Drinking Water in Short Supply

Pictured above is the reservoir for the city of Barcelona, Spain. So where is the water, you ask? And what's with the building? Submerged when the reservoir was commissioned 40 years ago, the building once again sees the light of day, thanks to human thirst and climate change. Barcelona now imports water on tanker ships.

Dwindling water supplies are also a problem in parts of the U.S. Last week the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the East Bay Municipal Utility District is now rationing water to its 1.3 million customers. After two dry years and the driest spring on record, the District has declared a water-shortage emergency and instituted a drought management program that would cut overall use by 15 percent. The rest of California may soon follow, as the Sierra Nevada snowpack is only 67 percent of normal. Orange County began rationing to its 330,000 customers last year.

Drought has also hammered the Southeast, where reservoirs are dangerously low. There are even rumblings of a border war between Georgia and Tennessee over rights to a part of the Tennessee River. Elsewhere efforts are under way to make brackish water potable. Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Antonio, and San Diego are all currently considering desalination plants.

Reading stories like these, Mainers are quickly reminded that they are sitting on an increasingly valuable resource: clean, fresh water. It is an asset which multinational corporations are eager to monetize, and they are blitzing local planning boards with large-scale proposals to pump groundwater, bottle it, and truck it outta here. To their credit, some communities are resisting. Perhaps Maine should consider legislation similar to what Vermont passed last month, declaring the state's groundwater a public trust and establishing a permitting process for high-volume users.