At its annual meeting on Tuesday, The MWRD installed commissioners Terry O'Brien, Patricia Horton, and Debra Shore. It was a a fine event with appropriate pomp and circumstance. However when Debra Shore gave her remarks I could feel that a fresh and clean wind was rising. Here is a partial transcript of her remarks:
I am so honored to be joining the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and there are many reasons I think this is an especially propitious moment to do so.
This is an agency with a noble history – and a storied past. Chicago became the great American metropolis because of what environmental historian William Cronon called “the intersecting geographies of nature and capital.” What Cronon meant was human capital as well as financial resources – the creativity, vision, energy and agency of city planners and leaders, including sanitary and civil engineers, who made no little plans, who dreamt big, and who helped to make our region so vibrant and robust.
I believe that Chicago is poised to become Nature’s Metropolis for the 21st century and if it does, it will be because of ecology and economy combined, those intersecting geographies of nature and capital. This agency has an absolutely key role to play.
Let me quote from a recent article about water by Michael Spector.
“Philosophers and economists at least since Copernicus have noted that, although no substance is more valuable than water, none is more likely to be free,” Spector writes. “In “The Wealth of Nations,’’ Adam Smith called this the “diamond-water paradox”: although water is essential for life, and the value of diamonds is mostly aesthetic, the price of water has always been far lower than that of diamonds.”
Let’s think about this for a moment. Most of us can get along without diamonds. We can even manage without single malt scotch, though that may come as a surprise to some of you in this audience. But none of us can survive without water.
Spector says, “Water that dinosaurs drank is still consumed by humans, and the amount of freshwater on earth has not changed significantly for millions of years. But that doesn’t mean it’s available when or where it is needed. Nearly all of the earth’s water is in the ocean. Only three per cent is even theoretically available for humans to drink. Most of that is locked in polar ice caps and glaciers, or deeply embedded in layers of rock. If a large bucket were to represent all the seawater on the planet, and a coffee cup the amount of freshwater frozen in glaciers, only a teaspoon would remain for us to drink.”
What does this mean for us here on the shores of a great lake?
The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission predicts that the region’s overall population will reach more than 10 million people by 2030. This continued growth will mean increases in the demand for water throughout the region, even in Cook County.
Next add the likely effects of global climate change.
“At the current rate of emissions growth,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a recent article, “carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere will top five hundred parts per million—roughly double pre-industrial levels—by the middle of this century. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and that this, in turn, will prompt a string of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes, more deadly droughts, the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the inundation of many of the world’s major coastal cities.”
If these projections are correct, one result may be dramatically higher migration of people from the coasts of America to the heartland, right here, where we have freshwater resources. And since our reversal of the Chicago River creates a diversion of water from Lake Michigan, we will be the subject of increasing scrutiny for our use of water by people in this country and around the world. Are we doing everything we can to conserve, to be wise stewards of this precious irreplaceable resource, or are we wasteful?
So the challenge that lies before us is this: that we begin to think about and to talk about storm water as drinking water.
There are only two places our drinking water comes from: The Lake, and other surface water or from the ground. And those sources are replenished by rain.
Everytime you think about stormwater management, change the term to drinking water management. Every time we talk about managing stormwater, talk about managing drinking water. Because the task before us is nothing less than a dramatic change in the way we think about and talk about and manage our freshwater resources.
Today we treat rainwater as if it were a misbehaving student: we send it to detention. We send it to detention until we can figure out how to get it away from us permanently.
We take fresh water, hustle it into our sewers where it becomes contaminated, we then pay to treat it, and then we send it downstream where it eventually becomes New Orleans’ problem.
Let me suggest that there is another path. The sustainable cities of the future will be those that are most successful at changing the culture, that make the transition from viewing stormwater as a problem to viewing rainwater as a liquid asset to be captured, treasured, saved and not squandered.
Fortunately the Water Reclamation District is poised to be a national leader in this arena, as it has so often in the past. It is rich with energetic, creative, thoughtful employees and has benefitted from sound, smart direction from the board.
I believe we have a chance here, a rare moment in time, when together we can set the course for generations -- toward a sustainable, harmonious, healthy relationship with nearby nature -- or not.
In a very real sense, it is what we do in our lifetimes that will determine whether we have succeeded. We can change the culture. We can act as caring stewards. We can treat and manage water as a priceless liquid asset.
The work is worthy, our time is short. Let us begin.
