The New York Times's Economix blog has a terrific interview today with Charles Fishman, investigative journalist and author of a sobering new book on water called "The Big Thirst."
Fishman's big claim is that what he calls the "golden age of water" is over, and in the near future we'll have to get used to the idea that public water will no longer be "unlimited, unthinkingly inexpensive and safe." Here's an eye-opening excerpt from the interview that illustrates how valuable water really is to those who don't get clean water piped into their houses for less than a dollar a day:
I visited a very poor neighborhood in Delhi named Rangpuri Pahadi. The 3,500 residents there live on $100 a month.
They got so frustrated standing in line hours a day at neighborhood pumps for water that didn’t even come at a regular time, they created their own miniature water system. They collected money — “capital” from people whose income is $3 a day — drilled wells, used their own labor to lay pipes from a storage tank to each each family’s shack.
Those who want water pay about one day’s wages a month, and the residents are thrilled. Their “upstart utility” gets them better water than the public standpipe, it comes on schedule, it liberates them to have jobs, liberates their kids to go to school. They pay the equivalent, for a U.S. family, of $150 a month for water. And they did it themselves.
Fishman thinks water is too cheap, and that the low price of water in the developed world leads to rampant waste, not just by households but by the far larger industrial and agricultural users that consume most of the nation's water. Here's a clip from a story he wrote recently for Fast Company, a magazine he writes for often about water issues:
In four days, the United States uses more water than the world uses oil in a year.
Imagine if water got anything like the attention that oil gets--would we figure out how to take better care of water resources? (On CNBC, the price of oil in the world markets flips onto the screen every 30 seconds.)
