The Conversation - 64 - Peter Gleick

**Aengus Anderson** (0:15)
Welcome back to The Conversation. I'm Angus Anderson.

**Mike Assull** (0:18)
I'm Mike Assull.

**Neil Prendergast** (0:19)
I'm Neil Prendergast.

**Aengus Anderson** (0:20)
And today's interview is with Peter Gleick. He's the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a think tank dedicated to international and domestic water policy. He's won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and has been deeply involved in crafting water policy with the United Nations.
In other words, Peter knows a lot about water.

**Peter Gleick** (0:42)
The water crisis is unfortunately a lot of different things. It's hard to pin it down, in part because water is a global resource, of course, but it's also a local resource.
Water's connected to the requirement to grow food for the world's population. It's connected to our natural ecosystems. It's part of the climate system in the hydrologic cycle. It's part of our industrial system. So the water crisis is different things to different people in different places.
And when people ask me, well, there's a water crisis? Really, what kind of a water crisis is there? If there's anything that, in my opinion, defines the water crisis, it's that it's now the 21st century and we have failed to provide safe water and sanitation to everyone on the planet.
There are a billion people or so without access to safe drinking water. There are two and a half billion people without access to sanitation services, something that I and my community basically take for granted. That's a gross failure. It's a crisis. It leads to bad things. It leads to water related diseases and cholera and dysentery and typhoid and probably two million deaths a year, unnecessary preventable deaths from water related diseases. And there are many other aspects of the world's water crisis. That one is the one that bothers me the most, I guess.
We've been lucky in the United States in the sense that we industrialized, started industrializing in the 1800s. The United States was where some of the greatest advances in water and sanitation occurred almost exactly 100 years ago. We started building the sophisticated water filtration, water chlorination, water treatment systems that in the United States eliminated those water related diseases that are still rampant in much of the rest of the world. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery, those were common diseases in the United States in the 1800s and even in the early 1900s.
And we've now vanquished them mostly. We've gotten rid of them precisely because we invested in innovative technology and modern water systems to provide safe water and sanitation. Now I can't not mention the fact that even today in the United States, there are populations without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation services. There are people, especially in rural America, who do not have safe drinking water and they either don't know it or they do know it and we've not addressed the problem. So it's not a uniquely developing country problem. We have, even in the United States, serious and growing water scarcity challenges. We have contamination problems with chemicals that we have not adequately regulated here in the United States. We have conflicts between states in the United States about who gets to use what water to do what. We have evidence that climate change is already influencing water demand, affecting water availability, changing extreme events. There are a whole suite of water related problems here, unrelated to these basic human need challenges that are pressing in other parts of the world.

**Aengus Anderson** (4:17)
Do you think that we are taking adequate steps to remedy any of these problems?

**Peter Gleick** (4:23)
Well, yes and no. In general, no. I think for too long, we've taken water for granted. That we turn on the tap, and almost everywhere in the United States, incredibly high quality potable water at an incredibly low price comes out.
And that's the way it's been for a long time. It's the cheapest service that we have. It's cheaper than our cell phones. It's cheaper than our cable TV. It's cheaper than our internet connections. It's cheaper than our energy bill. Of all the utilities, almost everywhere, water is the cheapest.
As a result, we've often ignored water and water-related problems.
But I do think that's changing. And people care enormously about water when there are problems. And I think there are remarkably innovative things that are going on in some places.

**Aengus Anderson** (5:12)
If there's a type of thought that sort of characterizes our current approach to water, what would you say that is?

**Peter Gleick** (5:19)
Well, it's certainly fragmented and for the most part, uninformed.
We don't have a national water policy, or we do by default, but not by intent. There's also just a general lack of understanding about where our water comes from and what we do with it and what's required to protect the natural ecosystems and what the value of natural ecosystems are. There's a lot of ignorance about the nature of our water problems.