Endless Resourcefulness: A Conversation About Water

I turned 60 in 2011. I’m from the Far East originally, born in Tokyo in 1951, and then I lived in Hong Kong until I was a teen. In Hong Kong in the late 50s and early 60’s we have numerous water crises during the dry seasons (it was before the pipeline from China). I learned part of what it means to be without water, often. Sometimes our part of the island was supplied with water for just four hours every fourth day. That was it, no such thing as turning a tap and getting a seemingly endless stream of safe water from a municipal supply. And so we collected rainwater in cisterns and tap when water was available and had to boiled it to drink. We filled every kind of container we could find. We filled glasses and pots and bowls and especially KLIM cans, the old powdered milk cans that the British had sent to their citizens overseas during the Second World War. Those KLIM cans, “klim” is “milk,” spelled backward, became the ubiquitous bucket in the Far East and source of sheet metal for making thousands of objects. And when the city pipes were turned on, all of us in our household would volunteer to line up for water at the public taps. It’s amazing to think back to those times.

So, yes, I see water as precious. But limited? No, that might not be the only way to think about it. I don’t just see water as limited. I see water as being of endless resourcefulness, but it needs our care, and it needs us to celebrate resourcefulness as a “material” and our creative use of it, not to simply bemoan it as a limited thing that is being destroyed by human abuse or human induced climate change.

When you simply think of water as limited, then instead of tapping its endless potential for sharing and recirculation in hydrologic cycles your mind gets channeled into thoughts about simply being “less bad” about our treatment of this essential life-giving (and even life-defining) resource. We start thinking “be more efficient”, dump less toxics in it, etc, and while these are obviously well-meaning and certainly worthwhile actions they are not necessarily the most beneficial path to life and health. It may just be embarking on the path to slower death. And so my work as a change agent begins with challenging people’s perceptions. It begins with re-aligning a few brain cells and getting people to think about things they sometimes had not or even had thought about. Things like drinking their urine.

I can hear you saying “Yuck!” and I understand that reaction. But at the NASA Sustainability Base in California, which we designed with NASA they have a system which, like that on other space stations, can allow the “terranauts” in this instance to recycle water, all of it, including urine if they wish. The building’s systems use filtering membranes similar to the ones that are used in space stations in geosynchronos orbit 22,000 miles above the surface of the earth to purify what people tend to call “waste products” and turn them into potable water. We have similar systems for energy, air supply, heat, and cooling, designing this earthbound research center (I call this a space station in geosynchronos orbit on terra firma) as if it were a self-sufficient space station. But here on Earth, perhaps a better comparison is to a tree. It’s a building that is alive and that participates in the natural flow of resources just like any natural, living thing. Regarding water, iff your reaction is still “Yuck!” then I’d suggest you get over it. Because this is the way we need to think and design our environment for a planet of 10 billion people (which the UN expects will be living here by mid-century).

Singapore has already gotten over the yuck factor. They take all their sewer water, convert it back into H2O, suck out the phosphates and nitrates and scum, and return it to potable quality. They call it “new water”, how wonderful a way to use the language to overcome perceived aversions, who wants old water anyway, and everybody’s happy. Isn’t it fascinating what changing the name can do? That’s the power of realigning those brain cells. Meanwhile, cities like San Diego and Sydney have gone through intense debates about their water protocols. In San Diego, those who advocated a system like the one in Singapore were calling it “indirect potable reuse,” while those who hated the concept used the phrase “toilet-to-tap,” which activated everybody’s “Yuck” synapses. So what did they end up doing instead? They pump the sewage down into the ground and then suck it out months later. They call it “ground water.” Do you see what they’re doing? It’s the same water, just filtered a little bit by terra firma, and that makes people feel better. It’s just good old H2O.

Perceptions are important. I think we should do whatever it takes within our wonderfully diverse cultures. We have to manage technology, we have to manage perceptions, and we have to choose the words we use with care. But personally I like talking about drinking our urine, because it makes the design challenge very vivid and unmistakable. I like to think we’re grown up enough to face it, get over the “Yuck” factor, and move on to better things.

