Water Chronicles and The Shocking Truth About The Global Water Crisis
Ravi Kurani
"Water is the lifeblood of human civilization – yet its critical importance is often overlooked."
In this thought-provoking episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani has an in-depth discussion with Peter Gleick about humanity’s past, present and future relationship with that precious resource.
Peter is co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of “The Three Ages of Water,” a sweeping look at how water enabled the growth of early agricultural societies, and led to major infrastructure in the industrial age, but also unintended consequences like pollution and scarcity. He argues we’re at a crossroads where solutions exist to major crises like persistent water poverty and ecological destruction, but lack the political will to implement them at scale towards a “third age” focused on efficiency and sustainability.
Delving into his lifelong passion for environmental issues, Peter shares insights from decades of research on the inextricable links between water, climate, and society. He makes a compelling case that if we hope to build flourishing civilizations in the 21st century, we need a fundamentally more conscious and equitable approach to managing scarce freshwater resources. Tune in to hear solutions-focused ideas around everything from wastewater recycling to international governance reform. This is a clarion call to action for everyone from policymakers to scientists, business leaders, and citizens – our collective future depends on evolving our relationship with water.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- The Three Ages of Water in Human History: Peter outlines his concept of the three ages of water spanning early agricultural societies, the modern industrial revolution, and a potential sustainable future.
- Water's Role in the Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations: Peter explores how harnessing water resources enabled the growth of early empires in places like the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.
- Unintended Consequences and Water Crises Today: Peter delves into major issues we now face including persistent water poverty, ecological destruction of rivers and wetlands, and conflicts driven by supplies.
- Optimistic Solutions for the Future: Peter argues solutions exist for major water crises, but lack the political will and institutions to implement them at scale towards a sustainable "Third Age."
Listen On:
Watch the interview:
Meet Peter
Peter H. Gleick is an internationally renowned scientist and leading thinker on global water challenges. As co-founder of the Pacific Institute, his pioneering work sits at the intersection of water resources, climate change, human security and sustainable development.
Over a distinguished career spanning four decades, Dr. Gleick's research has addressed everything from the impacts of climate change on water resources to conflicts driven by competition over scarce supplies. He has authored over 150 papers outlining new frameworks like the "soft path for water" focused on efficiency and conservation. His prescient insights on emerging issues like peak water and the human right to water have informed major policies and efforts on local and global levels.
Among his numerous honors, Peter is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, and a recipient of the prestigious Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Now a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, his recent book The Three Ages of Water provides a sweeping look at the central yet overlooked role water has played across human civilizations – and the urgent need to transition towards a more sustainable future. Peter continues leading the charge to place water issues atop the global agenda.
The Book, Movie, or Show
In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title stands out in Peters' repertoire.
Peter highly appreciates the genre of science fiction for its ability to forecast potential future scenarios. He recognizes that many science fiction works significantly touch upon the theme of water, providing unique perspectives on this critical resource.
One of the movies he particularly highlighted during his conversation is "Chinatown." This classic film delves into water rights and power struggles, making it an intriguing watch for those interested in these topics.
Contains affiliate Amazon links.
Transcript
00:00
Peter Gleick
We survived when our early predecessors didn't. And I believe it was largely because of our ability to deal with the vagaries of climate and the extremes of water availability. And again, the success of those early empires depended on our ability to deal with a hydrologic cycle. To get water where we wanted it, we invented agriculture, intentional agriculture, to support those early empires. But all, at least the end of the first age happened, I think, when our human population started to outgrow our ability to just deal with those aspects of the hydrologic cycle. We needed to get smarter about our manipulations of water. The problem isn't that we can't solve those problems. The problem is that we haven't. We haven't extended the advances of water purification and water treatment to the rest of the world.
00:50
Peter Gleick
Probably the most disturbing to me is what I describe as water poverty, the fact that not everyone on the planet has access to safe water and adequate sanitation. 2 billion people probably don't have access to safe water and sanitation, and they're vulnerable now to water related diseases that, again, we know how to cure, we know how to prevent.
