Mankind is putting unprecedented strain on the world's water supply, as demand for this increasingly-polluted natural resource continues to rise, journalist Marq de Villiers said Wednesday in a lecture in Spaulding Auditorium. De Villiers spoke alongside environmental engineer Alice Outwater about the need to improve management of the planet's water resources. This week's talk, which drew a crowd of about 300 community members, was part of the Positive Solutions lecture series sponsored by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth, an Upper Valley adult education program.
The growing water crisis could dramatically change the geopolitical landscape of the world, de Villiers said. The crisis will likely increase tension in the Middle East, for example, as Syria, Jordan and Israel compete for dwindling water resources, he said.
Within countries, water has become a severely limited resource, de Villiers said, adding that even water-efficient countries like Egypt are having trouble keeping up with rapid population growth. Egypt's population is increasing by a million people every month, he said, and would need the equivalent of 20 new Nile Rivers to sustain this growth.
Water pollution is also a concern, according to de Villiers. China is one of the world's worst water polluters, de Villiers said, adding that the Yellow River is so dirty it is not suitable for irrigation, and 80 percent of China's rivers are incapable of supporting fish life.
De Villiers said he remains optimistic, however. Countries are beginning to adopt more sustainable water practices, he said, showing that the global water crisis can be averted.
Because of improvements to water management, de Villiers said, ten years ago, a fish was found in the Rhine River, which had for the past thirty years been unable to sustain any fish life. Today, there is a viable fish population in the upper Rhine, he added.
Progress can also be seen in North America. Twenty years ago, beluga whales off the St. Lawrence waterway were found so coated in pollutants that they met "classical definition of toxic waste," according to de Villiers. Today, organizations such as the Riverkeepers in the Hudson River have cleaned up the country's rivers by suing polluters, he said.
Improvements have even been made in the Third World, de Villiers said. Windhoek, the capitol of the African country Namibia, is the only city in the world to completely recycle all of its water, while the African country of Niger created 7.4 acres of new tree growth after the government simply announced that farmers, not the state, owned all the trees.
Another solution to the water crisis is desalination, de Villiers said. Desert countries such as Australia and Saudi Arabia are beginning to build new water treatment plants in order to make salt water drinkable.
De Villiers warned that desalination would not solve the problem by itself, however.
"Desalination is like adding a lane to an expressway," he said. "It never solves the traffic problem, it just puts more cars on the road."
Outwater detailed how the global water crisis applies to New Hampshire and the Northeast. Governments adequately regulate point-source pollution emitted from single sources such as factories, she said, but need to work on combatting non-point-source pollution such as acid rain.
"In theory, if we could control point-source and non-point-source pollution we would have clean water," Outwater said.
Because pollution and population growth have decreased the country's supply of clean water, the United States has lowered its per capita consumption of water by promoting low-flow showers and low-flush toilets, de Villiers said.
"The cheapest water is the water you never use," he said.
