Where defense hawks, libertarians and leftists find common environmental ground.

Over the course of human history, many major civilizations have collapsed because of water.

From the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia and the Old Kingdom of Egypt around 2000 BC to the Mayan Empire in Central America around 900 AD to the Ming Dynasty around 1600 AD.

Provision of water is absolutely critical to maintaining large-scale societies. And given the scale of societies today, we need incredible volumes of water to sustain ourselves.

Humanity consumes roughly 4.3 trillion cubic meters of fresh water annually. That’s about 1.72 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools that needs to be moved each year to where we need it.

Existing human engineered systems consume roughly 1,400 terawatt-hours (TWh) of artificial energy per year to extract, treat, and move water - roughly the annual energy demand of India.

But over the course of history, and still today, nature has done the vast majority of the heavy lifting to get that water where it needs to go.

Nature’s water systems utilize roughly 4,000 times more energy than our existing human engineered systems, powered entirely by the sun, to move water through the atmosphere and power transpiration in plants. [Source]

4,000 times more energy!

To put that in perspective, that is 5.6 million terawatt-hours or 32 times the total amount of energy that humans use every year.

And that is why, for millennia, humans have settled almost exclusively where there are reliable rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

But as we’ve degraded the natural systems that have moved water at scale for the history of homo sapiens, those systems are starting to fail to deliver water. And the millenia long period where we have been able to take them for granted may be coming to a close.

So we start exploring options like investing in small-scale nuclear reactors across California’s coast to desalinate ocean water and pump it inland, to provide water for agriculture, cities, industry and the new player on the block, data centers, as the Colorado River flow continues to decrease year after year. I recently did a very high level quantitative cost/benefit analysis of nature vs engineered solutions to restore some of the Colorado River flow.

Without a doubt, we will need to make significant investments into new technologies and engineered solutions to treat and move water at scale. Because as the climate changes, there will be unavoidable shifts in ecological function that we will have to adapt to.

But where I think we are potentially making a fatal mistake, is that the powers that be are largely only looking at engineered solutions and not considering options to invest in protecting and restoring the ecosystems themselves to avoid needing to pursue the engineered solution or at least reduce our dependency on the engineered solutions.

And there are a few reasons that I haven’t seen enter into mainstream discourse why we should consider nature-based water solutions over engineered.

Three reasons that crosscut the partisan divide in current American politics.

Failing water resources is a critical issue for national stability and national security. The solutions that I see being proposed to address this national stability risk are largely engineered solutions. Most in the American West center on leveraging nuclear energy to do large scale desalination of ocean water and pumping that water inland.

One question is what technology solutions cost in dollars relative to protecting and restoring ecosystems. Another is the risk of delivery.

One consideration I haven’t seem come up in those discussions, is the acute national security risk that new engineered systems would present.

The US recently bombed desalination plants in Iran, disrupting water supplies for tens of thousands of people.

Imagine that the US decides to build desalination plants up and down the west coast. That would create a huge new amount of exposure to future attacks, a major national security risk.

And it’s not just the risk of a physical attack. Cybersecurity is increasingly a bigger threat, especially as the emerging AI models put more and more capability into the hands of bad actors.

And as of writing this sentence on August 1st there were at least seven states that experienced cyberattacks on their water systems in the last few months.

What are the implications for national security if our water is increasingly dependent on a set of focused pieces of infrastructure that are highly vulnerable to software and physical attacks?

You know what system can’t be hacked by humans or AI? Nature.

In all likelihood, in the US and many other countries, the solutions to a growing water crisis will likely be a combination of both engineered and nature solutions. And we will always need water treatment plants to make sure it is clean enough for human consumption.

But nature-based water solutions are inherently decentralized, large-scale systems that do not require energy or software for them to run. Engineered solutions are centralized, point source water systems that require energy and software.

Where there is an opportunity to invest in large scale protection and restoration of ecosystems to increase water resources (quantity of water), we must consider the national security, the national defense, implications of investing in those systems relative to engineered systems.

But the other question is what engineered versus nature-based systems cost the masses in terms of access to resources, who controls them and where power ultimately sits in those systems.

This is where libertarians and leftists can likely find some common ground.

If I want to be able to grow my own food, live where I want to live and live how I want to live, I need to have access to water. Water that doesn’t depend on someone else deciding that I can have it.

Nature-based water producing, regulating and cleaning systems don’t see water as power, or water as money. They provide water freely to anyone and any societies that decide to steward nature so that nature provides water for everyone without discrimination.

Water is freedom. Water is the democratization of power. Because where there is water, any human can flourish.