01:14
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to liquid assets. Liquid Assets is a podcast where we talk about the intersection of policy, management and business, all as it looks at the world of water. I'm your host, Ravi Kurani, and we're going to jump into today because we have an amazing, awesome guest for you.
01:28
Peter Gleick
Hi, I'm Peter Gleick. I'm co-founder and senior fellow of the Pacific Institute in Oakland and author of the Three Ages of water.
01:35
Ravi Kurani
Peter, how are you doing today?
01:36
Peter Gleick
I'm good. How are you, Ravi?
01:38
Ravi Kurani
I am doing good. Doing really good. We were chatting before I hit record, and let's just jump right into your book, the three Ages of water, if you can, for the audience, maybe just give a little summary. What exactly are the three ages of water? Yeah, let's go ahead and start off there.
01:54
Peter Gleick
Sure. The book is three ages of water. Prehistoric past imperils present and to hope for the future. And really, it's the human history of water, going back literally to the origins of the universe and the creation of the first molecules of water and the first empires on earth and how they managed water. The first age of water really is a prehistoric past. And the role that water played in the evolution of humanity in those first early empires.
02:21
Peter Gleick
The second age of water I describe as already a period of time from the islamic golden age through the Renaissance in Europe, the scientific advances and engineering advances that really brought us the wonderful advances of the world we live in today, but also the unintended consequences, the different crises that face us today in the world of water and the third age of water, I describe as the coming age, the future that could be, and I think will be a more positive, sustainable future. And I talk in the book about both the crises that we face, but how to solve those crises and move to that sustainable future for water?
03:03
Ravi Kurani
Let's go back and unpack your three ages. Let's go back to the first one, you say, the prehistoric empires. I got a little bit of notes from your book, and I would love to understand, and also, I think, the audience of what, and I think you do this beautifully in the book of what exactly did the first peoples like, how did water help us? And what is that fundamental first molecule?
03:25
Peter Gleick
So, interestingly enough, we live on a remarkable planet, of course, a planet that has life, the only forms of life that we know. And it's pretty clear that the success of our own species, the success of homo sapiens, ultimately depended on our ability to manipulate and manage the hydrologic cycle, to deal with extreme events, extreme droughts, periods of climatic disasters. We survived when our early predecessors didn't. And I believe it was largely because of our ability to deal with the vagaries of climate and the extremes of water availability. And that led to the first. Ultimately, Homo sapiens expanded out across the planet, and we built the first empires in the Indus valley and the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in the Middle east and along the great rivers of China.
04:20
Peter Gleick
And again, the success of those early empires depended on our ability to deal with a hydrologic cycle, to get water where we wanted it. We invented agriculture, intentional agriculture, to support those early empires. And those early empires also started the process of building dams and aqueducts and irrigation systems. And we invented writing, and we invented religion. And all of it, in my opinion, depended on our ability to successfully harness the water resources that we needed to survive.
04:52
Ravi Kurani
Super well said, and I want to unpack that a little bit more. So I've read. Are you a fan of Yuval at all? No. Harari, from the guy who wrote, no. He actually very similarly came to a very similar conclusion, that obviously the agrarian revolution got us to where we are. If you look at Mohenjadaro, Harapa, like you said, the Indus Valley civilization, the chinese civilization, our ability to move and manipulate water was the main point of it. And obviously being able to grow things, agriculture then allowed us to manipulate our food, and then we became really good at actually being able to do other things we could free up our time to now invent things, invent religion, invent different machinery that can get us from point a to point b.
05:35
Ravi Kurani
When we look at that first age coming into the second age, what was that inflection point that got us from the agrarian revolution into where we are today? And I guess leading up to mainstream time, when you said the islamic period, what kind of happened in that second age?
