A Nat Geo Explorer’s Quest to Help Solve Drought

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, now to a crisis of water impacting countries around the globe. In the United States, at least seven states are affected by the alarming deletion of the Colorado River. With the water levels of Lake Powell and Lake Mead reaching historic lows, some are calling it an absolute nightmare. Author and journalist Erica Gies is sounding the alarm in her book, “Water Always Wins”. She joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss innovative ways to conserve the precious resource.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks. Erica Gies, thanks so much for joining us. Your book talks about water in, kind of, a global sense. But here the United States right now, there’s a very active conversation on what is happening to the Colorado River. And how, essentially, all the states that benefit from the water of that river are trying to figure out how to redo and rethink an agreement. Why is this so crucial to the United States?

ERICA GIES, AUTHOR, “WATER ALWAYS WINS”: Water is an inherently local issue. Every place has its own unique geology, ecology, and human culture. And so, you know, all the solutions need to be tailored within those realms. And the point that I make in my book is that, yes, climate change is making drought and flooding much more intense. But a significant part of our issues with water are related to our development choices. So, that’s urban sprawl, industrial, agriculture, and even the concrete, kind of, very control-oriented way that we try to manage water has dramatically altered the water cycle. And in that way, we’ve created a lot of problems for ourselves.

SREENIVASAN: When we look at how we engineer how water gets to us, people will say, yes, obviously, there are more demands on the water, there’s greater population that there was 100 years ago when these treaties were signed. But haven’t we, kind of, engineered our way into a solution where there are unintended consequences that we didn’t think about? By putting in these sorts of canals and dams that we have?

GIES: I think the very heavily engineered water system that we have has worked to a point. But now we’re hitting these tipping points with population growth and climate change. But I just want to offer a couple of statistics to give some perspective on how we’ve interfered with the water cycle. So, humans have drained or filled 87 percent of the world’s wetlands. And we’ve intervened with dams and diversions on two thirds of the world’s large rivers. And the land area covered by our cities has doubled just since 1992. So, in all of these ways, we’re actually preventing water from having its low cycle. So, these are wetlands, floodplains, mountain meadows, and forests where water can flow on the land and move underground. And the relationship between surface and groundwater is really important, and I think it’s something that people have really forgotten in the U.S. was, you know, we tend to think of groundwater as extra water when surface water runs dry. But in fact, surface water and groundwater are connected. And when you have a healthy water table that supplies streams, rivers, and wetlands from below.

SREENIVASAN: If you could explain this idea of slow water.

GIES: So, all the people around the world who I met, these are engineers, ecologists, landscape architects, urban planners who are doing this really innovative things with water, they are all seeking to restore slow bases we’ve eradicated with development. And they’re also seeking to, like, reconnect that surface groundwater like. And so, I came to think of them as part of the slow water movement, which I find analogous to the slow food movement. I mean, that’s why I thought of it because the slow food movement is, you know, drawing attention to where our food comes from and how its growth impacts local people and the environment, and similarly, the way we relate to water is having these kinds of impacts. So, there are characteristics of slow water. It — they’re distributed across the landscape rather than centralized. They are socially just. They don’t take water from one place and give it to another. They don’t protect one area that — and then therefore make another area more vulnerable. There’s often a community engagement component. So, places I traveled in India and Peru, for example, Kenya, you had local people who were actually, you know, building and maintaining these projects, sometimes collaborating with each other in a very hands-on way. It’s kind of hard to imagine that in the United States, although certainly people who are landowners have done things like this on their own property. But there can also be an educational component, like if you reclaim that industrial site alongside the river and build a park there, you can have signage that explains to the public, you know, what’s happening with the water cycle there. And to a large extent, slow water is local. And, you know, that can seem anathema to places like the U.S. Western California where we bring so much water from elsewhere.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

GIES: But it really means — you know, making the most of the water that comes and, you know, capturing it on site. Having it be there locally and trying to think in terms of living within your water means.

SREENIVASAN: You also mentioned, for example, the ripple effects of what we’ve done as human beings on all the different river sheds and the river systems around the world by, for example, putting dams. On the one hand, lots of people who engineer this and countries will say, hydroelectric power is fantastic. It is so much better than, you know, us trying to use fossil fuels. It’s here for us. But at the same time, we are now in a situation where Lake Mead is running, potentially, so low that it might not be able to generate power in the future.

GIES: Yes, I think that there are some misconceptions about hydropower. Before, I wrote a lot about water, I wrote a lot about renewable energy. And you know, there are countries in Southern Africa, like Zambia, for example, Mozambique, where they get 96 percent of their power from hydropower. And, you know, for a long-time people thought of hydropower as a reliable baseload power.

SREENIVASAN: Uh-huh.