But if your source of water is controlled by someone else, if they become the gatekeepers, that water becomes their power. If you’ve seen the Mad Max movies, you’ve seen how this one plays out.

Where nature-based systems democratize access and power and deliver the most freedom, engineered systems run the risk of centralizing power, reducing access and constraining freedoms.

More often than not, engineered water systems are funded and run entirely as public utilities. Owned by the public and managed by the government with the public having power in how those resources are distributed and maintaining those services at a cost people can afford.

But what worries me, in the age of growing privatization, is who will own the engineered water systems of the future? If we go the path of large-scale desalination plants, will they be funded and run as a public utility? Or will they be financed privately and privately owned.

I would argue, that if someone, some entity, ends up owning our water sources, has full control, they will become the most powerful entity, powerful people in the country. Because who controls the water, in a water scarce region, controls the people.

And to be frank, that is not the America that I want. That is not something that I would want for any country, state or city.

So yes, one clear step is to make sure that when we choose engineered water solutions, we set them up as public utilities. But a single entity cannot own or control nature-based water systems. Nature itself.

If we want to guarantee that we never have to worry about some entity or individuals owning the majority of the water producing infrastructure that we all depend on, we should invest in nature.

Now to be clear, individuals, communities and corporations do own or steward the land that comprises nature-based systems. In the American West in particular, much of that land is owned by the federal government as national forest for example. And it is the decisions of each of those actors that affect the overall function of a nature-based water system.

And this is why that system is failing. Because each of those actors are optimizing for their own individual gain, as we would expect all of them to do. But they, we, are not factoring in the collective and individual losses if the combination of those lands stop producing water.

This is why, inherently, government, or some form of collective governance, collective stewardship of those resources is needed to get all actors that share the dependency on these lands to produce water, to pay the actors that own the lands that together deliver the water to those who need it.

If we want to democratize access to water, maintain water resource freedoms and ensure that power stays in the hands of many instead of a few, we need to create governance mechanisms that treat nature as critical infrastructure for water — where the dependent actors collectively contribute to the producing actors, those that steward the land, for that water.

Personally, I would much rather pay American farmers, foresters and land stewards to produce the water that we all depend on than pay future large-scale desalination and nuclear companies.

And just to note, given the likely automation of engineered systems, yes they might have more job creation than nature-based solutions during the construction, but over the long-term, I’d imagine that there would be much more jobs created and sustained from nature-based water solutions than engineered.

And it’s worth mentioning, this dynamic is not exclusive to water.

Let’s look at pollination.

About 1/3 of the food we eat depends on pollinators. In the US, roughly 80% of all insect crop pollination is provided by commercial migratory beekeeping operations. A service that since the beginning of time was free of charge, available to everyone, provided by nature, is now something that we need to pay for, that someone else could control.

We could decide to reduce pesticides and collectively create more pollinator habitat so that we can all grow the food we need, when we need it.

Or not.

These are the choices.

1. We keep the atmospheric systems (climate) stable and ecosystems (nature) intact that move water to where we need it today.

2. We create new technologies and engineered systems that can move vast volumes of water to where we need it today.

3. We move our farmlands, our industry and our cities to where water is going to be in the future.

One falls into the traditional mitigation bucket with two and three looking more like adaptation. And we very likely will need to do some of two and hopefully not, but maybe even some of three.

We very likely will need to invest in new technologies and engineered solutions such as desalination to move water at scale. This article is not me making that case that we should only invest in nature. Because nature itself is variable and we can’t always depend on nature. But I would argue that we also can’t always depend on engineered solutions. Because what if the energy system powering those engineered solutions goes down?

There is risk on both sides and that is why we should be investing in both. The issue that I see today is that we heavily default to investing in engineered solutions instead of nature solutions and that is unwise.

We would be wise to look at where it makes sense to invest in nature to build resiliency in the face of climate change to maintain existing flows of water or even restore where we have lost.

And makes sense to date has largely been a cost/benefit analysis largely focused on the financial cost and the water benefits and the delivery risks. But there are other costs and benefits that we must consider.

Like what type of water infrastructure, nature or engineered solutions, is more of a national security risk? And what type of water infrastructure, nature or engineered, bolsters individual liberties and puts power and agency back in the hands of the masses, every individual, instead of corporations or corrupt or authoritarian governments?

I’m sure you can think of other considerations but these were new angles that I think are critical for us all to consider, no matter our political leanings. Maybe in your country, the considerations are different, but I urge all of us to give a think to what they may be and start to amplify the message that we all depend on water and we must not overlook nature as critical foundational infrastructure needed to deliver it, impartially, for all.

Food for thought.

- Eric