05:51
Peter Gleick
Yeah. So, without a doubt, the first age depended on our ability to grow enough food to survive and to support these empires in the Middle east and in southern Asia and in China, without the intentional agriculture, without the ability to not just grow when we had rain, but when we didn't have rain along the reliable rivers of those areas, those empires would never have existed. But ultimately, the end of the first age happened, I think, when our human population started to outgrow our ability to just deal with those aspects of the hydrologic cycle, we needed to get smarter about our manipulations of water.
06:33
Peter Gleick
And the second age really was the islamic golden age, when science started to develop, when we started to understand what water related diseases were, the cultural revolutions and the scientific and engineering revolutions of the Renaissance, when we discovered what water was, we learned what hydrogen and oxygen were. And at the same time, we started to build the infrastructure, not just to move water a few tens of kilometers in dirt canals, but hundreds of kilometers or longer, and not just with gravity, what the Romans and the Greeks did tremendously successfully, but with the energy systems that we built so we could move water over mountains or through mountains. We built the first big dams to generate hydropower to store water in large volumes for dry periods.
07:24
Peter Gleick
When we got it, in the wet periods, we not just learned what water related diseases were, but we developed the medicines and the science to understand how to prevent water related diseases. That's the second age of water, and that's really our age. We've all benefited from those advances, and that's permitted us to build the societies that we have today. And in those societies, we mostly take.
07:45
Ravi Kurani
Water for granted, which has come up, actually many times on this podcast of, we just have this idea that if you turn the tap on, you're going to get water coming out of it. You just flush and forget. Right. I hear that a lot in the podcast, which is actually one of the reasons that I ended up pounding or building out this podcast is because I myself was searching for answers of what exactly is water?
08:07
Peter Gleick
Right.
08:07
Ravi Kurani
We hear water is going to be the next big crisis. What's actually happening out there? And I think it's a perfect segue to you saying that there are unintended consequences of what we've done in the second age and being able to manipulate water use. Pumps get water from point a to point b. Is it around pollution, ecological disruption, water scarcity? What are these problems and what are we actually looking at coming towards the end of the second age?
08:29
Peter Gleick
So one of the remarkable advances of the second age is that some of us now get to take water for granted. As you say, we turn on the taps and unbelievably cheap, clean water comes out and we magically flush our wastes away and it disappears. We've built a system that permits us, some of us, to take advantage of those advances. But I write that the second age of water is coming to an end in a whole series of water related crises and lots of other crises, one might add. One of them, probably the most disturbing to me is what I describe as water poverty. The fact that not everyone on the planet has access to safe water and adequate sanitation, the things we take for granted in the wealthier parts of the world. And so there's massive water poverty.
09:21
Peter Gleick
2 billion people probably don't have access to safe water and sanitation, and they're vulnerable now to water related diseases that, again, we know how to cure, we know how to prevent. But we've failed to do so because the advances of the second age of water aren't evenly distributed. We also have a very severe ecological cris. Many of the environmental problems that we see are a consequence of our taking water out of natural ecosystems and not understanding or not caring about the consequences. And now rivers are drying up or heavily polluted, or catching fire, or wetlands are disappearing and aquatic species are being driven to extinction. So there's an ecological component, but we also see conflicts over water. We see violence over water, politically and militarily. We see global climate change, which is as much a water problem as anything else.
10:14
Peter Gleick
These are all some of the unintended consequences of the second age of water, some of the challenges that we face, and some of the things we're going to have to solve if we ever move to a more sustainable future.
10:24
Ravi Kurani
And if I just unpack those unintended consequences, right, the kind of truth that you've listed around water poverty, around issues with health and water poverty, and then just the kind of political issues as well as polluting the water. Just going to ask a dumb question for the audience, why can't we just clean that up? We have the technologies to know how to flush and forget in a developed world, what's really the problem in just copy pasting that.
10:48
Peter Gleick
That's exactly the point. The problem isn't that we can't solve those problems. The problem is that we haven't extended the advances of water purification and water treatment to the rest of the world because we failed. We, the world community, have failed to make those investments, or our institutions are inadequate in some places, or we have failed states and failed governments. A lot of the developing countries, they have not just water problems, but they're dealing with education and communications and transportation, and they're dealing with a lot of challenges, and water is just one of them. But I argue quite clearly, and I think it's pretty obvious, we could solve those problems. We don't need to invent any new technologies to bring clean water and adequate sanitation to everyone.
