Contemporary sewage treatment occurs in three steps, in an ascending ladder of squeamishness. The first, primary treatment occurs when the sewage is placed in large tanks where the most disagreeable solids settle to the floor. This sludge is removed and buried in landfills (in a few exceptional places, it is converted to fertilizer). Secondary treatment involves adding bacteria to the still-vile water to consume remaining organic matter. After eating their fill, the bacteria, too, sink to the bottom, and are scraped away. Tertiary treatment usually means disinfecting the wastewater with chlorine or ultraviolet radiation, after which it is safe to discharge into rivers or seas. All of these are costly, which is why governments typically have resisted them until forced to adopt them by public pressure.
The municipalities around Tel Aviv—seven at first, and later, as the project grew, eighteen—agreed to conventional primary and secondary treatment. But rather than deploy tertiary treatment they decided to pipe the water from secondary treatment to a sand-dune region a few miles away. Layers of fine, packed sand sit there atop a coastal aquifer. (Or, more precisely, atop a section of the large sandstone aquifer that runs along most of the Israeli coast and down to the mouth of the Nile.) The wastewater would be channeled into newly created ponds on the dunes. In six months to a year, the water would filter slowly through the sand and then through a layer of sandstone. When it reached a hundred feet or more beneath the surface, it would recharge the aquifer. Water from the aquifer could then be pumped through a fifty-mile pipe into a reservoir in the Negev, where it would be disbursed for irrigation. Some of the irrigation water would in turn percolate into the ground, recharging another portion of the coastal aquifer.
After five years of testing, the first water went into an experimental recharging pond in 1977. Political opposition delayed the project’s expansion for more than a decade. Only in 1989 did treated wastewater go to the Negev. By then, the idea was being replicated across Israel. Laws directed every town to transform its sewage into irrigation water—a parallel, Howard-style water infrastructure. The advantage was clear: unlike the flow of rain, the flow of sewage is as constant as the North Star. But because farmers’ water requirements change with the seasons, the parallel infrastructure included reservoirs to store the treated water until needed. To keep the two networks separate, the new one had to be built from scratch. Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.
Reusing sewage water is an example of what the natural-resource economist David B. Brooks, of the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, called the “soft path” of water management.*2 The soft path is the Prophet’s path. The contrasting “hard path,” the Wizard’s path, the path of Lowdermilk and Israel’s National Water Carrier, has long been the conventional way: centralized infrastructure to capture, deliver, and treat water supplies. It is the path of huge concrete structures, vast engines, top-down planning, landscape changes on a geographic scale. The hard path asks: How can we get more water? Focused on increasing supply, first and foremost, it stems from the belief that the demand for clean freshwater is inexhaustible. Its logical outcome, according to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute: “ever-larger numbers of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts to capture, store, and move ever-larger fractions of freshwater runoff.”
Enabled by the development of cheap cement and cheap fossil fuels, the hard path has produced drinking and irrigation water for huge numbers of people. Like the invention of synthetic fertilizer, the reshaping of water systems has profoundly affected the contours of everyday life, allowing the inhabitants of today’s megacities to live at a level of cleanliness, health, and comfort that would astonish our ancestors. But it has also sucked water from rivers and lakes, degrading their ecosystems, and made water tables sink in every corner of the world.
The soft path, by contrast, is something new. Decentralization, efficiency, and education are its hallmarks. It “draws all ‘new’ water from better use of existing supplies and changing habits and attitudes,” Brooks and a co-author explained in 2007. It eliminates waste and squeezes inefficiencies from the system. It says it is usually easier and cheaper to be smart about current water uses than to build big new projects.
Hard-path Wizards ask: How should we get more water? Soft-path Prophets ask: Why use water to do this at all? In arid areas like the U.S. Southwest, middle-class households use as much as three-quarters of their water on the lawn. Hard-path boosters seek supplies to maintain them. If droughts occur, they endorse water restrictions—more-efficient sprinklers, no-watering days—but regard them as temporary measures, not long-term fixes. Soft-path believers see the goal as attractive landscaping and argue for replacing lawns permanently with dryland plantings that need little water. Replacing the lawn is an exemplary soft-path solution: hyper-efficient, locally oriented, bottom-up, low-tech. In saving water, it seeks to transform the featureless, universal landscape of the lawn with area-specific plantings that embody the essential qualities of a place.
Like Howard’s vision for agriculture, the soft path is about limits and values. It is, Brooks has said, “a human vision toward a sustainable future.” At one level, it is about reforming institutions; at another, about changing habits. Ultimately, though, it is a vision of the human place in nature. Hard-path supporters see technology placing humanity in charge: we can move H2O molecules wherever we want to satisfy our wishes. Soft-path people think this level of control is illusory—cooperation and adjustment, not command and control, is the way to live.
The problem is, as Gleick says, “We cannot follow both paths.” As a practical matter, saving water cuts into the justification for providing more, and vice versa. Implementing both paths at once requires attention and funding that are hard to come by in a world of clamoring needs.
