DRY SPRING: THE COMING WATER CRISIS OF NORTH AMERICA
By Chris Wood. Raincoast Books. 350 pp. $23.95. 

Chris Wood wants to put a price on Canada’s water so that it can be bought and sold by private companies.

Did you just shiver? Did your head shake in denial?

Well, according to Wood, a veteran journalist and the author of Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, the knee-jerk rejection of the commodification of water isn’t helping Canada prepare for the future. He contends that the only way bottom-line-oriented companies will start conserving water is if we make them pay for it.

But even mentioning water and the marketplace in the same breath has become impossible—largely, Wood says, as a result of “chilling” rhetoric from the Council of Canadians, a national progressive advocacy group, and their chairperson, Maude Barlow.

Barlow is best known for her campaigns to keep water in the public realm—she’s put forth her position at length in the book Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. She and the Council contend that under the North American Free Trade Agreement, once it is sold, water becomes a good and Canadian governments would be powerless to stop companies from selling it, even if water were needed in Canada. That’s a grim prospect, especially when taken in conjunction with predictions from water experts like David Schindler, the University of Alberta scientist who says Alberta is headed for a period of droughts.

And so, Wood’s call for Canada to put a price on water would seem to put him in the ultra-conservative, über-capitalist realm. But Wood also calls for very stringent environmental controls and better water management. Before water is sold in any form—including water exports hidden in the oil flowing to the United States—cautious, science-based limits on the use of water need to be in place, especially in Alberta.

Indeed, Wood never set out to be controversial. When the 55-year-old writer started Dry Spring over three years ago, it was as a result of the extreme weather he was observing and reporting on, and the increasingly urgent need to address the issue of climate change. (At the time, scientists expected the Arctic to be free of ice by 2050. Halfway though the book, that date was adjusted to 2040, and by the time Wood finished, some scientists were placing their bets on 2020.)

Wood spoke with people across Canada and the world, and his accounts put you on the ground, smack in the middle of forest fires, dusty plains cities, and coastal villages threatened by an encroaching sea.

His main message centres on how urgent and personal climate change really is, and how water management will determine how well we deal with coming changes. Challenging the current thinking on water privatization is just one part of the wider discussion he says Canadians should be having about water.

SEE spoke with the reluctant contrarian from his home on Vancouver Island, and here’s what he had to say about the oilsands, aqua nationalists, and the dangers of environmental defeatism.

SEE Magazine: Did you set out to challenge Canadians’ ideas about water and the Council of Canadians’ stance?

Chris Wood: I have long been skeptical about the notion that certain things are best protected in the public commons. I lived on the East coast when the cod fisheries were left in the commons and were destroyed. We no longer have a cod fishery in Canada because it was left in the public commons. Anyone could get at them and they did until they were gone. So, I don’t think that’s a good model for water. The more I looked at it, the more the worries of the Council of Canadians seemed like less of a threat, and certainly not the worst problem.

SEE: In Dry Spring you argue that the U.S. isn’t really interested in our water because moving water is much more expensive than implementing better resource management. But the economics of a project can change very quickly. The oilsands have only recently become economically viable. Couldn’t something like that happen with water?

CW: To a degree, that’s true. What you have to appreciate is that when the price goes up, all kinds of other things change in that market. In the same way that oil went up to the point that tarsands oil makes economic sense, a whole lot of other things begin to make economic sense too. In Pennsylvania there are power companies that are backing out of their coal-fire plants for wind-fire plants because the wind is cheaper on a straight up economic basis. People are no longer buying SUVs... There’s going to be alternatives that are much more attractive than coming to Canada to get it. Finally, nothing short of guns can oblige Canada to run a pipe from Lake Athabasca to ship in anything besides extremely low volumes.

SEE: Are markets the best way to prioritize water use? As just one example here in Alberta, an entertainment complex outside Balzac was able to purchase water rights even though there’s a moratorium on new water licenses from the Bow River.

CW: Well, whether that’s good or bad management depends on what you want at the end of the day. I’m not suggesting that everything be left willy-nilly to the market. Nowhere in the book do I suggest that. Of course there need to be rules... We should have transparent, cautious, and science-based ways of determining how much water we take out so that we do leave enough for wildlife. But once you have that sum that you can take out, how do you divide it up? Do you have government dictate—so much here, so much there? By sector? Industry changes and it doesn’t make sense to give one industry [a fixed amount]. If it’s economical for a company to save water, they will.”

SEE: What are some examples of buying and selling water that have helped conserve it?

CW: At the University of Lethbridge, Lorraine Nicol has researched the irrigation districts where they are buying and selling water rights [for the first time in Canada]. The water generally moves from less efficient irrigation technology and growing lower-value crops to highly efficient irrigation and higher-value crops. To me, that’s exactly what we want to see happen with our water. We want our economy to grow, and we can only do that if we get more out of each drop of water. I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible with industrial zones, which lend themselves to trading wastewater. There’s no reason that I can see that we should be cleaning all this water that industry uses to potable standards if they can be buying it from each other and recycling it.

SEE: Edmonton is selling the treatment of municipal wastewater to the proposed upgraders northeast of the city. But there isn’t a decrease in the consumption of water.

CW: That’s a political decision, not a market decision. And I have grave concerns about developing the oilsands because of the availability of water. It is disjointed to be concerned about nonexistent bulk exports of water when we are shipping three or four Exxon Valdez tankerloads of water underground every single day in order to sell oil to the United States. Markets do require regulation... A cap on the amount of water coming out of the Athabasca creates scarcity for the remaining water, which allows the people who need that water—the oil companies—to work out what it’s worth to them, and make that work with the rest of the accounting. At the end of the day, that means increases in their costs and prices.

SEE: And that would be a cost today instead of an environmental cost for the next generation of Albertans. But it’s going to be a while before that becomes mainstream.

CW: One of the things that I think is going to be deadly for us as climate impacts accumulate—and they are and will—is overcoming despair. Things do take time to change. I remember when smoking was everywhere. It took 30 years from the time folks discovered that smoking is bad for you to when it became something that you can’t do in public places. But unless we start having those conversations, we don’t get to the end of that 30 years, which is why I hope we can open up the conversation on water.