11:34
Peter Gleick
The cost of doing so is far less than, in my opinion, the cost of not doing so. Costs borne by women and girls who have to walk kilometers to collect dirty water rather than go to school and contribute to their economies. Or we pay in water related diseases and health issues that have a serious economic cost. Water poverty isn't an unsolvable problem. It's just an unsolved problem.
11:58
Ravi Kurani
And so when we start moving into the third age, what are these solutions that obviously currently exist today that we could implement to get us to there? And then what happens if we don't? Right? What's this future if we don't make any changes?
12:14
Peter Gleick
Well, so the good news, as I described in the book, which I describe as a hope for the future, is that the solutions to the crises we face are available. We have answers to solve water poverty. We have answers to solve ecological destruction that we've imposed because of our water policies of the second age, we could improve our politics and our water institutions. And we see examples, their success stories, all over the place around the world. We can talk about specific examples. But again, one of the reasons I'm optimistic about the future is that I see the innovative things, the smart things, the technologies that could be applied and sometimes are being applied to solve each piece of these unintended consequences.
13:00
Peter Gleick
And the challenge is to identify what's available out there, what's being done, what smart things are happening, and to scale them up and to make them happen faster.
13:09
Ravi Kurani
And if you were to build a pareto or maybe an 80 20 around what problems we need to fix, and what solutions we can easily plug in to get that, what are those?
13:21
Peter Gleick
So my top concern really is this issue of water poverty. If we could provide safe water and sanitation to everyone, on the planet, we would solve all sorts of problems that are the result of that water poverty. We would reduce water related diseases. We would let women and girls participate, get educated, and participate in regions of the world where they're now excluded from the advances that we could reduce. Conflicts over water. A lot of the conflicts that we see worldwide over water are the result of conflicts over access to safe water or disputes about control over water resources and water rights. So solving water poverty is, in my opinion, the first and most important step forward. But there are lots of other things that we need to do.
14:08
Ravi Kurani
And when we look at solutions or the kind of toolbox to solve water poverty, is that just getting governments to more efficiently allocate their capital? Or is it access to technology? Is there even three bullet points or a fix that we could potentially look at?
14:23
Peter Gleick
Yeah. So one thing to do, obviously, is to make sure that access to the technologies for water delivery and water purification and water treatment are available to everyone. Another is to make sure that the money is available to invest in those alternatives. And it doesn't necessarily mean the same exact infrastructure that we built here in the richer countries. It may not mean centralized water treatment and distribution systems. It may mean smart, decentralized rural systems. And increasingly, there are new technologies out there for small scale, distributed systems for purification. A lot of the water problems that we have, the poverty is a rural problem. It's not just an urban problem. In the big cities that don't have this infrastructure, let's do what we've done. Let's build the centralized treatment and distribution systems and wastewater treatment plants.
15:13
Peter Gleick
But in rural areas, it may be a different model that could be applied. There are all sorts of new small scale technologies for water purification, water desalination. When you have salty brines for pulling water out of the air, there are all sorts of technologies that are available, but we need to make sure those technologies are widely distributed. And frankly, sometimes it's just better institutions. A lot of the failures are institutional failures. We don't have good institutions, even in places like the United States, and we see failures like Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi, where we had water systems that failed because of inadequate investment or corruption or mismanagement. So institutional issues are also very important.
16:02
Ravi Kurani
I want to pivot a little bit to the work that you do. You founded the Pacific Institute back in, I think, 87, is that correct? Let's go to that really quick. What is the Pacific Institute? What does your work kind of constitute there? Because I feel like there's a bit of a through rely on the solutions that you could architect in this third phase and kind of what the Pacific Institute does?