GIES: But, you know, we’ve seen really terrible droughts where hydropower isn’t able to be produced anymore. And then you have, you know, entire economies collapsing at times if you have a country where, you know, you’re entirely dependent on the hydropower. And even countries that aren’t 100 percent or, you know, largely dependent on the hydropower can still have significant impacts. I’ll also add that, for a long time, hydropower was considered to be carbon free source of electricity. And in fact, it’s not. There has been an increasing body of science showing the emissions that are embedded within hydropower that were not really counted because people just presumed or we’re not burning anything, so it’s fine. But, you know, there’s a lot of emissions embedded in concrete. I think something like eight percent of our global emissions come from concrete. And then there is significant methane releases from the reservoir as that plant material decomposes. So, you know, it can take, you know, more than a decade of, like, the equivalent of burning fossil fuels too overcome that embedded carbon within a dam. And then there is just really, really major ecological and sociological impacts which have been pretty well documented around the world.

SREENIVASAN: China, for example, has very visibly gone through some of that hardship of people being displaced because of the needs of a dam. You also write about something that’s kind of interesting that I haven’t heard about before this. Sponge Cities that they have there. What are those? What can we learn from them?

GIES: I mentioned that the area covered by pavement in our cities, globally, has doubled just since 1992. And we’ve seen a real increase in urban flooding. And it’s because when rain falls — I mean, partly it’s because climate change is bringing bigger storms, but part of it is also because that water can’t sink into the soil. And so, it just runs off the pavement and then you have a lot of water at once that you have to do something with. And there’s a landscape architect there named Yu Kongjian who is pretty well-known internationally for his work in trying to find places within the city for water to slow and move underground. And he does this through his landscape projects. So, the president of China, Xi Jinping, became aware of this work and decided to make it a nationwide program to try to make cities more permeable and dubbed it Sponge Cities. And I really like that moniker because it’s very evocative, you know. You imagine the soil absorbing the water and then releasing it later when it’s needed. And so, within a city, there are various ways to do this. You know, you can have green roofs. You can have biosoils which are, like, ditches that absorb stormwater and typically they’re aligned with native plants that can tolerate both the water and the dry period. You can do infiltration wells, which are kind of conical wells into the ground and then the water absorbs through the sides. You can make your pavement permeable. You can make incentives to increase infiltration, like, with street trees and things like that.

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned that, you know, trying to return water back more towards the natural state of how it flowed doesn’t just have a regional benefit, but it can help with this existential crisis that we face about climate change. How?

GIES: You know, there’s an expression that climate change is water change and that’s because a lot of the ways that we are starting to experience climate change in our own communities is through these water extremes. You know, heavy flooding or really intense droughts. And I think, you know, people can feel really overwhelmed by a climate change. We are waiting for our national leaders to make deals with other national leaders and everybody to reduce their emissions. And, you know, that’s incredibly important, but 25 percent of our emissions come from land use change. And these slow water solutions have a really important carbon storage component. And in some cases, like, different kinds of wetlands can store three to five times more carbon dioxide than forests.

SREENIVASAN: You know, just recently, we had John Hickenlooper on the program. And he was talking about the need for senators to come together and try to hash out their disagreements about how to use the water on the Colorado. If you are in that room, so to speak, where these people are, I mean, what is — based on your reporting on the water detectives that you’ve talked to and the research that you’ve done for those on what is working around the world, how — what does the water — what does the Colorado want? And how can we help it become more, I guess, life-sustaining which is beneficial to us?

GIES: What water wants is a return of these slow faces (ph) that we’ve eradicated with our development, you know, the wetlands, the floodplains. So, there are a lot of different things that we can do. You know, beaver restoration is a really important thing that’s happening in the western U.S. It started, kind of, in Washington State, but now it’s expanding to Oregon and California and Colorado. And, you know, trappers came first across around the United States and Canada and eliminated most of the beavers, killed them through trapping for the fur trade. And so, when settlers came, the landscape was already significantly dried out from what it had been naturally. And beavers play a really important role, you know, they build these ponds and that slows water. And then, you know, the water can then move underground and join the surface water at a later date. The floodplains, so, you know, when we put levees right along with the floodplain and use that land for development or for farming, we are raising the level of the river and increasing flood risk. But we are also preventing that water from slowing on the flood plain. And that kind of whisks our water away and makes less of it available into the dry season. There’s a lot of important processes for carbon storage and food and salmon that happen on the floodplain. So, in some places, including California, there are new policies to encourage moving the levees back to the far edge of the floodplain and returning that land to water. But I really do think it requires thinking more in terms of — you know, I hesitate to say this because I feel like it sounds a little new agey, but the abundance mentality versus the scarcity mentality. You know, when you are team not trying to suck out every drop and maximize every efficiency, you’re leaving more water in the system for it to do its thing. And you know, like, in California, we have this, you know, fish versus farmers argument. But there’s been some good scientific work showing that when you set back the levee on the floodplain and you allow the fish to spend time on the floodplain when they’re small, they get really, really big, you know, significant five, 10 times faster than they would if they’re just going through the river. Because the river in a levee is like a food desert.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

GIES: So, the fish on a floodplain gets fat and happy. It’s much stronger. It doesn’t need as much special attention. And then that wonder is — that same water that was benefiting the fish is moving back into the river over longer period of time and keeping water levels higher during the summer. So, the same water is benefiting the fish and the farmers. And so, that’s just one example of the way in which providing for the systems and making them healthier, you know, they can better provide for us.

SREENIVASAN: Erica Gies, thank you so much for joining us. The book is called “Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge”. Thanks so much for joining us.

GIES: Thank you.