Is the worlds water problem a result of human pollution or of natural environmental processes at work?
I don’t think it’s either of those alone. You can argue that cleaning up fresh water in the U.S. and Europe has been a real success story of the last thirty years or so. For instance, the quality of water in the Great Lakes is much better now than when I was a boy. When I was a kid, we used to play on the shores of Lake Erie and there were dead fish everywhere. We’d have dead-fish fights. And it was because the water was in terrible shape. It’s much better now. I don’t think it’s a pollution issue, certainly not in the United States, and it’s not a climate-change issue. It is at the intersection between climate and people. The demographic trend in this country is for people to move south and west, and when they move, particularly west, they go from wetter to dryer. A lot of the areas that have had the highest growth, like Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles, are places where natural supplies of water are difficult to come by. America is regarded as a gluttonous consumer of water. Has