16:21
Peter Gleick
No. So the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, it's an independent, nonprofit research institute. We do work on research and policy around global freshwater challenges. And one of the rationales for the institute at the very beginning, in 1987, was that a lot of the problems were looking at, we thought, we, the founders thought, were interdisciplinary problems. They were not narrow engineering problems or narrow economic problems or narrow political problems, but problems that crossed all of those borders and that weren't going to understand or solve environmental issues unless we looked at them from an interdisciplinary point of view, which universities were not very good at and corporations are not very good at, and governments are not very good at.
17:05
Peter Gleick
And I think that's proven to be true, that the solutions to climate change, the solutions to water problems, the solutions to energy problems, aren't purely going to be found in technology or in narrow economic thinking or in narrow political thinking, but are going to require really interdisciplinary thinking. And that's absolutely true for the water problem. It's not just a technology problem or an economic problem or a political problem. It's an integration of those issues. And our traditional institutions aren't very good at that. And that's one of the things we focus on at the institute in the context of sustainable water resources.
17:46
Ravi Kurani
And what does that tactically look like? I feel like the audience or myself can very clearly understand focusing on a particular vertical, let's get a technology to fix filtration or fix brine. When you talk about multidisciplinary problems or the meshing of politics, economics and technology, how does the institute execute that? What does a plan look like? What actually happens from the institute's journey in fixing a problem?
18:12
Peter Gleick
One of the things I've written about is, I call it the soft path for water, which is juxtapose sort of the antithesis of what we did in the second age of water, which was the hard path that has developed, the hard infrastructure, the science and the technology, the engineering and the centralized institutions that we've applied to solve our problems. And I should be very clear right at the outset, I should have said this earlier. The second age brought enormous benefits to us. It was a hugely successful effort to bring the benefits of smart thinking to our water systems and other systems. It does have these unintended consequences that now we have to deal with. But the second age of water brought great benefits to us.
18:52
Peter Gleick
But it was a time when, again, I said this earlier, we didn't understand or we ignored for example, the ecological consequences of our actions. And so the soft path for water says, let's do what we did in the second age. Let's bring water supply to everyone. But let's think differently about water supply. It maybe no longer means draining our rivers and our aquifers. Maybe smart water supply means collecting and treating wastewater to an incredibly high standard and then reusing it, which we're already starting to do in places like Singapore and Israel and parts of California. That's a different way of thinking about water supply than draining our ecosystems. But the soft path for water also really means rethinking the way we use water.
19:45
Peter Gleick
The idea of efficiency, and part of the third age of water, in my opinion, is going to be an efficiency revolution. How can we do what we want with less water? How can we grow more food with much less water? By better technologies like soil moisture monitoring and smarter irrigation systems, but also thinking about the kinds of things that we choose to eat. Our diets, it turns out, are very water intensive, especially when they're meat intensive. So that's a different way of thinking about supply and demand of water and the way we think about agriculture. But thinking about demand is not easy. It's not something we've traditionally done. And it's an important part of moving to the third age of war.
20:30
Ravi Kurani
I love what you said there, because it's alongside this thinking of basically an abundance mindset, right? Many times, a lot of forward thinkers or people that kind of look at the market in the future, they always think that we need to cut supply. We can't all have the same life that we're living because we just have to be less abundant than we are today. But in your framework, we should actually have more, but we should just be more efficient with how we're using what we're using, be that water, and being just more efficient and smarter in the way that we're using the supply that we currently have without damaging the hydrological system.
21:05
Peter Gleick
So that's a great point. It's actually a mix of two things. Absolutely. We need to be more efficient at doing what we want. We don't want to use water, except for, really things like drinking survival, but we want clean clothes and clean dishes, and we want to make semiconductors, and we want communications, and we want food. And a lot of the things that we want require water, but almost all of them require far less water than we're currently spending to do those things. So if we focus not on water use, but on what we want, the benefits of water use and then think about how to do those things as efficiently as possible.
