The Most Precious Commodity on Earth

We turn on the tap to make coffee, take a shower, or drench the begonias. We not only expect water to be there, in the United States we take for granted it will be clean, plentiful, and cheap. Fortunately for us, there are people like the four Grinnell alumni profiled here who spend every day thinking about water — what’s in it, how it’s used, where it comes from, where it goes, how it moves, what it costs — and generally regarding it for what it is: the most precious commodity on earth.

Two alumni, Bill Stowe ’81 and Inga Jacobs ’04, work on issues of water quality — Stowe in central Iowa and Jacobs in South Africa. Morgan Robertson ’93 is a policy expert. Jonathan Higgins ’80 is a freshwater conservationist who studies river basin ecosystems.

Bill Stowe ’81: 

An Iowa Fight

Agriculture has such huge economic and political clout in Iowa that it is fair to say that no one would choose to pick a fight with it unless there was a very good reason. Stowe believes there is a good reason, and it is water.

Stowe, a labor lawyer with a master’s degree in engineering, is no shrinking violet when it comes to advocacy, having worked at times for big oil, big steel, and utility companies. More recently, he spent 15 years leading public works for the city of Des Moines. In that capacity his water concerns ranged from wastewater treatment to managing risk for a flood-prone city at the southern end of the geological formation known as the Des Moines lobe.

In September 2012, Stowe moved from public works to become CEO and general manager of Des Moines Water Works (DMWW), an independent municipal utility that pumps 17 billion gallons annually to customers in and around the city of Des Moines.

“I came to this job thinking that floods, droughts, and climate change issues would be a huge portion of it,” Stowe says. “It didn’t take me long to get clued in to the fact that source water quality is the largest single concern by far. It is a survival issue for this business.”

Indeed, Stowe is on the front lines of a water quality battle that is front page news in Iowa almost every day. It may ultimately impact environmental policy across the nation. For the time being, the battle is being fought over the quality of water that arrives in Des Moines via the Raccoon River watershed.

According to Stowe, nitrate concentrations are regularly present at three- to seven-times the permissible levels in the rivers from which DMWW draws its water. In order to provide its customers with nitrate-safe product that meets the Environmental Protection Agency standard of 10 milligrams per liter, the utility operated its nitrate removal system for 97 consecutive days this winter at a cost of well over half a million dollars.

“We expect to see this in the summer with planting and fertilization, but we should not see nitrates at this level in the winter,” Stowe says. “That tells us there is a sea change of some kind happening.” Stowe is worried about overburdening the plant’s 25-year-old technology. “If we had a denitrification unit go offline for whatever reason, the drinking water that we deliver to half a million Iowans may not meet federal quality requirements. That would be a big problem for us, as well as a public health concern.”

A new treatment system to handle the increased loads is projected to cost upward of $100 million. Stowe and the DMWW trustees for whom he works contend that their ratepayers should not be on the hook for a problem over which they have no control. They are looking upstream for accountability.

“Our raw water is coming from surface water sources that are heavily influenced by agriculture in this state,” Stowe explains. “Factors like CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations], anhydrous ammonia, and monocrops in the 10,000-square-mile area that represent our watersheds are driving our water quality. Data indicate that our source waters are increasingly at risk. We are going to push back against the assumed policy mainstream that says industrial agriculture is the norm in Iowa.”

The focus of DMWW’s push is drainage districts, which are natural and artificial systems shared by landowners and managed by county boards of supervisors to move water away from cropland during times of “excess moisture.” Iowa’s laws specific to drainage districts were written a century ago. They presume drainage of overflow surface water from agricultural land to be “a public benefit and conducive to the public health, convenience, and welfare.”

Stowe contends policy formulated in the 1890s gives “no thought to downstream impacts” of discharge from those districts into the state’s waters, particularly in view of the fact that agricultural land use has expanded to cover 90 percent of the state. Furthermore, Stowe says, agricultural drainage districts are not subject to pollution regulations by which manufacturers and wastewater treatment plants must abide.

“If I have a metal processing plant, I cannot put anything into the waters of the state without a permit,” Stowe says. “But if I’m part of a drainage district, I can put in whatever, and it comes out of that pipe and goes into the river completely unregulated. That pipe is regulated, this one isn’t. What’s the policy basis for that? There’s no good reason for it, especially when ag folks know where 90 percent of the nitrogen problem in this state is coming from.”