The larger point is that water is not just a content, it’s also a currency, it’s flow. It’s flow of money, flow of people, flow of health, flow of fecundity. Water is a medium that makes all life possible, the magical vehicle that catalyzes the energy of the sun with the materials of the earth and helps it all become biology. That’s what water is for us. The flow of water means that we can exist. It has to do with almost everything living, it touches everything, it’s so beautiful. So when you mess with water, you’re messing with everything.

And why have we been messing with this precious living medium of water? Bad design. We poop, we pollute. We mine, we pollute. We farm, we pollute. We make things, we pollute. We create so many materials that we insist on thinking of as “waste” products and then we dump them into our rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans. It’s awfully stupid, really.

But to change the system, you need to start by changing the way you think. We’ve found ways to convert what people normally call “sewage plants” into “nutrient management systems.” We can suck out the phosphates and the nitrates and the other dissolved minerals that are essential for life, ​and now we have a fertilizer product that can be sold to farmers and earn a 12 percent rate of return. It makes so much sense as a business proposition. Instead of building a waste disposal plant that people think of as a liability for the community, a costly, ugly, smelly thing nobody wants in their backyard and an expensive drain on local resources, we eliminate the concept of waste. Everything we conventionally think of as waste is really a nutrient, an asset. So we shift the traditional thinking about design from asset-to-liability to asset-to-asset. This is the Cradle to Cradle thinking, which I have developed with Dr. Michael Braungart, instead of cradle to grave.

That’s the same principle a tree works on. And then if we want to release the purified water from our nutrient management plant into the nearby bay or estuary, there’s no problem, it’s clean and refreshing to the ecosystem instead of degrading and damaging.

Of course, it’s not just a matter of perceptions. It’s a matter of technology and design as well. We’ve lately been working with the Dutch on many fronts and are enjoying watching them call for new systems for phosphorous recovery from sewage plants. One on my favorite examples of this idea originated in a waste treatment plant in Vancouver. A mechanic was trying to make sure the pipes didn’t clog up from the gradual mineralization of the solids flowing through the pipes, a little like the way your tea kettle at home gets crusty over time. It is my understanding that a scientist named Donald S. Mavinic tried putting these materials in a vortex to separate out the minerals. He found that they came out in little round mineral spheres, beautiful things, actually. The resulting product is called struvite, and it’s mostly phosphate, a tiny bit of magnesium, and some nitrogen, and it’s a profitable, valuable fertilizer.

And a lot of the solutions we should be looking at focus simply on where we do things. Maybe we ought to start building vertical farming and greenhouses right on the back of our nutrient management systems (former sewage treatment sites), so that the dissolved minerals necessary to plant growth are already in the water that’s delivered to them for super-productive hydroponic agriculture. Our reliance on imported essential minerals would go way down as a result, and hydroponic agriculture can raise the same volume of produce as traditional farming while using just eight percent of the water. Cities could deliver food and fertilizer, clean water, economic benefits, and jobs while eliminating point-source pollutions, and all the while benefiting farmers by providing valuable slow-release fertilizers that eliminate non-point source pollution in countryside.

But in the meantime we’re still stuck between old and new ways of thinking. One of the basic protocols of the industrial revolution started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it appears to me, if brute force isn’t working, you’re not using enough of it. So the solution to many problems has been to use more energy and water and to pour on more concrete. If we keep thinking that way, the results over the next few decades will be an extension of what we have been seeing more and more, tragic consequences. Instead, why not design our cities as organisms? Why not design our cities to feed themselves and to cycle water continually? Why can’t we run the gray water people have used for cleaning through simple sand filters and membranes and then use it, building-by-building, for irrigation and vertical agriculture? Why can’t we use the new LED lighting to grow fruits and vegetables using only the essential parts of the visible spectrum, which require a fraction of the energy needed for white light? Yes, these technologies are available today, and they work. We can grow sweet strawberries as big as your fist if we want to, and without even thinking about transgenic genetically modified organisms.

