Starve a man and he’ll live for a month. Take away his water and he’ll be dead in a few days.
If one were looking for a thread of commonality in a fractious world, that would be it. Water, of which we are mostly made—60 percent of a given human body comprises water—is also our Achilles’ heel.
Ironically, Achilles, the great warrior of Homer’s Illiad and of Greek mythology, was mostly immortal thanks to his mother’s dipping him in water, that water being the River Styx, which, in Greek mythology, divides the land of the living from that of the dead. Unfortunately for Achilles, he was “mostly” immortal because when dipping a child in the River Styx, a mother has to hold her child somewhere. Consequently, that somewhere—the heels in Achilles’ case—doesn’t get the magic touch of the river.
So, why are we desperately dependent on such a simple little molecule—two of the tiniest of atoms, hydrogen, and one lowly oxygen, curiously held together by their very oppositeness?
For whatever evolutionary reason, water is the elixir that helps move nutrients and oxygen around our bodies, regulates our temperature in a world of wild temperature swings, absorbs the blows of daily life so our organs don’t have to, lubricates our joints so that we may move about in the world, and balances our chemistry in a myriad of ways.
To make a sweeping generalization: No water; no life.
The average male needs to take in about a gallon of water a day, in whatever form it may come: as plain water, foods (celery, cucumbers, and tomatoes are 95% water), milk, coffee (yes, coffee counts) or other drinks. Curiously, women need only about half a gallon per day. With a U.S. population of 347 million and assuming an equal distribution of the sexes, that would be 260 million gallons per year of drinking water. But factor in domestic use, which includes uses like washing for hygiene, toilets, and landscaping and the average American uses 82 gallons per day. Now, we’re looking at 345 billion gallons of water consumed each year.
“But wait, there’s more!” to quote the nostalgically endearing ad for the Veg-o-Matic, a marvel of a bygone era.
Since artificial intelligence—"AI,” as hip people say—is all the rage now (no, this essay was not written by ChatGPT), we can’t forget about the “bots” out there—some AI-smart, others not so much—that are thirsty for electricity or that simply just want to hang out in a cool room. According to a study by researchers at U.C. Riverside and the University of Texas, Arlington, the 2028 U.S. water demand for AI needs is projected to be 528 billion gallons per year. That’s 50% more than what us lowly humans require.
All this notwithstanding, the really big number comes from agricultural use. “Ag”—as people not associated with AI say—uses approximately 120 billion gallons per day nationwide (University of Michigan study, 2024). Ag makes AI look pretty good. Nonetheless, add it all up, and it turns out the U.S. demands upwards of 45 trillion gallons of water every year. Picture every square inch of Idaho covered thigh-deep in water. Every year.
This is all to say, we use a tremendous amount of water in the U.S. Unfortunately, the supply—which either comes from rivers and lakes above ground or from aquifers below ground—is being depleted faster than it is being replenished, particularly in the West.
A warming climate, which brings smaller snowpacks, greater surface evaporation, prolonged droughts, and bigger demands from vegetation, has exacerbated the problem we face. Two examples of the twinned issues serve to demonstrate the point: the Central Valley of California and the Colorado River Basin.
Each year approximately a cubic kilometer of water is pumped from the ground in the San Joaquin Valley. The water feeds the agriculture industry there, which, in turn, feeds much of the country. However, so much water has been pulled from the ground over time that the land is sinking in on itself.
Two Stanford researchers, Matthew Lees and Rosemary Knight, published a study in 2024 in which they analyzed the subsidence of land in the San Joaquin Valley from 1925 through 2022. Between 1945 and 1970, termed “the historic period,” the land sank over 12 inches across an area of 2.7 million acres (bigger than the entire Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho). Some areas saw the land sink nearly 30 feet. The total volume displaced was 14 cubic kilometers.
The problem stabilized a bit during the 1970s and 80s when a vast aqueduct system was put in place that enabled the annual importation of nearly a cubic kilometer (264 billion gallons) of surface water emanating from the snowpack of Northern California. The draw on the groundwater supplies slowed significantly, and land subsidence leveled off.
Lees and Knight found, however, that from 2006 to 2022, when the importation of surface water fell due to droughts, land use changes and environmental draws, Valley-wide the land began to sink again, dramatically so. In those 16 years, the land under study subsided as much as it had in the 24 years of the “historic period,” (14 cubic kilometers), and at a faster rate (12 inches per year in places).
Unfortunately, aquifers are not always like sponges. Depending on the soil type, sometimes they can be filled up again, but sometimes they just collapse permanently. With the earth dropping 12 inches a year, it’s hard to imagine how people can keep canals running, pipelines intact, and buildings standing, let alone keeping a $100 billion high-speed rail on the tracks (under construction).
