Taking Water for Granted
In places where it’s readily available — a matter of turning on a tap, or, for some reason, buying it in a fancy bottle — water is considered a boring subject; second, possibly, only to air. If you go to Germany, for example, and a local says you’re "like a sip of water" (wie ein schluck wasser), they’re not saying you’re refreshing, possibly life-saving, but that you’re generic, boring, weak. Water is, still, ubiquitous to some of us. This arrangement seems perfectly natural, but it is in fact deeply unusual. The days of easy water are a historical and geographical anomaly, and from California’s central valley to Flint to Miami, the signs are accumulating all around us that they’re not going to last much longer.
Like climate change, the words world water crisis may make you recoil with corrupt resignation: I can’t do anything about it, so I’d better not think about it too much. Unlike climate change, however, water shortages are not necessarily a problem that can only be solved with a unified global solution. Author Charles Fishman has argued that rather than one crisis, we are facing dozens of local water crises, all with particular problems and local solutions. In other words, you can do something about it. That requires taking a fresh look at this magic substance that formed our civilization and keeps us alive, and thinking deeply about the idiosyncratic ways we interact with it.
Photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz and Fishman have been offering us that hard, thoughtful look at water for over a decade now. In Fishman’s book The Big Thirst and Abdulaziz’ ongoing series Water, they both capture our strange relationship with the stuff of life, contrasting different cultures’ interactions with it. They succeed in different ways at making water surprising, the kind of secretly profound thing you’d want to talk about with your friends when you're stoned ("the shit is everywhere — but also nowhere!"). And this is important work in the age of scarcity, when water is being traded as a future, and the US Vice President is predicting a future of water wars. We spoke to Fishman and Abdulaziz about how they made water interesting, their respective world tours of water crises, and what can be done to solve them.
I would love to start off at the very beginning — in the biblical sense — with a question that seems very simple and dull but is actually pretty mind-blowing. What is water even? Why are we blessed with it, the one thing that really separates us from other planets? Charles, I believe you have a good story about finding it out for yourself.
As a reporter, you don’t always tackle subjects in the right order. And so, six months into writing my book on water, I had an odd, slightly embarrassing experience. I was talking to a nephrologist, a specialist in kidney disease, about how people die of dehydration. Somehow this turned out to be a lot more boring than I’d expected. While I was listening to him, my mind wandered vividly, I started thinking about Niagara Falls, and the Pacific Ocean, and I had a moment of quiet panic. Where did all that water come from? I had no idea. How could I not know? I spent the next two weeks talking to astronomers and cosmologists about how water had arrived here on earth. And that was such an astonishing and humbling journey. Well, I’ve got news for your readers. There is no mechanism for creating or destroying new water on Earth. Every molecule of water that we've got was delivered here from outer space, when oxygen and hydrogen atoms slammed into each other in these vast interstellar clouds of gas. Any water in your Fiji Water; any water coming out of your tap or your toilet, it all came to earth from outer space, delivered by asteroids and comets when the planet formed. All the water we have is all the water we've ever had. So when you draw a glass of water to make coffee or tea in the morning, that water was consumed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. In fact, it’s been through the kidneys of a dinosaur six or seven times. The good news is that it’s completely recyclable. It's all dinosaur pee. The bad news is you're not getting any new water, so you better take care of what you’ve got.
What draws a person to such a huge, important — and, in retrospect, precocious — subject? How did you become fascinated with water and its weird role in the world?Â
My family used to drive down to Miami, where I grew up, every year at Christmas to visit my parents. We checked into a hotel — this was 2005, 2006 — all worn out from riding in the minivan for twenty hours. There was a bottle of Fiji Water waiting on the hotel room table, a brand I had never heard of at that point — this strange rectangle of water. Before we had seen the eight dollar price tag on it, my wife had opened and half consumed the bottle. I remember asking her: do you think this actually comes to Miami from Fiji? Eventually, I threw the empty bottle in my suitcase, and when I got home discovered that it was indeed from the Fijian islands, and that this was a place where 53% of the population didn’t have access to clean drinking water. Meanwhile, eighteen hours away by plane, you could walk into any chain drugstore in America, any CVS, any Walgreens, any Rite Aid, and there's Fiji Water. That struck me as kind of insane. I ended up going to Fiji to write about this trivial product. Roughly three hundred Fijians worked for the company, and somehow generated more revenue than the three hundred thousand Fijians who work harvesting sugar. And still many people there couldn’t drink Fiji Water. That was sort of the first moment I thought about water in any particular way — the incredibly strange ways that we interact with it that seem so normal to us.
Bottled water is a ridiculous industry in many ways, but almost none of them are specific to the product itself. It's a ridiculous paradigm that applies to pretty much every large agricultural product that we consume in this hyper-connected, hyper-globalized, modern economy, where it's often times cheaper to send something away to a very distant place and have it fixed or modified or whatever, and then have it sent back to you, than it would be to hire a local worker for that cost. Water is just more intimate, moretied to every aspect of our lives, so it shapes our culture more profoundly.
