Till the Well Runs Dry: Alan Snitow

Map It:  Dupont Circle 

WATER. YOU USE IT every day, without giving it much of a thought.

But who owns that water?

And who do you want controlling it in the future?

That's part of what authors Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox endeavor to find out in "Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water." Their broad investigation into worldwide water issues began as a PBS documentary in 2004 and has now evolved into a book that examines cases around the U.S. in which public and private interests faced off for control of water systems.

The messages in "Thirst" serve both to inform and warn about the future of our water supply: the relatively cheap reserves of clean, reliable water we enjoy in the United States are not to be taken for granted. Public control of water could, however, serve as an effective platform for civic involvement and citizen action — as demonstrated in several cases the authors describe.

Express recently caught up with "Thirst" co-author Snitow — who will be appearing at Olsson's in Dupont Circle at 7 p.m. on Monday — to ask what we need to know about our water supply to keep our heads above ... well, you know.

» EXPRESS: A basic tenet of the book is investigating whether water is a right or a commodity. Which is it?
» SNITOW: This is a huge contest and battle over how water is going to be in the future — all over the world, in different ways and different places. And part of the reason for that is there's no real market in water in some sense, especially in places like the United States, because it's a monopoly service. There's only one set of pipes that go to every house and, as a result, you have no choice. So the question becomes, "Is this something that is going to be controlled for the common good, it is going to remain a public trust or is it going to be something that is turned into a commodity, which is for the benefit of the few?"

And in areas where it is a commodity — in poor sections of the world where people have to buy it from trucks, for example — they pay unbelievable amounts of their annual income, such as it is, for their water. And if you're going to actually modernize and provide people with the possibility of getting a real water supply — a water supply that's clean, that's tested, that's regulated and that's controlled as a human right — then you also have to make it so they can afford it. And if that can be done around the world, then by a stroke you could actually transform the standard of living and reduce unnecessary death, particularly of children, by tens of millions a year. And the cost would actually be so much less then we can actually imagine.

What works in terms of aid in the third world, in terms of making water a human right, is when you allow people to organize and assert their own needs for water. You provide a certain amount of funding and technological assistance but you make it so that the grass roots themselves are empowered to figure out how they want what they need. This has worked in a number of places in India, for example, that we've observed with extraordinary success. It has empowered women to be able to take control of a resource in India where girls and women spend four to six hours a day schlepping water around from wells. And you can, by a small level of input and help and organization, transform the water economy in the developing world. And by doing that you're able to assert a human right.

» EXPRESS: What about private companies — how big is the push to privatize water in the U.S.?
» SNITOW: When the private companies came in, the big ones, the multinationals — Suez and Veolia from France and RWE Thames from England in the late '90s and about 2002 — their expectation was that this market was going to be huge and that they were going to be taking over a significant percentage of the water utilities in the United States in the next 20 years. And what they found was that there was a kind of visceral reaction on the part of local communities — large cities to small towns — across the United States, where there were these kind of spontaneous movements that crossed a lot of normal political lines for people demanding and wanting to maintain local control of their water supply rather than shipping their money out of the country and risking much higher rates, loss of services and so forth.

And so what has happened is that although they are still in this drive to expand, their efforts have been blunted. To some extent this is a story that's sort of happening ... it's percolating up. It's not something that's happening where there's a national consciousness of it. Because it's happening in a town like in Stockton, Calif., or it's happening in Lexington, Ky., or it's happening in Holyoke, Mass., and there — because water is a local issue it's hard to sort of say, "OK this is now a national trend that people are aware of."

But it's happening in so many places that I think that you have to now look at this as being an insipient kind of national movement that is having its own research centers, like Food and Water Watch, which has done a lot of the basic research on this and is putting out information but doesn't have dozens of organizers around the country. These are groups that are developing in local areas. And these local groups have been able to battle multinationals, these are among the hundred largest companies in the world, battle them to a standstill or tie them in knots to such an extent with courts actions, with referenda and so on, that it's made it so that the multinationals have said it's going take us a lot longer than we expected. And one of the multinationals is actually retrenching and saying, "OK, we're going to sell our water interests in the United States because we found it so much more difficult going because of the public resistance on this water issue, on loss of local control." So there are still efforts on privatization that are actually going on all over the place but it's much more of a pitched battle on this issue.

» EXPRESS: It's been speculated that wars could be fought in the future over water supply. Do you think that's possible? Could water be the new oil?
» SNITOW: I find this a difficult question because water is so local. I'm sure [there will be] local battles, but not like oil, which you can transport easily in supertankers and refineries.

But one of the things that's been very interesting, for example, in the Middle East, where there is tremendous water issues, particularly between, let's say, the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israeli and Palestinian hydrologists have continued to meet and cooperate on certain water issues, even when they have differences, when there are questions of exploitation by Israel of Palestinian aquifers and so forth. Those discussions have been able to go on productively during the entire time when there were disputes, and when various groups of scientists and academics and so forth were not meeting with one another. There's also a tradition in which the local water can be something that brings people or enables people to get together because it's so essential, that they have to deal with one another. So I'm of mixed feelings.

I think that when the next phase, and I'm not sure how it becomes something that's a battleground, is that we're seeing so many desalination plants being proposed and coming up, that this is a way for private interests to start taking control over water resources. And it's quite problematic, desalination, although it's going to be useful in some areas of the world and in some cases where there are not many choices. It undermines the drive toward conservation, number one, which is far more productive than building a gigantic, extremely expensive plant, which is controlled by a centralized company. And so "desal" has become in some ways the hope of a lot of the private water companies that are coming in. ...

» EXPRESS: What you advise people to do if they want to get involved or investigate their local water systems?
» SNITOW: At the local level, the first thing that I would advise people — which seems to be now the lesson that's being learned by these sort of spontaneous groups around the country as they start to share information or see that this is an issue — to go to your city council people and to mayors and to find out whether this is on the agenda.

People on the local level really have the capacity to change things and to influence them on this issue, but ultimately it's going to have to come back to Washington itself. Because what has happened is that it's not only the Bush administration but the Bush administration has taken this to the ultimate extreme, to really starve the beast, to starve local cities, to starve the city administrations of resources.

And so what we're seeing as a result is the fire sale of public assets. We're seeing highways being sold; we're seeing airports being sold. Everything that used to be considered part of public service, the whole idea of public service is up on the auction block. And what is really necessary is that we now being to change back and see that these services are essential for citizens to control. If we don't control the most basic services that we have in our country, what do we democratically control?

» Olsson's, 1307 19th St. NW; Mon., 7 p.m., free; 202-785-1133. (Dupont Circle)