21:46
Peter Gleick
Then some of the inequities in our system, the poverty in our system, can be addressed very directly without worsening our impacts on the environment, without stripping more water out of the environment. But it's also true that maybe some of the things that we're doing today, we shouldn't be doing. We should be eating less meat. I'm not saying we should be eating no meat, but we should be eating less meat. And the less meat we eat, the less water is required in the agricultural system to feed animals. And more of that water and more of that agricultural production could go to feed humans. That would benefit the water system. It would benefit ecosystems, it would benefit human health.
22:30
Peter Gleick
And so we have to think both about efficiency, but we also have to think pretty carefully about the consumption side of the equation and what we're choosing.
22:38
Ravi Kurani
To do around the softpaffer water. You also have this concept called peak water, which sounds very similar to what you're explaining right now. Can you explain peak water as a concept?
22:48
Peter Gleick
Yeah, I developed the concept of peak water with some colleagues. And basically, the idea is that there are limits to what we are able to do with a water cycle. There's peak renewable water. A lot of our water resources are renewable in the sense that the hydrologic cycle refills our rivers when we drain them every year because it rains. That's the hydrologic cycle. But there are renewable limits. We use the entire flow of the Colorado river every year. And we might want more water out of the Colorado river or the yellow river in China, or any number of our rivers that are overtapped, but we can't have any more. We're up to the renewable limits of our systems. That's peak renewable water. But some of our water resources are nonrenewable.
23:34
Peter Gleick
A lot of our water comes from nonrenewable use of groundwater, where it's nonrenewable in the sense, like any. Like a bank account is nonrenewable. Or oil resources are nonrenewable when you use them faster than we refill them. And for water resources, some of our groundwater systems are being drained. We're pulling water out faster than nature recharges them. And then it's a non renewable peak limit. And we see in the central valley of California and the Ogalal aquifer under the Great Plains in the US and in northern China and in parts of India and Pakistan, we're overdrafting those groundwater systems, and that's unsustainable. We have to figure out how to bring the entire system back into balance if we're going to have a sustainable future.
24:21
Ravi Kurani
You have such a deep knowledge of water. Your background, from when you were at Yale and Berkeley to your background in the government in California, has just allowed so many different verticals of how you have this really vibrant view of water. I wanted to rewind Peter's life to the beginning or close to where you feel like starting. What was your kind of upbringing like? When did you start to really realize that you wanted to get into water? For the kind of listeners out there, I feel like a lot of our audience wants to get into water. There are younger folks out there that are looking to get into water. What do the life of Peter look like?
24:56
Peter Gleick
Those folks absolutely ought to get into water, because at its heart, there's nothing more important. So I've always been interested in the environment. I was a bird watcher from a very young age. My father was a birder. We'd go out and I grew up in a big city in New York. But we valued and treasured the little bits of the natural environment that we could see around us. And that was always important to me. And I grew up at a time also when there were a series of environmental crises. The environmental movement was booming. We were beginning to understand and address some of the environmental challenges, the crises that we developed and caused in the 20th century. There were a series of energy crises.
25:34
Peter Gleick
And I got into the energy and environment field and ultimately went to school and graduate school in the field of energy and environment. That really led to a focus on water. Water was such an important part of all of those aspects of the environment and energy systems. It was under address. People hadn't looked much at it. I did some of the earliest work on the impacts of climate change on water systems. And I just think water is so important. It touches everything we care about. We've talked about food. 80% of the water we use goes to grow food. But it touches ecosystems. It touches politics and conflict. It touches institutions and water management. And there's so many aspects of water because it touches so many aspects of our lives. It's great to see a growing interest in water.
26:19
Peter Gleick
And heaven knows, we need a lot more people dealing with not just the crises, but the solutions and how to move to this sustainable third age.
26:28
Ravi Kurani
When you started your career in water and when you were studying, when you wrote those first papers, are there thoughts and thinking that you had back then that the world was like that are different today?