Over the past ten years, you’ve been to dozens of countries across all continents (including the uninhabited one) to tell this story. How did you become the chief auteur of our neurotic interactions with water?
I had been a contract photographer at the Wall Street Journal, shooting a whole variety of things, and I felt like I wanted to do my own thing and devote my skill to a big overarching topic. I was looking for a theme. I wanted to capture our changing world, the challenges to our environment. I looked at oil, at resource management, at migration. I eventually realized it was staring me in the face all that time. Water was the common denominator to all these crises, and it lent itself to my work — this combination of illusion, surrealism, and yet still a very concrete topic. Water is both a setting and a resource. It’s the interactive stage and the driving force of the play. Water connects and separates so many people and that became the central theme of my work.
Your photos don’t show these crises in a dramatic way. You try to get us to think about water, rather than scaring us about shortages of it. How did you settle on that approach?
The first place I travelled to was Sierra Leone, in West Africa, which at the time, in 2011 was enduring an outbreak of cholera. When I arrived there, I was very focused on understanding the epidemic and seeing its impact. Working in Freetown, I saw all the conditions that lead to cholera: impoverished areas with limited privacy, hygiene, and sanitation, dump sites of refuse, and garbage burning next to homes. These conditions make a waterborne illness easily transmissible. During my time in Grey Bush and Kroo Bay, the two main slums that had a major outbreak, the locals spoke about this life-ending disease in a casual way — with the same immediate reality that we would speak of going to a store to pick something up. This was their daily reality, and, unable to control it, they had accepted it. I tried to capture those moments in that place without being dramatic and didactic about it, because that doesn’t tell the story as it happens. In fact, it prevents people from connecting with the work emotionally.
I met a woman who told me a story about her friend who had contracted cholera in the morning, came home from work, and had perished by the evening. The first time I heard this, I knew it was a fact, I knew it in terms of data. But to hear someone leave their home for work and die by the time it's dinnertime because of a disease that's entirely preventable through sanitation and proper hygiene, that stuck with me. I didn’t want to dramatize that. I choose to capture the humanity, rather than the inhumanity, of these crises
An essential crux of this story in both your works is the Ganges. What about it fascinated you so much, Charles?
In India, I was immensely struck by what I thought of as a contradiction between the sanctity of India’s rivers and their immense pollution. The Ganges, for example, the holiest river in India, has one thousand times more E. coli bacteria than is considered safe for human contact in America. The science advisor at the US Embassy in Delhi told me that I could go out on the river — there are no water hazards per se — but suggested I leave everything metal on shore, because the river is so polluted that it is rotting in its banks, and it produces methane gas, a little layer can be seen hovering on the surface. If you should cause a spark, there will be an explosion. I remember speaking to Coca-Cola’s head of sustainability for Southeast Asia, and telling her how surprised and puzzled I was that all of these factories can pump their toxins straight into the Yamuna and the Ganges. How people burn bodies in the river, the raw sewage from twenty million people dumped in the river, and yet the rivers are regarded as "holy." I said I didn’t understand that contradiction. She burst out laughing and said, well, that's a very Western way of thinking about it. The river is a Goddess, you can't do anything to hurt her.
This is the paradox at the heart of water. We always find a way to insulate ourselves from rational responsibility. That’s true of water management in the Ganges, but also true of oil spills in the Louisiana Gulf, or the way that we expect strawberries to still cost $2.99, despite the extreme drought in California’s central valley where they’re grown.Â
Your photos tease out these contradictions. I love that photo of that rich green golf course surrounded by desert.
Yeah, I try to turn these contrasts into subtle elements in my photos. The methane haze that Charles mentioned hovering over the Ganges. I used that to create a dreamlike quality in those images — the shared dream of a river — the pollution and the religiosity. Maybe, if the viewer looks at it long enough, they’ll see the beauty and the terror at the same time. That’s the place I want them to be. Photography is not a great narrative tool, like writing, where Charles can lay out every fact and detail and facet with so much control. What it’s really good at is connecting someone to that immediate moment, a way of recontextualizing their understanding in the twilight of reality and surreality. I try to show that beauty and the cognitive dissonance that I think connects all water crises. In many ways, we’re not that different from India in how we treat our resources. We also believe that you can’t destroy the Goddess.
The difference in India is how much more closely people’s existences are tied to this river — how much more they use it. I travelled down it from the mouth, starting in the foothills of the Himalayas, where it first merges, the combination of two other rivers, one quite muddy, and one glacial — a holy place to Hindus. This holiness draws people to the rivers. I travelled from mass rituals in Devprayag, at the mouth, to Allahabad, almost dead center along that route between the Himalayas in the Bay of Bengal. Allahabad draws the largest congregation of human beings on the planet, the Kumbh Mela, which hosts fifty to sixty million people and I can only describe as the rave to end all raves. This is the part of the story that goes beyond the environment, into much more exalted realms.
