Our Cup Runneth Dry

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Position: Served as Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003
• Pages: 26-31

Page 26 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, March/April 2009

Our Cup Runneth Dry

Henceforth, North Americans will have to give up their assumption

of an easy abundance of water, transcend their fears of future scarcity,

and manage their water resources sustainably with due regard for

their full value — ecological, economic, and social

G. Tracy Mehan III

We charge the same for water whether it is used for

drinking or for swimming pools. We do not allow

markets to function in a way that would, economi-

cally speaking, enable water to f‌low to the highest

and best uses. We pave paradise, f‌ill wetlands, en-

croach on f‌lood plains, clear forests, and otherwise

disrupt natural f‌low regimes and the water cycle.

And we fail to treat runof‌f or stormwater as a valu-

able resource that should be retained on site, inf‌il-

trated into groundwater, or reused where feasible.

is paradox captures something of the dif‌f‌icul-

ty in answering the question, Does North America

have an abundance of water? e answer is obvi-

ously critical, given that water is not only essential

for life on this planet but also has value to human

beings in terms of climate, culture, technology, gov-

ernance, and supply and demand. Whether North

American water abundance is a myth or a reality,

however, depends on many factors, both now and

in the future.

Governance will remain a key variable in our

drive for sustainable water management since the

whole process is highly decentralized. In the United

States, law and tradition place management of wa-

ter quantity primarily in the hands of states, either

individually or, if they negotiate an interstate com-

pact that allocates water among them, then region-

ally. State laws break down into regulatory regimes

of Prior Appropriation (“First in time, f‌irst in right”

and “Use it or lose it”) and Riparian Doctrine (“rea-

sonable use”), in the arid West and the humid East,

respectively.

ere is also a federal common law of equitable

apportionment, derived from Supreme Court deci-

sions such as that governing the diversion of Lake

Early in 2008 I was invited to a New

England college to discuss a topic

ominously titled “Is Water the Next

Oil?” In such a center for lively dis-

cussion, I of‌fered a provocative an-

swer: “If only it were.”

In North America we do not

prize water as highly as oil in terms of its price or

the amount of money we invest in exploring, de-

veloping, drilling, transporting, ref‌ining, or pump-

ing it out of the source and into the multiple uses

operated by the average American household. We

do not pay the full cost of maintaining our water

infrastructure, much less account for the full value

of water’s ecological, economic, or social value in

our water utility rates. We subsidize wasteful water

projects and consumptive uses, as well as agricul-

ture and ethanol — all energy-intensive enterprises.

wa T e r ’s wo r T h

G. Tracy Mehan III served as A ssistant

Adm inist rator fo r W ater at the U.S .

Environ mental Protection Agency from

2001 to 200 3. He was Director of both

the Missouri Department of Nat ural Re-

sources and the Michiga n Ofce of the

Great Lakes. He is a Principal with the

Cadmus Gr oup Inc., based in Arlington,

Virginia. This article and the accompany-

ing sidebar are adapted from One Issue,

Two Voices (Issue 10, November 2008),

“Water Abundance in Canada and the

United States: Myth or Reality ?” which

was published by the Canada Institute of

the Woodrow Wilson International Center

for Scholars.