetlands would normally have been a process whereby there would have been some, uh, cleansing of that taking place
It goes through the wetlands and it comes out more purified into the river systems, et cetera
But what happens when the wetlands are destroyed? Where we poison a certain amount of water that can never really be fully recycled
What we now know is that we are polluting and depleting the finite stock of fresh water so fast that we’re now mining the groundwater faster than it can be replenished
It rains. The water hits the ground and percolates into the soil, collecting underground into what are known as ‘aquifers’ or ‘groundwater’
But how much of our finite supply of water is underground?
We can only estimate, as there is no reliable method to accurately measure which is why our growing dependency on groundwater is such an urgent concern
[5:39] The fabled Atlantis in the Middle East had a real city attached to it. It was called Ubar, … (it) disappeared and no one could figure out what happened, and then some archeologists found it and what they realized is, it collapsed into the desert sand, from ground water pumping
Not only could it happen, it is happening today in Florida
Giant sinkholes have emerged all of a sudden, just big cavities in the ground, opening up
The effects are not always evident, as with a sink hole or a lost city
Entire regions can slowly and evenly sink as a watershed is depleted
[6:20] A perfect example is where Mexico City is now. There was once an oasis of water
When the Spanish came, they didn’t want their new city to look like, uh, Venice, they wanted it to look like Madrid
And they used slave labor to cut down all the trees that will protect the water sources, and to dredge the water systems
And what happened was that they just destroyed the water table
And, of course, that was one thing, when there were 10,000 people living there, it’s another when there are, what, maybe twenty-five million
They’ve taken the rest of the water underneath the city
The city is literally sinking in on itself and these great, big churches are beginning to, you know, go sideways
and Mexico is having to go further and further and further away from its local water sources ‘cause there aren’t any left, to find water
[7:08] Human ingenuity has found out ways to get water from beneath the surface of the Earth for thousands of years
What’s changed, though, is the technology
We now pump approximately thirty billion gallons of groundwater every day
[7:39] The farming community started tapping into our aquifers at a time when there really were not other demands on the resource
The way that the law works is, that they are allowed to use limitless qualities,
And then the added kicker is, that the law said, if you don’t pump, if you don’t defer all of this water, you may lose your water right
So, with that scenario, it doesn’t encourage conservation of water
I mean, why, why am I going to go ahead and quit pumping to save water, and lose everything?
So then a guy like me, who may want to quit pumping, to quit depleting the aquifer, … I have to keep pumping, in order to keep my water rights
When we pump water for such irrigation some of it percolates back into the ground which is called ‘recharge’ or ‘return flows’
So long as we pump no more than what is recharged, we are using the groundwater sustainably
The problem is, that where pumping up to fifteen times more water from the ground than is returning back into it, creating a global crisis
One thing that most people don’t know is that the world is desertifying and very quickly, we are becoming a desert in many places
Our soil is eroding
Simply meaning that overgrazing, winds and flooding damage the top layer of Earth, essentially hardening it to the point that rainwater cannot easily soak into the ground
Our life source, literally, slips away from us, back into the ocean through sewers and rivers, draining the land of its moisture and life
Extreme weather, a world of hurricanes and violent storms over the ocean, while the interior land receives less and less rain or violent, harsh storms that simply erode the land more
Deforestation is a major contributor to soil erosion
Tree roots absorb water and thus hold the watershed in place
When they leave the land, so does the water
Because the forests that held the water have all been logged, there is no place where the water can be stored
The rain still comes and runs away, as instant surface run-off
Just what I feared! He’s formed a gang and they are whooping it up for a flash flood.
They are rushing down the canyon. They’re made a wall of water twenty feet high! Look out!
No longer satisfied with flash floods, the gang is planning bigger and wetter floods.
Junior’s getting dangerous, he is getting tougher, and bolder, everyday!
[11:10] But groundwater pumping cannot alone be blamed for our desertification crisis
Cities are growing and expanding
For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in the countryside
We’ve replaced permeable ground with hardscape; with roofs, parking lots, with homes
If it rains and the water doesn’t hit the ground, but hits the sidewalk or street instead, it can’t soak into the ground and make trees. It just slides down the street back to the ocean and makes more clouds
This means that the ground gets really dry and the grass and trees die
Clearly there is much more unpaved than paved land in the world, but the effect is cumulative and should not be underestimated
There is another problem with increased urbanization, which is our continued insistence to build housing for growing populations that demand more water than local watersheds can provide
People in housing development, … and they make money by turning houses, and they’re very large companies so their goal is to avoid the water issue that might limit the number of houses they might have
Instead of adapting our development to the available water supply of a region, we choose to force the world’s water supply to adapt to our desired locations
[12:53] What dams do is change the hydrologic cycle
They provide water during those months when the natural flow patterns do not
What’s happened is that we build these huge hydro dams mainly to create hydropower and hydroelectricity and when we’ve done that, we’ve done it in a very narrow framework
And we haven’t thought about the fact we’re going to need water for other purposes
In this quest to conquer nature, as some label it, we’ve constructed close to 50,000 large dams worldwide
But if we are headed towards desertification, by allowing too much rain water to run off into the sea, then is it not to our benefit to dam water and prevent it from reaching the sea?
One of the basic functions of rivers is to carry stuff from one place to another
and that stuff, which is really critical to the health of an entire watershed; it becomes completely and wholly interrupted when you build a dam
Dammed rivers fail to carry such nutrients and minerals downstream through the watershed, resulting in more soil erosion, less percolation when it rains, more runoff and thus, an increase in the desertification problem