26:40
Peter Gleick
So some of the early work I did, I looked at climate change early on. I looked at conflicts over water early on. Some of the earliest work on conflicts over water at a time when international security was considered to be rail politics, superpower politics, everybody was worried about nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, which, of course, we still worry about and ought to worry about. But I thought at the time, and I think it's pretty clear now, that conflicts are about much more than that. They're about resources, they're about poverty and inequity. And I think that we now have a better understanding of some of the connections between environment and security and between poverty and inequalities and conflict. And water is a piece of that.
27:22
Peter Gleick
It's not the only piece, but it is a way to think about some of those challenges and a way to understand that reducing conflicts and reducing poverty means reducing inequities, reducing poverty. We're not going to solve these problems just by watching the rich get richer, but by addressing the challenges facing the poorer populations of the planet.
27:46
Ravi Kurani
And so when you think about water policy, as you mentioned, there is a multimodal aspect here of folks looking at education, at water policy, at the environment, at a whole bunch of things. And there's obviously not only governments, but corporations as well. And in the spectrum of highly capitalist societies, to some that are less. Where would you place. Let me reframe that question. How would you work with governments and corporations combined to build a solid water policy?
28:19
Peter Gleick
Right.
28:19
Ravi Kurani
Because there's so many incentives at play removing even the kind of injustices, the fact that we're degrading the environment, et cetera. But how do you build the incentives for the governments and the corporations to also get buy into this as well?
28:35
Peter Gleick
Yeah, so this gets back to the fundamental point that one of the failures of the second age of water was the idea that there were silver bullet solutions to things, there were technological solutions that would solve our problems, that there were political solutions that would, if only one political strategy would succeed, we could finally solve our political disputes. I think it's pretty clear now the world is a lot more complex than that. And so the solutions to our water problems are multimodal. There is no single silver bullet solution, although I love to see some of the brilliant technologies that people are working on in the water space. But there needs to be an understanding that they have to be accompanied by economic solutions and political solutions and solutions at all levels. There are absolutely things that governments have to do.
29:28
Peter Gleick
There are things that the international community has to do. There are things that corporations have to and can do. But there are also things that our local communities and individuals have to do. Even a simple thing is getting rid of your lawn in the western United States, or buying that efficient washing machine and dishwasher and toilet and reducing your own water use. That's this efficiency revolution. Let's do what we want. Clean clothes, clean dishes, magically getting rid of our waste. But let's do it with less water than we're doing today. There are things that we can do with our local institutions. People really care about water. They should understand where their water comes from.
30:08
Peter Gleick
They should get involved in the water districts and the water agencies that are responsible for bringing water to them or run for school for not just water boards, but local political boards that understand and manage water resources. They should push their politicians to care about water. Most of the politicians don't think much about water, but there are some out there that really try to understand water issues and we should vote for those politicians. So all sorts of levels of engagement are important at the corporate side. You mentioned corporations. There's an effort underway among corporations to understand risks to them of not dealing with water property properly, either their impacts or their responsibilities in the corporate stewardship area.
30:56
Peter Gleick
There's efforts underway at the UN, something called the UN CEO water mandate, which is a bunch of corporations that are really starting to pay attention to water and think about water sustainability and think about reducing their impacts on water resources. So the corporate sector has a big role to play here too.
31:15
Ravi Kurani
I feel like looking at water politics is just complicated because the districting, by the way, are not lined up with cities. You pay bills from one side to the other, especially looking at the US. And then on top of that, elections are even separate. You're voting for water districts at a very different, maybe even a different time than you're voting for a presidential or a Senate election. Is there a resource or a website that we can go to, just like we go to ballotpedia and I know what does this president stand for versus the senator? And I can go ahead and vote along a particular party line or a kind of vector. Is there like the water vector that I can vote against?
31:49
Peter Gleick
That's a great question. I don't have a great answer to that. There ought to be a water politics website where you can go if you really want to help influence the political arena in the direction of water sustainability. How would you get involved in local elections? How do you understand where your water district, where your water comes from, and how to influence the management of that, or how to identify those state or local or federal politicians who really get the water issue, somebody ought to set that up. That's a great idea.
32:21
Ravi Kurani
You have multiple awards and honors that you've received from the MacArthur Fellowship to the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the US Water Prize. Can you just talk about what those awards are and why you received them? What was the work that you did?
