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This chapter chronicles the building of the O'Shaughnessy Dam, the largest concrete dam in the United States when completed in 1923, and the keystone of the Hetch Hetchy water and power system. It covers the difficulty of financing and constructing a dam, and facilities deep in the mountains of California. It explores the contractors and the lives of the workers who built the system. It asks whether the system, completed in 1934, was worth the lawsuits, bond issues, political discord, construction problems, the cost in dollars, and the loss of human life. The answer was no because San Francisco had other viable alternatives. Nevertheless, the Hetch Hetchy system represents one of the three great California public works projects of its day. The other two were the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge.

This chapter assesses the role of innovation in averting the global water crisis. Recent technical advances—such as desalinization of saltwater, geographical information systems (GIS), and remote sensing—have the potential for managing and increasing freshwater supplies. There is also a new generation of urban water supply systems that can improve efficiency and sustainable use. Water use in agriculture, too, can benefit from a range of innovations in irrigation technologies and delivery systems. The chapter then considers the key policies and other initiatives that are necessary for prompting more economy-wide innovation in water technologies: public policies and investments that facilitate private research and development (R&D) activities of firms; overcoming the water efficiency paradox; privatization of some activities currently undertaken by public supply utilities; and initiatives by the private sector and corporations to account for water costs and risks.

This chapter examines California's water management projects, which represent an important exception to its leadership in the area of environmental protection. California's approach to water management is distinctive from its other environmental policies in three important respects. First, the threats to the state's aquatic environment came from government, not business. Second, with the notable exception of the battle over the damming and flooding of Hetch Hetchy around the turn of the century, until recently neither conservationists nor environmentalists challenged California's wide-ranging water management initiatives, despite the fact that many had deleterious environmental consequences. Third, historically, business interests were not divided with regard to what to do (or not do) with California's water. Both agricultural and urban commercial interests were united in their strong support for the continued expansion of the state's hydraulic infrastructure. Thus, in this case, the public and business were on the same side. As was the case with the protection of forests and scenic areas, the federal government has also played an important role in shaping California's approach to water management. The federal government's initial legal backing of and subsequent financial support for the state's water management system has been critical in promoting the exploitation of not only the state's but the region's water resources.

This chapter tracks the development of water and wastewater treatment infrastructure in Kentucky from colonial days up to the present. It examines the requirements for capturing, holding treating, delivering and removing water via reservoirs, treatment plants, pipes, pumps, etc. It examines the increasing role of government and state and local utilities through time to insure safe drinking water and proper treatment and disposal of wastewater. The historical role of federal rules for water and wastewater management is examined. Historical developments in the City of Harrodsburg illustrate the evolution of water and wastewater management in Kentucky.

This chapter identifies problems of sustainability as systemic action problems and presents illustrative case studies in environmental governance: the management of energy, water, and food systems. It begins by examining the widely discussed idea that problems of sustainability are wicked problems, and argues that systemic complexity and decisional complexity are the factors fundamentally involved in such problems. This opening discussion of the nature of sustainability problems and the case studies that follow bring together and illustrate thematic strands of the preceding chapters, including the costs, benefits, and hazards of complexity, the respective roles of market and government mechanisms, and trans-boundary environmental governance. The illustrative cases concern the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Australia’s National Water Management System, and the changing patterns of food production in the Mekong Region of Southeast Asia. The cases progress in this way from the local and regional to the national and international, and all are concerned in one way or another with relationships between water, food, and energy systems: the widely discussed water-food-energy nexus.

This chapter explores the changes in Brazil’s water management through the emergence of a new paradigm. It pushes two aspects of water management, namely: To reframe water as a common good with economic value, and to create participatory institutions that will help in the development of water management. The chapter posits the value of knowledge and research in providing clear paths for stakeholders to be able to make informed decisions regarding effective water management. It explores how Brazil’s water systems pose significant challenges to policymakers in equity terms, and what we can learn from their case and history, concluding with the ability to reform water management and policies being critically reliant on personal belief systems and worldviews. Evidence is shown of the possibility of more equitable, transparent, and accountable systems that are more beneficial when compared to previously exclusionary, clientelistic systems.

US municipalities have some of the safest and most reliable water resource systems in the world, providing low-cost water and sanitation services to the vast majority of the nation's population. But even though traditional water-related diseases have largely disappeared, there are still some important, serious, and growing challenges facing the nation's towns and cities. This chapter reviews some of these challenges. It considers alternative approaches for addressing these concerns, including soft path tools and policies that may be especially valuable for moving to a more sustainable water system. It concludes with recommendations on strategies the federal government can take to facilitate these changes.

