Water

Water, the basic medium of all forms of life, is essential to global human security and an important part of global economic and political interaction. Necessary to daily life everywhere, water cycles through the planet's hydrosphere. The ocean's saltwater currents yield molecules of fresh water to the air where winds carry them to land where they fall as rains to refill rivers, lakes, and aquifers and assume the form of aquatic territory.

As territory, water organizes human activity, its surfaces, depths, and currents carrying everything from submarines to sailboats, tuna to plastic diapers. Water's territorial aspect is unpredictable, prone to floods and tsunamis that shift the boundaries between land bodies and water bodies, disrupting industrial bases, informational circuits, and residential neighborhoods from global cities to coastal hamlets. Although the daily use and abuse of water resources takes place on local and regional scales, a global framework is nevertheless crucial to understanding the combined and repetitive effects of urbanization and industrialization; widespread use of antiquated and advanced technologies; interconnection of distant places of production and consumption, each with distinctive patterns of water use. Combined effects support global-level phenomena bringing benefits as well as harms, such as global trade; tourism; proliferation of exotic, invasive plant and animal species in a range of distant freshwater habitats; naval bases and warfare; and global communication through fiber-optic cables running across ocean floors.

Scholarly debates on global water issues usually link to definitions of water as a public good, a universal human right, and a commodity. Each gives a value to water and articulates associated ideas regarding management and governance. Much research concentrates on conflicting and unequal access to fresh water for basic human and industrial needs. Debates tend to organize based on the opposition between economy and ecology, wherein the need for jobs, energy, and production in the short term contrast with the need to create a sustainable relation between humans and water in the long term. For example, present needs to exploit aquifer water for crop irrigation or to [Page 1776]supply a city network may conflict with the long-term need to lower rates of aquifer depletion and pollution. Although parameters vary, such overlapping and competing needs and priorities characterize water issues generally. Currently there is a vociferous quest to resolve the contradictions between economy and ecology by developing so-called green technology. The quest rests on confidence in technological innovation to simultaneously spur the economy and solve water problems. However, the advantages and negative effects of technologies are unequally distributed in communities and regions. Critics of the “technological fix” model call for more holistic and participatory methods of working to change the dynamic human-water relationship.

The need for fresh water is universal, but access to it varies among world regions, industries, and human groups within locales. Patterns of scarcity and abundance may seem to arise naturally, but in fact, to a large degree, they result from past and present human activity, such as deforestation that leads to desertification. Scarcity can result even in water-abundant regions due to pollution from human and industrial waste and saltwater intrusion. Cities and their industrialized hinterlands would come to a complete halt without water. Daily operations depend on water, even as they deplete and destroy freshwater sources through improper use and disposal of organic, chemical, and radioactive pollution, and garbage. Most large cities created water infrastructures that affect regions far beyond their immediate geographies, bringing water in from, and sending wastes out to, distant places on land and sea. Even global cities that deterritorialized much of their political economy rely on the material resources in and around their localities.

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