Palm Beach County: the world in a drop of water. In Palm Beach proper, average daily use (does this mean you, Mr. Trump?) is 13,ooo gallons per day. In Belle Glade, where a third of the residents live below the federal poverty level, they average 1,000 gallons per day. Monthly water bills in Belle Glade? A flat $62.50. Monthly water bills in Palm Beach? A bit less than $30, depending on consumption. "Worldwide," Barnett writes, "the poor generally pay much more for water than the rich." And that's not all: as a resource, water is underpriced. That's why we squander so much of it.
With so much wasted, "[w]ill water become the oil of the twenty-first century?" T. Boone Pickens, owner of 27,000 acres over the Ogallala Aquifer, is betting on it. Barnett relates how, by 2005, Pickens had contracted with 75 Texas Panhandle landowners, securing water rights to 100,000 acres, along with financing for a 171-mile pipeline. Where water is concerned it would appear Texas is ahead of the privatizing (not to mention feudalizing) curve.
And then there are the blue-sky technology freaks who bet on Aquifer Storage and Recovery, or ASR. On first read, it sounds like a good idea: when it's wet, withdraw water and store it underground to use during droughts. When it's dry, reverse the process. What could go wrong? Well, for one thing, basing the project on cost, rather than hydrogeological data: there's arsenic in the parts of the aquifer where ASRs have been sunk. "The mix of highly oxidized ASR water with the low-oxygen water...in the Suwannee Limestone [layer of the aquifer] causes arsenic underground to 'mobilize'." Oops. And then there's desalinization, costly and ineffective.
Barnett posits that the problem of water in Florida may be due to Floridians losing touch with it. You can't swim in Crystal Springs anymore, due to water bottling. You can't see the ocean for the condominiums. However, as she points out, we have a choice: we can continue the giveaways, we can put our faith in unproven technology, we can continue to ignore land-use plans, or "we can spend [our tax dollars] on water-conservation, land-preservation, and restoration projects."
My take? Everyone in Florida (and possibly the United States) should read this book.
