Will it be to late?
ALEX BEAM
Water on the brain
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist | October 31, 2007
It sounds strange, but I moved here for the water. Already in the early 1980s, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that the West would be running out of water, with the mighty Colorado River overtaxed, and the water table declining beneath the arid lands of Nevada and Arizona. That was about the same time that the late Marc Reisner started researching "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water," which was published in 1986.
I knew I had to get out of Southern California, and New England seemed like just the place. I didn't care about the climate; I looked at the upper Northeast as the aqua-Arabia of the future, overflowing with the one resource people would need to make it through the 21st century: water.
Oops.
A while back, I bumped into Federal Reserve Bank economist Robert Tannenwald, co-author of a very disturbing report on New England's water resources. Nowadays, as I see pictures on the evening news of a half-full Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir, or read about water crises in Georgia and elsewhere, I remember Tannenwald's words about potentially "severe water shortages" in New England. His message: It can happen here. In fact, it is.
Tannenwald's Fed report explains that our lush geography is working against us. Compared to the West, our underground aquifers are quite shallow and easily depleted. Also unlike the West, our mountain ranges don't trap snowmelt in high-altitude lakes; our thousand of rivers and streams funnel potable snowmelt, as well as the heavy rainfalls, across the gravelly water table into the ocean.
One of our largest potential supplies of fresh water, Lake Champlain, is polluted, and Vermont spends big bucks treating it for the ever-increasing stream of immigrants from points south.
Taps ran dry this summer in the Green Mountain State, in the rapidly expanding town of Williston, which was adding subdivisions quicker than its wells could pump water. "These subdivisions were stealing water from each other, and they started fighting," says Jon Groveman, water program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. "It's counterintuitive because it seems to rain so much here."
Closer to home, several towns have been fighting over access to the Ipswich River, just as several states are struggling to tap the Colorado River out west. Beverly, Boxford, Danvers, Topsfield, Peabody, Wilmington, Wenham, and Hamilton all have claims on Ipswich water. Reading, which used to take Ipswich water, has since joined the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which has generally reliable sources of water from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs. Wilmington has applied to join the MWRA.
I asked the MWRA's planning director, Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, if it would be fair to compare the fight over the Ipswich to the quarrel over the Colorado. "Obviously the scale is different," he said. "But the principles are the same."
What is going to happen? Desalination of ocean water, once viewed as a high-cost alternative for the oil-rich, water-starved countries of the Arabian peninsula, has come to New England. There is already a small plant in Maine, and Brockton plans to open a large facility on the Taunton River next spring. If things get really desperate, we can always take some of Canada's water. I am sure they won't mind.
Postscript
On the very day that I wrote a column about Internet book reviewing, former UMass professor Carter Jefferson launched internetreviewof books.com. It's not as ambitious as the Barnes & Noble Review, yet, but maybe it will come to something. Somehow Jefferson and his colleagues bamboozled essayist Sven Birkerts into reviewing a collection of John Updike's essays for free, and there is other good work on the site.
Duly noted: openlettersmonthly .com, which also publishes reviews. As far I can tell, neither site has yet mentioned the best book ever written: "Agent Zigzag," by Ben Macintyre.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com |
