Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a
Water-Starved World
by Seth M. Siegel (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015)
Not too far into Seth Siegel’s revealing book about how Israel
became a “water superpower,” he tells the story of the moment when drip
irrigation was invented. Drip irrigation is so powerful a technique —
dramatically cutting the amount of water that crops require while increasing
the amount of food each plant produces — that it may rescue the world from both
hunger and thirst in the next 40 years.
In 1933, Simcha Blass, a young water engineer in what was then
British-ruled Palestine, was supervising the drilling of a well on a farm. In a
row of trees along a fence line, Blass noticed that one tree was significantly
taller than the others — even though the trees were all the same species, were
roughly the same age, and grew in the same conditions.
It’s rare to see that crystalline moment of curiosity in which an
important new idea is born. Blass poked around the base of the big tree and
found a tiny leak in a metal irrigation pipe, which was depositing a steady
trickle of drips directly onto the tree’s roots.
“I became busy with other plans, but the drop of water that grew a
gigantic tree refused to leave me,” Blass would write in his autobiography 40
years later. After he helped launch Israel’s water system, when his own career
had improbably foundered, Blass returned to the power of those drops of water,
and invented the first rudimentary micro-irrigation technology. He conducted
the early studies that not only showed how much water the technology saved, but
incredibly also showed that giving plants less water, precisely applied, would
cause them to grow more crops.
That is exactly what Israel itself has done over the last 70
years. It has turned water scarcity into water mastery. Siegel’s book aims to
do two things: To tell the story of how a tiny country with almost no water
resources has become so water rich that it can afford to export billions of
gallons of water a year to other countries, and to show how Israel’s prowess is
relevant now to a world thirsty for water and water expertise, from California
to Brazil, from China to Iran.
Israel has infused its society with a sense of the value and the
innovative opportunity of water. This sense is felt in grade-school classrooms
and in water utilities themselves. In Israel, wastewater — what those of us in
more developed countries often call sewage —is cleaned and reused. Unlike in
the U.S., where utilities have to fight public opinion to get recycled water
back into the water system, reuse water in Israel is in heavy demand. Most of
it goes to agriculture, where it makes up half the irrigation water used by the
country’s farmers. In Israel, 85 percent of wastewater is cleaned and reused. Spain
has the world’s second-highest recycling rate, at 25 percent. In the U.S.,
Siegel says, we reuse just 8 percent.
Siegel, a Cornell-educated lawyer who has spent most of his career
as a businessman, doesn’t have any apparent prior expertise in water issues,
and this is his first book. Yet he appears to have interviewed almost everyone
involved in water innovation, water policy, and water management in Israel. And
Israel’s journey has some made-for-the-movies moments and characters.
The first significant pipeline into Israel’s Negev desert was
built in 1946, amid post–World War II shortages of metals of all kinds. The
same Simcha Blass who would go on to invent drip irrigation was in charge of
building that pipeline. He found an unlikely stockpile of water pipes: During
the Blitz on London, the city constructed an extra piping system to supply
water to fight fires caused by the nightly bombing. After the war, the system
was dismantled, and Blass managed to have representatives in Europe quietly buy
up the pipe and get it to Palestine.
Siegel also tells the story of the first wary partnership between
China and Israel designed to help solve China’s continent-wide water problems.
In 1983, nine years before the two nations formally established diplomatic
relations, China secretly invited Israeli water experts in, and agreed to
follow their guidance on smarter irrigation practices and more appropriate
crops. But with one condition: The Chinese “demanded that all markings had to
be removed from the irrigation equipment and seed packaging that might indicate
their Israeli origins.”
“In Israel, 85 percent of wastewater is cleaned and reused.
Spain has the world’s second-highest recycling rate, at 25 percent.”
Siegel is not a practiced author, and Let
There Be Water has some rough patches. The book starts slowly, with a
cookie-cutter essay on global water problems segueing into uninspiring opening
pages on what Israeli children are taught about water use in hygiene class and
on the passage of early water laws. And Let There Be Water is often frustratingly vague just when you want it to be
specific. That first water system built with pipes from the London Blitz to
supply desert farms was so expensive that early settlers nicknamed it the
“Champagne Pipeline.” But Siegel doesn’t tell us what the pipes cost (or tell
us that the cost is lost to history). Siegel describes how Israel raised
household water rates nationwide by 40 percent in 2008, resulting in both a
widespread outcry and a 16 percent drop in residential water use. But he
doesn’t tell us what Israelis pay for water at home — before the rate increase
or after.
When Siegel anticipates readers’ questions, however, he nails it.
How in the world did Israel get its farmers to adopt purified sewage for their
crops? The price of that irrigation water was discounted, its supply was
guaranteed regardless of drought, and farmers got 20 percent more than their
normal allocation if they took the reuse water. Now, they can’t get enough (and
the discounts and bonuses have long since been phased out).
One Israeli official makes an arresting point to Siegel. He
compares the current moment in water management to the moment, thousands of
years ago, when humans started to cultivate food instead of simply gathering
it: We grow food where it needs to be grown and transport it where it needs to
be eaten.
Now, the official says, we’ve reached the same point with water
—because of reuse, desalination, and micro-irrigation. We can “manufacture” the
right water for the right purpose in the right place. The only issues are
determination and cost.
That’s truer in a coastal state such as Israel than in, for
instance, Nebraska. But Israel’s determination to create water security is a
half-century-long lesson in the liberating economic power of smart water, and a
vivid illustration that scarcity doesn’t need to lead to deprivation. It can
often drive exactly the opposite: innovation and even abundance.
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00364?gko=619ab
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