Agricultural interests in Iowa favor voluntary measures to address nutrient pollution. The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, a response to the call for 12 Mississippi River Basin states to partner in reducing hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, aims to cut nitrogen in Iowa’s waterways by 45 percent. Studies are under way, and distressed watersheds have been identified. But Stowe says the problem is here and now, and data prove the nutrient reduction strategy to be too little, too slow.

Meanwhile, county supervisors regard it as neither politically nor practically feasible under Iowa law to do anything but drain the land. That’s a position Stowe finds untenable, but understandable. “The problem in Iowa,” Stowe says, “is that we have taken the view that any federal legislation like the Clean Water Act by its very nature exempts agriculture, and so there are no consequences from it.”

In March, following a 60-day notice of intent, DMWW filed a lawsuit in federal court against the boards of supervisors in three counties to the north of Des Moines. Stowe explains, “There are three critical words in the Clean Water Act — agricultural stormwater discharge — that are exempted from regulation. The basic legal argument we’re making as scientists is that what we see coming out of these very sophisticated, plumbed farm fields is a pipe, and a pipe is a conveyance. It is a point source, just as in a storm sewer system.

“We’re pretty savvy on issues of groundwater versus surface water, and in our view drainage districts are not agricultural stormwater dischargers. They are actually groundwater dischargers,” Stowe says. “Our point is to prove in federal court that they are point source polluters and should be regulated wherever they discharge into the waters of the state.”

Formal court proceedings are in the discovery phase with little action expected until late summer. The court of public opinion, however, is in full song. Editorials alternately peg Stowe and the waterworks trustees as righteous crusaders or anti-ag reactionaries.

“I never thought I’d come over here and within three years be publicly criticizing the Farm Bureau and going into federal district court to sue drainage districts in northern Iowa,” Stowe says. “My role is to apply the right financial, scientific, and ethical principles to make the business run. And it is a business. We want to be here next year, the year after that, and 100 years from now.”

Inga Jacobs ’04: 

Water Security Challenges

Jacobs, executive manager for business development, marketing, and communication for the South African Water Research Commission, says deteriorating water quality has become a global concern as the human populations grow, industrial and agricultural interests expand, and myriad environmental factors put the water cycle at risk.

“Poor water quality affects water quantity, as polluted water diminishes the volume of usable water within a given area,” Jacobs says. “According to the U.N., the most widespread water quality problem is eutrophication from the oversupply of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. Only about 20 percent of nitrogen used in agricultural production is actually consumed as food, while the rest is lost to the environment. Lakes and reservoirs are especially vulnerable because of their complex dynamics, comparatively longer water residence times and their role as an integrating sink for pollutants from their drainage basins.”

Jacobs’ concerns illustrate that water issues related to nutrient pollution are the same in South Africa as in central Iowa, and bring the issue of food versus the environment full circle. “One of the biggest challenges lies in curbing the effects that the agricultural sector has on global water systems, while ensuring that enough food is produced for a population that is expected to increase to nine billion by 2050,” Jacobs says.

The effects of personal care products and pharmaceuticals on humans and aquatic ecosystems also are a recurring theme. “Not much is known about their long-term impact,” Jacobs says, “although some are believed to imitate natural hormones in humans and other species. In South Africa, we’re currently doing a lot of research on the impact of medical waste in our rivers.”

Jacobs says that providing stable freshwater supplies is a concern for virtually every country in the world. She points to United Nations statistics that say one in three people today lives in a country with moderate to high water stress. By 2030, nearly half of the global population could be facing water scarcity, with demand exceeding supply by 40 percent. A country is considered to be water-stressed if the amount of renewable water in the country is less than 1,700 cubic feet per person, per year.

Given that demands on river basins worldwide will intensify as stakeholders with different priorities seek access to increasingly overstressed resources, Jacobs ranks water security as one of the greatest challenges that modern-day states will have to overcome.

Morgan Robertson ’93: 

Realities of Workable Policy

According to Robertson, associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, landmark pieces of environmental legislation passed between 1965 and 1980 — such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act — were designed to be aggressive yet limited at the same time.