This chapter illustrates how civic projects articulated national ambitions. The United States needed technologies to develop industry, transport American-made products, and protect the health and homes of urban citizens. But it was the way Americans chose to promote inventions, devices, and civic constructions that put national aspirations into public conversation. Although the Erie Canal was the most prominent public works project in the early nineteenth century, water systems undertaken in American cities between the 1810s and 1850s were the most tangible evidence of civic development. Celebrated as representations of America's place among the nations of the world, the magnitude of these projects made them tourist attractions. Lithographs, paintings, sculpture, and music depicted these achievements. Moreover, the brick-and-mortar constructions visually articulated empirical ambitions through their design and embellishment. Reservoirs, pumping stations, and fountains incorporated references to ancient empires and communicated Americans' conception of nationhood with an easily understood visual rhetoric.

This chapter focuses on a variety of projects that have implemented low impact development principles and construction materials. The featured projects have been designed to manage urban storm water runoff by either storing and reducing runoff volumes, or treating the water so cleaner water is returned to streams and waterways. A particular emphasis is placed on alternative material used in contrast to traditional material usage and approaches, as well as the challenges, associated with changing traditional mindsets.

This chapter focuses on the increasing reliance of California’s water utilities on impact fees to help pay for water-system expansion projects. It discusses the levy and increase of impact fees by local government on developers. Water impact fees and the importance of their analysis in understanding local water politics are discussed. A model examining California’s public water utilities is provided that helps in understanding decisions regarding water pricing. The relationship between the growth rate and impact fee levels is discussed, as well as the effect on growth. The chapter presents a hypothesis that may cause special districts to impose high-impact fees when there is a slow growth rate in the community.

Chapter 4 abstracts and summarizes the very copious field data from the three lengthy field seasons at Chocolá, including the specific evidence obtained about the very extensive water control system that was discovered. Intensive grid excavations were undertaken in five operations: Mound 15, the northernmost part of the elite north sector, Mounds 6 and 7, in the southern part of the north sector, Mound 2, in the central administrative sector, and Mound 5, in the south sector. Accordingly, our three field seasons provide the specific evidence and artifacts we have been able to use to understand the clearly hierarchical structure of the ancient society and city. Of particular importance for a better understanding of the material underpinnings of Chocolá is our research at Mound 5, in the south, where we believe cacao arboriculture was developed for long-distance trade in the Preclassic period.

Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia, was the most extensive low-density agrarian-based urban complex in the world. The demise of this great city between the late 13th and the start of the 17th centuries AD has been a topic of ongoing debate, with explanations that range from the burden of excessive construction work to disease, geo-political change, and the development of new trade routes. In the 1970s Bernard-Phillipe Groslier argued for the adverse effects of land clearance and deteriorating rice yields. What can now be added to this ensemble of explanations is the role of the massive inertia of Angkor’s immense water management system, political dependence on a meticulously organized risk management system for ensuring rice production, and the impact of extreme climate anomalies from the 14th to the 16th centuries that brought intense, high-magnitude monsoons interspersed with decades-long drought. Evidence of this severe climatic instability is found in a seven-and-a-half century tree-ring record from tropical southern Vietnam. The climatic instability at the time of Angkor’s demise coincides with the abrupt transition from wetter, La Niña-like conditions over Indochina during the Medieval Warm Period to the more drought-dominated climate of the Little Ice Age, when El Niño appears to have dominated and the ITCZ migrated nearly five degrees southward. As this transition neared, Angkor was hit by the double impact of high-magnitude rains and crippling droughts, the former causing damage to water management infrastructure and the latter decreasing agricultural productivity. The Khmer state at Angkor was built on a human-engineered, artificial wetland fed by small rivers. The management of water was a massive undertaking, and the state potentially possessed the capacity to ride out drought, as it had done for the first half of the 13th century. Indeed, Angkor demonstrated just how powerful a water management system would be required and, conversely, how formidable a threat drought can be. The irony, then, is that extreme flooding destroyed Angkor’s water management capacity and removed a system that was designed to protect its population from climate anomalies.