But shifting our thinking is hard. Look at what China is doing, a highly populated country with a hyper active economy. According to some, only 10 percent of China’s vast land mass is desirable, so their government is most concerned about how they’re going to feed the hundreds of millions of new people that are arriving in the next few decades. As has been typical in western farming, an early reaction can be to apply brute force: Let’s develop genetically modified seeds to force increased crop yields; let’s amp up our systems of conventional agriculture, even though we find ourselves watching the plowed-up soil blow away or no-till farming aggregating herbicides in the soil and binding minderals… but what agendas occur with this mindset? Shall we move a lot more water to dry places, even if that means diverting rivers and building gigantic dams that will make the Three Gorges project look like a Lego toy? And just in case all of this doesn’t work, shall we consider buying farmland on other continents? What about buying land and mines in Africa and South America, figuring that is perhaps how we can hope to feed the next generation of children? It has often been said that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

What if there were a change in thinking from the bottom up, a very different vision based on a new design model? What about increasing agricultural productivity at home by twenty percent, not just on farms, but in cities, which can go a long way toward feeding themselves, dramatically reducing the need for trucks and trains to transport produce over hundreds, even thousands of miles. We can extract the nutrients from used water that’s already available in the cities and use them to grow food in magnificent vertical farms. We can drive it all using solar power and wind power, which we can realize are actually in abundance. It’s a matter of design, and of connecting dots we have not seen connected before. What if “wind equaled food” on the loess plains of Shangxi?. All these innovations are already in the works.

It’s time for a heavy dose of common sense combined with optimized economic, social and ecological systems thinking. Goals become clear and powerful but about being “more good” instead of being “less bad.” The re-envisioning of current practice is so clear and so powerful. But we need people to clear their minds to accept it.

There’s an old joke about a third-grade teacher who tells her students, “Kids, let’s all draw what we love today. Mary, what are you going to draw?”

Mary replies, “I’m going to draw a picture of God.”

The teacher says, “You can’t draw a picture of God. Nobody knows what God looks like.”

And Mary answers, “I know. That’s why I have to draw my picture.” So let’s have the confidence to start drawing pictures. Let’s try together to let people everywhere see how creative and generous we all are and that we can have regenerative systems instead of degenerative ones. Everything we need, including abundant water, is right here, available to us.

And the beauty really is that none of these ideas are really alien to human tradition, or even specifically to China. They’ve been farming for forty centuries. How do you farm for 4,000 years without a chemical industry? You understand nutrient and water flow, that’s how.

The reality is that we don’t have a water problem, we don’t have an energy problem. We have plenty of water and plenty of energy. We have a resources-in-the-wrong-place problem.

Take carbon, for example. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are contributing massively to global climate change. And a lot of the carbon we’re producing ends up in the oceans. Forty-three percent of anthropogenic carbon is now in the oceans, which means that the oceans are going acidic. We know that for ages the pH level of the oceans has ranged between 8.8 and 8.2. It’s now on the way to 7.9. At 7.9, we’re heading for carbonic acid, and mollusks can’t form shells, which means by the end of the century we’ll probably have destroyed the bottom of the food chain in the water. Really, really dumb.

But does this mean we have a “carbon problem”? Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with carbon. It makes me sad to hear carbon demonized. We are carbon. If you don’t like carbon, then you don’t like life. It’s just that we have carbon in the wrong place. Nature wants to use solar energy to grow biota and sequester carbon in the soil.

So let’s celebrate carbon. Let’s just put it in the right place, in us and in soil. And in the same spirit, let’s celebrate the abundance of water. Our job is not to bemoan the limits of water. Our job is to celebrate the infinite fecundity, richness, and resourcefulness of water, and to be smart about how we use it.

It’s so simple. It’s common sense. It’s humbling. And so huge. The challenge is endless, but, then that’s the point.