“None of them promised to stop pollution period. Each of them includes some kind of provision or allowance for pollution to continue in a regulated way,” Robertson says. “So if you come to these major landmark pieces with the expectation that pollution is going to simply stop, then yes, you’re going to be disappointed, because the Clean Water Act contains provisions for allowing impacts to the waters of the United States to continue, even from point sources.

“What I try and tell my students is that in terms of point-source control of pollutants and slowing down or halting of the filling of wetlands, there have been remarkable successes,” Robertson says. Some of that success comes in the form of compensation sites to offset unavoidable pollution, usually a condition of receiving a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to impact water of the United States. While 30 years of debate have not settled the issue of whether such remedies are adequate, it’s worth noting that nearly 50,000 acres of wetland and stream compensation per year result from such requirements.

The idea of offsetting losses in exchange for exceeding pollution limitations is inherent in the culture of American environmental regulation, according to Robertson. “You can see it as a failure, but I have had it explained to me by people who were on the scene in the 1970s that if we had passed (landmark environmental laws) and provided no relief valve where there was incredible pressure to permit a certain amount of pollution, it would have guaranteed the overturning of these laws within about five to 10 years.

“So, it’s interesting to me that this is one of the things that really gets students interested but also kind of depressed,” Robertson says. “People who are in their college years tend to view the law as failed because it compromised the goal of environmental quality.”

Jonathan Higgins ’80: 

An Integrated Approach

According to Higgins, director of conservation for The Nature Conservancy’s Great Rivers Program, the amount of hydropower produced around the globe is set to double in the next 20–30 years. Working upfront in an integrated, basin-wide planning approach to meet the needs of society and the environment, he says, is far more likely to foster long-term social and environmental viability than trying to deal with dams one at a time to mitigate impacts. In addition, once they are built in a given place, the opportunities for mitigation are often limited.

“Building dams in some places is really problematic,” Higgins explains. “We’ve looked at development scenarios for generating ‘X’ gigawatts of hydropower in some of these river basins over the next 30 years. There might be 40 dam sites that are approved for potential dam development, and probably half of those sites will be developed. Which half is really important, because certain arrangements would allow the majority of river basins to be connected and flow naturally. Done another way, you would completely disconnect major portions of the river and tributaries, and the fisheries would fall apart.”

In addition, displacement from reservoirs and downstream impacts from dams can uproot entire cultures that have depended on freshwater ecosystems for food and materials for centuries, Higgins says. “Those people are the silent majority of those impacted from dams, and there’s nobody fighting for them. After losing their fisheries, flood recession agriculture, and riparian grazing, they migrate to cities and contribute to urban poverty on a global scale.”

“Hydropower developers are concerned because it’s costing them a fortune to be thrown out of countries because of social unrest,” Higgins says. “Governments and developers can have enormous compensation costs, so it’s in their interest to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. The future costs of not taking that into account are prohibitive.”

Consequently, project financiers like the World Bank and international development banks ask Higgins and his partners to develop frameworks for environmental sustainability. Using computer scenarios to assess potential impacts to the freshwater landscape, licensing and planning agencies and developers can see what impacts may occur in the context of developing dams, concessions for forestry, mining, or agriculture.

Without such considerations, Higgins says, river functions and habitat quality can be highly altered. Floodplains can cease to function, fish and bird reproduction can be dramatically decreased or terminated, and sediment, temperature, and natural flow pulse regimes of a river can be affected for hundreds of miles downstream.

Currently, Higgins and his partners are working with government licensing agencies and dam developers to influence how dams are built and operated globally in order to better sustain environmental processes and biodiversity.

“Those are the types of win-win situations we’re looking for,” Higgins says.

Whether he is working with source watersheds for sustaining municipal water supplies in Colombia, wetlands in the midwestern United States, or developing freshwater conservation strategies in China, Higgins says putting conservation priorities to work on a scale that actually makes a difference is the challenge of the day.

Society, he says, needs to make broader and longer-term decisions about water resource management.

“It goes well beyond buying land and establishing protected areas,” Higgins says. “You’ve got to make it something that is socially and economically beneficial to people. One of the corners that the Nature Conservancy has turned recently is to implement — where useful — the concept of ecosystems services, an integrated approach that includes both — biodiversity and the services that ecosystems provide that are important for people.

“I don’t think that’s all we should be doing, but our work should be put in the context of sustaining the environment so that it’s good for people, it’s good for the economy,” Higgins says.