32:38
Peter Gleick
I think they vary. The MacArthur Award was for basically my efforts to try and raise awareness about water issues and water solutions and to integrate basically science and policy together in an unusual way. The National Academy of Sciences, that's a recognition of scientific achievements in different categories. So it varies. But the good news is that there is a growing recognition both of the challenges associated with water, but also the innovative things that are happening by all sorts of people around the world to address those water problems. And it's nice to get that recognition. But there are a lot of people doing brilliant things in this area that go unrecognized that ought to be recognized.
33:22
Ravi Kurani
When you think about something that you know that the kind of regular population does not, is there like a factor figure that I wish I knew today kind of thing that if you had the chance to, or if people ask you're like, oh, did you know that 80% of the water was used for agriculture? Is there a handful of bullet points that people don't know that you do?
33:42
Peter Gleick
So there are a million of them. It depends on what you're most interested in. It is interesting that 80% of the water that we use in the world goes to agriculture. 80% of the water we use in California goes to agriculture. It's one of those sort of bits of rule of thumb, but I think people ought to know where their water comes from. People ought to learn where that incredibly cheap tap water, high quality tap water originates and how to protect it. I think people really ought to know that there's a growing awareness that climate change is real and caused by humans. They really ought to understand that some of the worst impacts are going to be on water systems, on water use, on water demand, on water availability, on water quality, on extreme events. We're already seeing some of those consequences.
34:22
Peter Gleick
And the more people understand that, the more likely they are to understand the importance of supporting efforts to reduce the threat of climate change. That's important as well. And I think it's important for people to understand that. First of all, there's no silver bullet solution to our water problems, but there are lots of solutions to our water problems. And the more people understand that, we can solve these problems, the more optimistic they are and won't sink down into the doom and gloom. There's nothing I can do mentality that I worry is increasingly pervasive. There are solutions, and let's figure out how to promote them and scale them up entirely.
34:58
Ravi Kurani
And it's interesting you say that because we see a lot of climate news be super doomsday and people that it's great for clickbait. It gets views on the different media outlets, but it also then paints a picture of I'm not really unable to do anything.
35:15
Peter Gleick
There's plenty of bad news out there and we ought to understand it and be aware of it. But there is good news out there and there's solutions, and it's less clickbaity, but it's more. Yeah, yeah.
35:27
Ravi Kurani
Entirely. Peter, I ask everybody this question towards the end of the episode, and it's, do you have a book, a show, or a movie that has had a profound change or profound impact in the way that you look at the world of water or just you look at the world in general?
35:44
Peter Gleick
Well, so I love science fiction. I read it all. I love the dystopian movies that we see. I just watched another one last night. A lot of them are related to water, actually, on my website@glick.org, at glick.com, I have a list of water related movies. There are lots of them, the science fiction ones, but things like Chinatown. And it turns out there are lots of movies related to water. And so if people like that genre, lots of things to see there. Awesome.
36:15
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. I love science fiction because it gives us the ability to forecast or forward look at what would happen in multiple different permutations of the world, given technology entirely. There's an amazing actually investor. I think he's in the bay. His name is Paki. He took a look at the last hundred years of Sci-Fi from Asimov to the three body problem with Lewisi Shin. And he analyzed the technologies we had today. And when it was first mentioned, it's a really interesting list. He was like, I think that the iPhone was predicted back in 1908 by some sci-fi author or something. And so it was really interesting list.
36:47
Peter Gleick
But I just saw an interview with Arthur C. Clark from 1964 in which he basically talks about the future and cities of the future and the idea that maybe someday everyone will be so connected physically they could talk to anybody any moment on anywhere on the planet, and we wouldn't have to all live in cities and we can conduct our business remotely. It was quite prescient yeah. Interesting.
37:10
Ravi Kurani
Peter, thank you so much for joining today.
37:13
Peter Gleick
Ravi, it was my pleasure. It was a fun conversation.