Exactly that conflict occurred in Israel when water authorities adopted soft-path methods in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to mandating wastewater recycling, regulators successfully pushed farmers to stop growing cotton, a water-intensive crop. They mandated low-volume showers and dual-flush toilets (one button for big loads, one for small). They raised water prices. They launched water-education programs in schools that taught children to value water—classroom posters exhorted children “not to waste a drop.” (“If my shower goes too long, my kids yell, ‘Dad! You’re draining the Sea of Galilee!’ ” Noam Weisbrod of Israel’s Zuckerman Institute for Water Research told me.) Utilities fought leaks by equipping every meter with a cell phone that reported unusual flows.
Notably, Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just the rate at which it can be absorbed by plant roots. Invented by the Israeli engineer Simcha Blass, it can use half or less of the water used in ordinary irrigation to nourish the same number of plants. At the same time, drip irrigation is one of those ideas that sounds simple but is hard to accomplish in practice. To exude water in regular amounts from the holes, the water pressure must be exactly the same down the entire length of the pipe, an engineering challenge; if the pipe is underground, which maximizes contact with roots, the holes must not be susceptible to clogging by dirt or being infiltrated by water-seeking roots. The first Israeli drip-irrigation firm was established in 1966; by the 1990s, the method was being used in about half of Israel’s farms.
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Hard-path boosters scoffed at these efforts as Band-Aids that treated symptoms instead of the actual disease: scarcity. Scarcity occurred in two forms: natural and political. The natural scarcity referred to the region’s recurring droughts and meager stores of groundwater. Political scarcity referred to the likelihood that some of Israel’s water would be seized by its hostile Arab neighbors. These neighbors had objected vehemently to the National Water
Carrier, which they viewed as an illegitimate regime’s scheme to steal the region’s water. In the 1950s Israeli and Syrian forces shot at each other over the former’s efforts to implement it. The opening of the National Water Carrier prompted Egypt to convene the first Arab Summit, which in turn led to the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The target of its first attack, in December 1964, was the National Water Carrier. Since then, Jordan has diverted more water upstream from Israel, as has Syria. Palestinians have repeatedly demanded a greater share. Diplomats have suggested that Israel trade water for peace.
All of this, hard-path backers say, is why Israel will eventually need to come up with more water. Dual-flush toilets and school posters are not enough. Agreeing, Israel built five huge desalination plants on the Mediterranean between 2005 and 2015. They produced so much drinking water—about 80 percent of the nation’s needs—that Israel has discussed replumbing the National Water Carrier to send any surplus to the Sea of Galilee. Meanwhile, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians announced in 2013 a vast project to link the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. For its first phase, to be completed in 2021, a desalination plant on Jordan’s Red Sea shore would provide water to southern Israel and the Palestinian territories. In a swap, Israel would send desalinated water from its Mediterranean facilities to Amman, the water-short Jordanian capital. The leftover brine from Red Sea desalination, too salty to be dumped safely into the environmentally fragile Red Sea, would be pumped north into the Dead Sea, making up for some of the Jordan River water lost to dams and the National Water Carrier. The project was scaled back after scientists decried the ecological risks of linking those two seas for the first time ever. Nonetheless officials from all three governments told me they were excited. They saw themselves as changing the game, not simply fiddling with the rules.
Economic Interlude
Urban planning is easier in a dictatorship than in a democracy. Since its founding, in the thirteenth century, Shanghai has occupied the west bank of the Huangpu River. On the east bank were the farms and gardens that fed the big city. In 1993 the Chinese government decided that this arrangement was unsatisfactory. It bulldozed the farms and gardens, created a “special economic zone” in their place, and in a hot-brained hurry threw up a brand-new city, Pudong (“East of the Pu”). Pudong now has the world’s second-, ninth-, and twenty-third-tallest buildings, and more than 5 million inhabitants, most of them middle class, housed in faux-Mediterranean villettes as deracinated as so many Orange County strip malls.
By chance, I visited Shanghai a year after construction had begun. Out of curiosity, I crossed the river one evening to see what was going on. I walked to the edge of the then-small construction zone and looked to the east, toward what would become the rest of the city: an endless expanse of rice paddies and truck gardens. Few of the inhabitants seemed to have electricity; only a handful of lights were visible in the darkness. Fifteen years later I returned to the same spot and saw a city almost twice the size of Chicago. Its light covered the stars.
Rapid urbanization is a hallmark of our age. In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world’s people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two out of three. Meanwhile the world’s population will have more than tripled. In 1950, 750 million people lived in urban areas; by 2050, demographers project, 6.3 billion will—more than eight times as many. For the most part, farmers have kept up with the increase in urban numbers, growing more food and distributing it in the newly expanding cities. Water has a poorer record. Cairo, Buenos Aires, and San Antonio; Dhaka, Istanbul, and Port-au-Prince; Miami, Manila, Monrovia, Mumbai, and Mexico City—all have greatly expanded, and all have failed to keep up with the demand for clean, plentiful water.