On the surface water side of supply, the Colorado River Basin provides a related but different example of our water dilemma. Again, with a warming climate, the snowpacks above the upper basin are diminishing. What’s more, after two decades of drought, the water levels at Lakes Mead and Powell are getting dangerously close to “dead pool” levels, the level at which water can’t flow downstream or is too low to generate electricity.
To complicate matters, the water allocated to the seven states in the basin is significantly more than historically flows in the basin. This was basically a miscalculation made by the original drafters of the Colorado River Compact in 1922. In addition to this mistaken flow estimate, a number of current stakeholders—Native Americans, Mexico, and fish—were never accounted for in the original compact.
And for better or worse, the way water is allocated in the West—“first in time, first in right”—adds an additional level of complexity to the issue. Places like the Imperial Valley of California and the Tribal Nations have rights senior to rapidly growing “front range” cities such as Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs, as well as cities in Arizona, most notably Phoenix with its thirsty 1.65 million people, lawns, and golf courses. When a low snowpack year arrives, or drought persists, as both increasingly do, the first to lose their water are these junior rights holders. It makes one wonder if continued growth and development in areas without preexisting and generous water supplies is sustainable.
Still, beyond biological imperative and beyond socio-economic dynamics, there is yet another dimension to this curious little molecule. And that, for lack of a better word, is a spiritual one.
I’m fairly educated on the benefits of drinking water and do appreciate that it keeps me alive, but I’ve never been able to choke down even close to a gallon of water every day. While I can imagine living without drinking water, I don’t think I could live without flowing water of some sort: rivers, oceans, mountain lakes.
Once upon a time, before the millionaires (now billionaires) moved in with vast fortunes fueled by the inventions of the microchip, personal computer, Internet, mobile technology, and AI, there was a sleepy little hamlet in the San Francisco Bay Area called Portola Valley. To give you a sense of the place, the weekly paper was called “The Country Almanac,” which was filled mostly with accounts of the weekend AYSO soccer results, some prized recipes, and the occasional man-bites-dog story. The town was a haven for young families: there were no fences between homes, kids played in tree forts perched in the oaks, slid down grassy hills on cardboard, and on hot days hung out in the cool redwood groves.
Behind our house was a creek that normally was just a pretty little creek. But some years, in the spring, that little creek would swell up, run brown and fast, ripping through trees and brush, riding high on the banks. It was these times that our little gang of miscreants would grab our car inner-tubes, imaginary lifejackets, and find our way upstream to begin the world’s most dangerous river expedition down the raging Corte Madera Creek. Where our parents were during these debacles is anyone’s guess. There were strainers and culverts, trees across the creek, any number of things that would kill a kid. But it was as thrilling as childhood gets.
The next stop on my spiritual education was in high school. Some buddies and I miraculously convinced our parents to let us spend a couple weeks at a kayak school on the Rogue River in Oregon. Learning to kayak whitewater was exciting enough, “But wait, there’s more!”
This was the 1976-or-so river scene in rural Oregon, about as close to the hippy, free-love, Woodstock era as these four 1960-babies, then 16, were going to get. There was plenty of pot smoking going on, women running around topless in the guide house, hot springs and more nudity, and a Jesse Colin Young soundtrack playing. It was teenager Heaven.
Knowing how to kayak became a gateway drug of sorts into river guiding after college. While some of these same friends and I had moved on to real jobs in the Bay Area, on summer weekends we continued to kayak the South Fork of the American River. One particular weekend that sticks in my memory, a river outfitter, inexplicably named Echo, was short a few guides. Lucky for them, maybe unlucky for the guests, we—the kayakers with no training—jumped in and pretended to be guides for the day. No one died, and we became hooked on the experience.
That one weekend led to decades of weaving in and out of the guiding world on the rivers of the West: the Tuolumne, Rogue, Main and Middle Fork of the Salmon.
It was life lived simply under big skies, in places so pristine that it seemed we had somehow slipped into a Shangri-La of sorts. For a small group of folks who lived that time together, it was a precious experience full of laughter and wonder and deep friendship.
Rivers and the places through which they freely flow provide a sense of awe, which is not to be underestimated when talking about survival. A sense of awe belittles us in a good way, injects humility in a species that tends to hubris. A sense of awe, ironically, connects us to bigger forces, and for brief moments of bliss, pulls us from the confines of our time.
There is one particularly lovely creek that flows into the Middle Fork of the Salmon. This creek, according to river guide lore, perhaps more aptly our imaginations, flows with magic water. Each week as we passed it, and to this day, I and other believers row our boats over to sip from it. What the magic will do for us has never really been articulated. I always figure, like Achilles, it will bring me some taste of immortality, even if it’s only mostly so. Sounds silly, I know, but you can’t blame a guy for trying.