p. 247 - 251   (David's third selection, out of six) :-

• The Carbon gas spike can be slowed to some degree by trapping carbon gas in trees and plants, as is normal for all plant life. The problem is that as heavy mining of water for industry or municipal use leaves marginal lands with insufficient supplies, cropland is abandoned and often turns to desert—cutting down on the amount of carbon that can be sequestered in plants and trees, and thus raising the spike still faster. About 200,000 square kilometers of land turns to desert each year. Over a decade, that's more than the area of California, Japan and England combined. An even larger amount of land is deforested in ways that may not result in desertification, but do continue to shrink the carbon sink. Much of that is in watersheds shared by two or more nations. Moreover, the deforestation in these nations is continuing relentlessly. As the synergistic effects of the spikes have shown, such deforestation is a problem with many faces: it reduces the capacity of the watershed to filter groundwater; it speeds erosion; and it exacerbates flooding. The policies that stabilize water management, therefore, by restoring tree cover will also trap carbon. But if a watershed is shared by several nations, they may be helpless to make this happen on their own. The logical unit of governance, then, is not a nation but a watershed district.

• Extinctions can be slowed by halting the devastation of coastal estuaries, which are among the planet's richest ecosystems—but also the most endangered. Rivers are the primary sources of water for cities and industries, and as those users draw more water, the lowered water downstream dries out those estuaries. In the Colorado river basin, of the 50 native fish species that thrived a century ago, 29 are now either endangered or already extinct. One reason is that the Colorado flows through both the United States and Mexico, and the two governments can't agree on how to manage it. National governments also tend to perform poorly in the protection of biodiversity even in the rivers and lakes within their boundaries, because their fixation on global trade often causes them to sacrifice ecological needs for those of industry, as is happening in the rivers of China or in the mangrove forests of Thailand. There may be a need to shift power both to watershedwide institutions (for rivers crossing international borders or covering large regions) and to local communities (for smaller watersheds and ecosystems). Nations will need to let go of their central control and let more of the stewardship of local ecosystems return to local people—perhaps under the management of the bioregional institutions, coordinated by global institutions rather than by nations. Hindu nationalist prime ministers, Muslim militants, US western senators, and Thai shrimp mafia will be out of the loop.

• Population growth has historically centered around rivers and other well-watered areas, and societies' capability to support that growth without collapse has depended on their ability to produce enough food surplus to support the variety of nonfarming occupations that make up a diverse and thriving society. In other words, the extent to which a population spike of 8 or 10 billion is able to avoid catastrophic collapse depends in part on the efficiency with which it can convert water to food. The higher the yields, the higher the population that can be supported. The danger is that the higher the population climbs, the greater the crash will be if that efficiency can't be sustained. It's like watching an acrobat climb a vertical pole with his arms: the stronger he is, the higher he can climb—and the more risk he takes that when his strength finally gives out he will fall.
        Thus, as higher population diverts more water to showers, toilets and factories, the increasing scarcity to agriculture will drive up the efficiency with which we use water, through increasingly sophisticated techniques of irrigation and recirculation—but will make us increasingly vulnerable should those highly tuned systems ever fail. Unfortunately, the need to use river water as efficiently as possible is blatantly undermined by the inclinations of individual nations to gain as large a share as possible. Why would Egypt rush to reduce its use of Nile water through greater efficiency, if it thinks that will give Ethiopia grounds for demanding Egypt's share be reduced?

• The Consumption spike is the one that nations are probably least capable of stabilizing, because their conception of identity, and even survival, are so tied to the idea of "development" (as in "developed" nations versus "undeveloped" ones). Economic development, as presently practiced, is aimed explicitly at increasing consumption—both domestically (to raise household income and GDP) and abroad (to raise export income). Some of this practice is hard to fault, at least for those of us who find it hard to imagine life without showers and flush toilets. In the developing nations, as the number of people who can afford bathrooms rises, so does per capita water consumption—dramatically. More efficient designs can mitigate that somewhat. But those designs do nothing to cut back on the huge amounts of water consumed by the shift toward more meat consumption, and toward higher consumption of products like paper and leather and plastic (all of which take large amounts of water to produce), as development proceeds. The more urbanized, industrialized, and modernized we become, the more water we consume.

Because a rising share of the consumption is in products that are traded internationally, this means—in effect—that water shortages in one part of the world will be felt in many other parts not only in the distribution of food, but through the sales of hundreds of other products. And, while the control of water-as-food may have the more primal imapct, water-as-consumer-products may wield the greater financial clout. The reason is that in the current global economy, the market value of water to industry is far greater than it is to agriculture—which is one of the reasons why so much water has been diverted from farms in the first place. A thousand tons of water used to produce a ton of wheat, for example, has a market value of $200, while the same amount of water used in heavy industry yields, on average, about $14,000 in output. As long as nations are in competition with each other to capture export income, that industrial stranglehold on water—and the raising of the consumption spike—will continue.

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