The Toyota Auditorium in the Baker Center Wednesday night held a large crowd warmly greeted by the guest speaker Maude Barlow, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and former senior advisor to the United Nations on the issue of water. She is chair of the Food and Water Watch Board and in 2008 was awarded the Citation of Lifetime Achievement Award in her home country of Canada. As best-selling author or co-author of 16 books including Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World's Water and Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future within Fortress North America. Barlow is well-versed in communicating the global water crisis issue and feels passionately about conveying its implications in today's societies.

We have collectively built great wealth on the myth that we don't need to think or contemplate where water comes from" -Maude Barlow

Barlow began her speech with a laugh as she wiped the podium of the droplets just spilled from her mug of water, "I'm having a water crisis! Just a minute."  

But as she continued her speech it became clear that the larger scale water issue, the fact that global demand will one day soon outstrip global supply, cannot be properly addressed by just one set of hands. The World Bank estimates that by 2030 demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent, increasing the risk of death for many people worldwide because of unclean, disease-infected water or no water at all. Currently, the annual death toll is at 3.5 million, with water-borne diseases being the #1 killer of children in the global South.

Barlow often used the term "myth of abundance" to describe the fallible mindset that directs our actions and defines our concerns. Sure, water goes through a major geological cycle known as the hydrological cycle which implies that it simply circles around. But we are severely limiting the fresh water that gets cycled through because of the way we pollute and displace what we initially have. There is less than 1 percent of readily available drinking water on this Earth according to Bill Deane, UT professor in Earth Sciences.

"We have collectively built great wealth on the myth that we don't need to think or contemplate where water comes from," Barlow said.

Instead, she said we should treat water as a living entity and ecosystem. We should make use of practical means of storage such as capturing storm water, and divert to a more sustainable and local way of food production. In 2005, irrigation accounted for 31 percent of total withdrawal from fresh and surface water, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. By buying local, we keep the water in our watershed while simultaneously reducing transportation and subsequent environmental costs.

The problem is everywhere, not just in poor countries. In America, Florida is pumping groundwater so fast and hard that sink holes are sucking up houses. Trillions of gallons a day are being pumped out of the Great Lakes. Tennessee is in the top 10 group for dumping waste in our waterways. Lake Mead, a crucial drinking water source in Nevada, has decreased in size by half and researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography say it could be completely dried up by 2021.

A drier climate also leads to a warmer one as water yields to desert, the surface albedo increases, reflecting more sunlight. Even though global warming will help melt the glaciers up North and free the locked up freshwater, capturing the melt is unproductive because of its speed and evaporation rate.

Reaching a population of nine billion people by 2050 will significantly add to the resource strain, especially in the poorest parts of the world where most of the increase is supposed to happen (a United Nations press release from March 2009 indicated that the least developing countries will double their population by 2050).  

But Barlow is confident that the issue is not so much a population one as it is a lifestyle one. America has the largest water footprint than any other nation according to the book Globalization of Water. Improvement will require lifestyle changes, in addition to futuristic and global thinking. On an individual basis we can decrease our shower time and be more conscious consumers. On a larger scale, we should reconsider our priorities and make sure cost-benefit analyses sufficiently include environmental impacts. (Barlow said Arizona is in the process of building a gigantic water theme park, Waveyard, although it does claim to only use as much water as an 18-hole golf course).

Energy sources are also of concern. Producing ethanol is water-intensive and so is producing nuclear energy. Millions of gallons of water are needed to run nuclear reactors for cooling water, although this water is recycled through.

Now, the issue of where water comes from is political, economical and ethnocentric. China and India are buying land and water in Africa. China is working on a water diversion plan to bring 45 billion cubic meters of water each year from the Yangtze River and its tributaries and move it to North China. And the next big thing, of course, is water desalinization.

This, according to Barlow, is not the fix-all solution. She is concerned about becoming reliant on technology rather than conservation and is turned off by the mere intensity of the project. Furthermore, it's not a clean process. According to a 2005 study by J. Jaime Sadhwani and colleagues published in Desalinization and the Environment, a byproduct of desalinizing the sea water is brine, a concentrated salt solution. This brine, along with chemicals used during the process such as sulfuric acid and chlorine, are returned back to the sea water as discharge, posing a threat to the aquatic environment.   

Many say a water war is looming, but Barlow hopes for the exact opposite. She believes we should declare water as a commons, a public trust and human right. This does not mean, she pointed out, that water should be a "free-for-all", but should rather be allocated specifically and under strict regulations. She believes no one should die because they can't afford water, and no one should die fighting for it either.

That's why Barlow takes the peaceful approach. She is an advocate for cooperation and hopes that a shared resources will bring us together instead of tearing us apart. When the warring nations of this world will be able to meet and agree on conservation strategies, the great leaders will be able to lead their people in a new direction. She attended the recent Copenhagen conference and believes real interest was generated in the subject of water abuse.

The earth's hydrosphere is composed of nearly 70 percent of water, our bodies are 50-70 percent water and our brains are 76 percent. Water is our true blood and the only vaccine we have for an infection is forethought. We are living in a volatile era, one defined by change. The earth's surface may be drying up in the most inconvenient of places but it's not a lost cause. We can think and act more globally, and when we do, we protect our future generations and ecosystems. After all, why should we deny the Universe a future built by perhaps its most intelligent species?