The chapter argues that building of institutional capacity for sustainable urban water management would require scientific planning of urban areas with due consideration to their main characteristics as they would have significant impact not only on the physical performance of the water systems, but also on the performance of the urban water utilities. On the other hand, the sustainable development of cities would largely depend on the ability of the cities to meet their growing water demands. Therefore, the master plans for future expansion of urban areas should take cognizance of the regional water resources scenario. Given the wide variation in physical, socio-economic and administrative set ups, a uniform water policy is not going to work across all urban areas. No policy can be uniformly applied across typologies. While policy objectives will change according to the typology, the policy instruments will also change.

This chapter describes how the first found exoplanets presented puzzles: they orbited where they should not have formed or where they could not have survived the death of their stars. The Solar System had its own puzzles to add: Mars is smaller than expected, while Venus, Earth, and Mars had more water—at least at one time—than could be understood. This chapter shows how astronomers worked through the combination of these puzzles: now we appreciate that planets can change their orbits, scatter water-bearing asteroids about, steal material from growing planets, or team up with other planets to stabilize their future. The special history of Jupiter and Saturn as a pair bringing both destruction and water to Earth emerged from the study of seventeenth-century resonant clocks, from the water contents of asteroids, and from experiments with supercomputers imposing the laws of physics on virtual worlds.

Our lives depend upon and determine the fluxes of water and chemicals in the environment. Atmospheric, aquatic, and terrestrial systems are all characterized by transfer processes that make our lives possible. Some of these processes deliver the air, water, and nutrients that we need to produce food and fiber. Other transfer processes relocate our wastes as environmental contaminants that must be properly managed. As society grows in absolute numbers, so, too, must our concern for maintaining the balance between the wise use of our natural resources in a sustainable manner on the one hand, and the misuse of these resources through short-sightedness and mismanagement on the other hand. Utilization of our resources must be accompanied by protection of them, and knowledge of the role that transfer processes play in this balancing act is important. Management for the long term means that wise decisions in the short term are based on two key issues. First, there is a crucial need to further understand how natural processes, particularly transfer processes, operate. Without this knowledge base, we are unable to formulate logical and lasting solutions to environmental problems. While soil scientists have always focused on tabulating land characteristics in the form of soil surveys, there now is the need to translate these static characterizations into dynamic land qualities, such as soil transfer processes. As important, but less appreciated, is the fact that scientists are becoming increasingly accountable to our clients, the public, for approaches to solve problems that are important to society. This is particularly true for those scientists knowledgeable in transfer processes, for the obvious reasons of public focus on environmental management and pollution prevention. The decisions regarding the impact of our science will be debated, enacted, and enforced outside the scientific community. As we now realize, this means we must consider solutions to environmental problems that are endorsed not only by the scientific community, but also by the public citizenry and regulatory bodies. Many soil and water scientists are experts on transfer processes in the unsaturated zone of the soil.

In Ethiopia, 85% of the population is engaged in agriculture (CSA, 1999). Agriculture supplies a significant proportion of the raw materials for the agro-industries, and accounts for 52% of the gross product and 90% of the export earnings. A wide range of climatic, ecological, and socioeconomic diversities influence Ethiopian agriculture. The dependency of most of the population on rain-fed agriculture has made the country’s economy extremely vulnerable to the effects of weather and climate, which are highly variable both temporally and spatially. If rains fail in one season, the farmer is unable to satisfy his needs and pay his obligations (tax, credit, etc). Farmers remain in the bottom line of poverty and lead a risky life. Moreover, due to climatic change and other human-induced factors, areas affected by drought and desertification are expanding in Ethiopia (NMSA, 1996a; WMO, 1986). There are three major food supply systems in Ethiopia (IGADD, 1988; Teshome, 1996): crop, livestock, and market-dependent systems. Cropbased systems are practiced principally over the highlands of the country and comprise a very diverse range of production, depending on altitude, rainfall, soil type, and topography. Any surplus above the farmer’s need is largely dependent on, for example, good weather conditions, absence of pests and diseases, availability of adequate human and animal power. Failure of rains during any cropping season means shortage of food supply that affects farmers and others. The livestock system constitutes about 10% of the total population, which is largely based in arid and semiarid zones of the country. This system is well adapted to highly variable climatic conditions and mainly depends on animals for milk and meat and is usually supplemented by grains during nondrought years. Approximately 15% of the Ethiopian population is market dependent and is affected by the preceding two food supply systems. Its food supply (grain, pulses, and oil seeds) has been facing serious shortages due to recurring droughts. People’s purchasing power determines access to food in the market-dependent food supply system. In Ethiopia, an agricultural drought is assessed using the concept of the length of growing period (LGP).