Both your work captures these fraught interactions, but it also shows glimmers of hope. Charles, your book drew attention to the future of water scarcity, but it also made a point of highlighting places that were showing us how to deal with these crises. They can be successfully managed. Some of these success stories are right next to crisis areas, showing us that it comes down to local policies rather than global governance.
Yes, one important person I met in India was Mehmood Khan, a senior executive at Unilever, who decided to move back to the village he’d grown up in, about fifty miles from Delhi, after forty years overseas. While he had been rising through the ranks of this gigantic company, he watched the global economy boom, and even the economy of India boom, but he saw the conditions in his village, Mewat, decline sharply. He was so upset about this that, at some point in the late 2000s he said to his wife, I'm quitting Unilever and we're going to move back to India, and I'm going to figure out what's going wrong in my village. He moved back to a cot in a room in his family home, for his community. Girls weren't being educated. The once-robust agriculture was failing. He dug into each of these issues, and discovered that every one of them was the result of a water problem. Girls stopped going to school the moment they got their periods because there were no sanitation facilities in the schools in the village — causing them to drop out in the sixth grade. The wells of his childhood, that his father had dug, had gotten contaminated, so local farmers were always waiting for rain. He became a water campaigner, and he found that with every local problem he tackled, it solved a few other problems: improving water access improved school attendance, it improved agriculture, it gave people the ability to think a little longer term again.
Another great example is in a "slum" neighborhood called Rangpuri Pahadi, where residents got tired of struggling for water and decided to pool their resources. Six hundred families — thirty five hundred people — dug a new well and created their own water subscription service. It costs them each roughly a day’s wages to get water delivered to their houses for a month. This isn’t even a legal settlement and they have solved their water problem. And that means that every adult in that "settlement" can work. Women don’t have to spend much of their day waiting for the water tap to be turned on, or carrying water. Local health has improved dramatically. This is a neighborhood where many of the people work as housekeepers and cooks in rich parts of Delhi, where people have water. They said, Why can’t we have that too? And they didn’t wait for someone else to solve their problem — they did it themselves
Another one of those success stories is not far from where I’m located in California, the epicenter of the American water crisis. What makes Las Vegas such a fascinating case study for how to handle water?
Las Vegas has this unique system for getting water. Its water comes from Lake Mead, and the total amount of water the city is allowed to take out of the lake was set in 1935. The population has grown from forty thousand people to 2.2 million, and they get no more water than when they started. That’s crazy. How do they do that? In 1985, Patricia Mulroy became head of water for the Vegas metro area, and she looked at two things: the rate of growth of her community — Vegas was doubling in size every ten years — and the available water supply. And she realized quickly: we’re running out of water. Soon we're gonna have to prevent people from building here because we won’t be able to hook them up to the water utility. She spent the next twenty years changing the water culture of her city in a thousand different ways. Thanks to her, you aren't allowed to have a front lawn in Las Vegas anymore if your house has been built after 2000. Why? Because it's the desert. Every golf course in Las Vegas — and there are more than forty of them — has a water budget. We don't care what the weather is. We don't care how pretty your greens are. Stick to the budget. It's illegal to let your sprinklers hit the sidewalk. Las Vegas has a group of forty water police officers whose job is to enforce these water rules; they come around and cite you. Las Vegas recycles every single gallon of water that hits a drain anywhere in the metro region. If it goes down a drain, a swimming pool drain, a hot tub drain, a toilet, a shower, a washing machine, it goes back to a water purification plant owned by the regional water utility. It's cleaned and put back in Lake Mead. And the water they put back is cleaner than the water they take out. And all this paid off: in 2018, the Vegas metro region had grown 40% from 2010 to 2018 without adding a single gallon of water use. It turns out that all these seemingly small things change how people see water. And this has saved their city.
There's a story from my time in Nigeria that really gave me hope. I visited a village in rural northern Nigeria that had been dealing with water scarcity and disease outbreaks. While I was there, I got to witness firsthand the drilling of a new well. There were celebrations in the streets of this village of six hundred people. This well meant independence, self-sufficiency, dignity — control over their lives — and the sense that if they could solve this problem many other solutions would follow, as has generally been the human experience with water.
I like to wander; it's kind of how I make my photographs. And there was a woman who was balancing a huge pot of water on her head. She was balancing it with all the grace and ease of a basketball player finger-spinning a basketball, all the while talking to me. The river was behind her, it was a pale blue, and so was the sky. She was standing there with such elegant colors and poise. Everything was lining up: her head and the horizon. It looks like she’s holding the weight of the river behind her. Her water-route was much shorter now and this changes everything.
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