Providing water to cities entails four basic functions: purifying the water that goes into the system; delivering it to households and businesses; cleaning up the water that leaves those homes and businesses; and maintaining the network of pipes, pumps, and plants. Simple to describe, these tasks are hair-pullingly complex on the ground. The cost and technical challenge of building and operating a water system that can supply the daily onslaught of morning flushes and showers while not overwhelming users at light times is the sort of thing that keeps engineers in heavy demand. Challenges increase if the city is growing rapidly, like Pudong. Because demand is constantly increasing, new capacity must be built at top speed while administering the old.
But cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, the South African province, lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. More than thirty North American cities improperly test for lead in their water, including, famously, Flint, Michigan, where bungling local, state, and federal officials have forced residents to drink bottled water for years. The Mountain Aquifer that straddles the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories is the most important source of groundwater for cities in both nations. In an atypical act of collaboration, both societies are polluting it. And so on.
So long is the litany of government failure in urban water systems that in the 1990s organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund began to argue for turning over water management to the private sector. One of the biggest examples was China, where in 2002 the Shanghai government contracted the task of expanding and operating Pudong’s new water system to a French company named Veolia. In return for $243 million and a fifty-year, 50 percent stake in Pudong’s water utility, Veolia became very, very busy. In its first five years in Pudong, Veolia laid almost 900 miles of large-diameter pipe, hooked up 300,000 new structures to the growing water system, built sewage and water-treatment plants, and hired 7,000 local workers. Along the way it built a new office tower and on its ninth floor created a customer-service call-in center—a novelty in China—staffed around the clock by young women in powder-blue Veolia uniforms. During my visit, one proudly showed off a war room with a twelve-foot screen displaying the real-time status of every water connection in Pudong.
Veolia has a longer, stranger history than one would expect from its dull corporate moniker. It was founded in 1853 by Napoleon III, France’s last emperor, along with many French nobles, and financed by the bankers Baron de Rothschild and Charles Lafitte. The Compagnie Générale des Eaux, as it was then called, became an essential part of the emperor’s plan to modernize his country. Signing decades-long contracts to expand, modernize, and operate the water systems in France’s biggest cities, CGE became integral to the national infrastructure—a private enterprise holding a public commission, and entrusted with the water supply even of the glorious capital.
In the 1980s the firm abruptly woke up to the possibilities of modern financial markets, and realized that it could use the revenue flow from its millions of water customers to acquire other companies, most of them in industries more glamorous than plumbing. After buying publishers, software firms, music companies, television networks, and movie studios, the company’s CEO celebrated by moving to a $17.5 million duplex apartment on Park Avenue. The unwieldy enterprise soon foundered. The CEO was forced out and in 2011 was convicted of embezzlement. Meanwhile lawyers and financiers feasted like vultures on the parts, tearing off corporate pieces and gulping them down. Out of the morass emerged Veolia, the biggest private water-service operator in the world. It runs water systems in nineteen nations, including China.
Veolia’s smooth operation in Pudong was a testament to the power of private enterprise. It takes formidable organization to deliver water to
so much new construction—though even here, incredible to Westerners, the water must still be boiled before drinking. (Habituated to bad water, Chinese people don’t expect to be able to drink it straight from the tap.) To let Veolia recoup its costs, Shanghai gradually raised water prices—not enough to make Pudong’s nouveaux riches blink, but enough to ensure that they will not leave the taps on all day. “This model is a unique combination of private efficiency within overall public ownership,” Veolia’s Shanghai director said to me. He said he had a hard time understanding why anyone would be upset at the thought of privatizing water. So did his boss, Antoine Frérot, now head of Veolia. “Private companies can better manufacture cars” than governments, Frérot told me, and water “is exactly the same.”
Veolia and other water multinationals—Big Water, let me call them—make an argument straight out of Economics 101. I heard a version of it from John Briscoe, who was for ten years the senior adviser on water at the World Bank. Briscoe kept a doggerel poem by the economist Kenneth Boulding on his wall that read, in part:
Water is politics, water’s religion,
Water is just about anyone’s pigeon….
Water is tragical, water is comical,
Water is far from the pure economical.
Boulding had captured something, Briscoe said. Many of the world’s water problems arise because the sacred aura around water induces governments to treat it “as common property—it’s free to use, no matter what you do with it and how much you use.” In consequence, huge quantities are wasted. Equally bad, the fact that water is free means that governments can’t recoup the cost of extending water networks—so they don’t. Utilities don’t fix leaky pipes for the same reason. All over the world, Briscoe said, “you have these hugely underfunded, very inefficient services producing very bad service.” He said, “They don’t have enough to operate the system properly, so the existing system rations water, and of course it’s the elite that gets to the front of the queue.”