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May/June 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Reverberations Feature: Water Curious by nature

IT IS EASY to get misty-eyed about water, to say the most portentous and sentimental things about it, because the water that falls in a spring shower really is much more than mere moisture. It is also a symbol of growth and renewal — not just water but the water of life, not just a metaphor for life but its very underpinning. I have seen farmers go giddy in the spring when the soil takes on that aromatic reborn smell after a rain, and it is hard to be cynical, because farmers understand the cycle in a way that city dwellers cannot. But water is an immensely practical matter too, and moving water goes about its business as it always has, careless of how humans might romanticize it. Some of the water from that passing rain shower is taken up by plants and living things, and some of it soaks into the earth to join the water already there — the aquifers we think of as "the water table." Some of what is left evaporates. The rest runs off. It may become a small we tland, but eventually, it seeps away and becomes a creek and, joined by others, a stream, a lake and then … well, you know the rest. It may be dammed and used and reused and diverted for a variety of purposes, but in the end, it fetches up in the sea, where it lives for a while.

The hydrological cycle is the way water circulates through the Earth’s systems, going from one "reservoir" to another in complex cycles. The whole process works only because more water evaporates from the oceans than returns to it directly, the balance falling on land as rain or snow. This imbalance is what makes our lives possible, for when the rain falls, it falls as freshwater.

The interconnectedness of the hydrological cycle is not something that the editorialists of The Globe and Mail or the National Post like to contemplate, imprisoned as they are in their touching but essentially naive faith in the endless efficacy of market capitalism; to them, water is just another commodity that can be owned, sold and disposed of by anyone. But the reality is that water is different. It might rise on your property, but it is not yours — it is just passing through. You can use it and abuse it, but it is not "property." It is a basic part of our life-support system.

I grew up in the arid centre of the South African plains. It seldom rained there (though when it did, the clouds burst), and for most of the year, the rivers were dry, dusty places where thorn bushes grew and weaver birds made their nests. And then I came to Canada, where there seemed to be water … everywhere.

One place — Canada — has water in abundance; the other — South Africa’s Karoo — does not. One place pays little attention to the marvel of water; the other is, by necessity, obsessed with it. And so I came to understand when I was just a child that water is not a commodity like any other, that without water — without the clouds that pass, the drops that fall, the soaked and aromatic soil — everything dies.

It really is very simple.

But while the hydrological system is simple to grasp, governing it is not. Almost all water, at some point, crosses personal property lines. In Canada, hundreds of rivers and streams cross provincial and territorial borders or join rivers that form provincial boundaries. And the majority of the world’s great river systems pay little heed to human politics and insist on migrating where they always have.

Who owns this water, and when and at what price may they sell it? If there is water in a lake that is not "owned" by some person or corporation, who has the right to use it? To divert it or extract it? To what purposes may they use it? At what cost may they abuse it? In international terms, is it all right for the Americans to have "stolen" the Colorado River from the Mexicans just because it rises on American soil? Does Turkey, to take a more fractious example, have the right to divert the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, on which Syria and Iraq so absolutely depend?

All the complicated politics of water (the notion of property rights or pricing, the supply and withholding of supply, the obligation to sell or not to sell water, the difficulties of transborder water disputes, the endless wrangling over an international legal code to govern water transfers) flow from this simple assertion: water is not ours to own but part of the global commons.

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