ABSTRACT
What do you call the principles, the values, that form the basis of water policies, or that motivate us to use or not use water in certain ways? How do we judge whether our use of water – whether for brushing our teeth or irrigating a farmer’s field – is wasteful or necessary? When we read about the proposed dam that the government of Laos wants to build on the Mekong river, what determines whether we feel that is a good idea or a terrible one? I use the term “water ethics” to denote these underlying principles that influence our own water behavior and our reaction to other people’s behaviors. The kind of ethics I am talking about are rarely black and white. We
usually need more information to form a judgment about the dam, or even about whether we are using too much water in brushing our teeth: What is the source of the water flowing our of the tap, and what will happen to it when it goes down the drain? What sort of dam is being proposed on the Mekong? What will be the impacts on the river’s fish, and on the traditional communities and cultures that depend on fishing? What will the electricity from the dam be used for and what are the alternative energy options? What will happen to the people who live in the proposed reservoir area? The questions we ask in our inquiry about whether the dam is desirable
or not, or whether we are using too much water in our own homes, reflect our values about what is important. What information is relevant to our support or opposition to the dam proposal? Does it matter if fish can navigate around the dam through fish ladders? Does it matter if local communities have to give up fishing and work in a factory powered by the dam’s electricity? Does it matter what is being produced in the factory that uses the electricity from the dam? What about the labor conditions? Where do water ethics end and other ethics begin? The American conservationist, Aldo Leopold, believed that an extension
of ethics beyond our immediately obvious self-interest, to include the wellbeing of nature, is “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity” (Leopold 1970 [original 1949]:167). Our civilization has already made good progress on our ethical path and embracing nature is the next step. In his most famous essay, The Land Ethic, Leopold illustrates how far we’ve come
in our ethical evolution, by relating the Greek myth of Odysseus returning after twenty years away from home (ten years fighting the Trojan War and another ten years finding his way back). His wife and son have been loyally awaiting his return, but what about his slaves, and particularly the female slaves? Had they been loyal too? Just to be sure, Leopold tells us, paraphrasing Homer, “he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.” What would today be considered mass murder was then seen as justified housecleaning. “The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong … ” (Leopold 1970 [original 1949]:167). Leopold’s story has been recounted many times not only because of the
powerful imagery, but also because there are two deep truths in his example. The first truth is that we have made incredible progress over the past few millennia, and particularly in the past century, in extending our ethical boundaries. While we continue to give special attention to our immediate families and communities (“Charity begins at home”), we have also embraced an ethical concern about people we do not know and will never meet. Through the United Nations, we have endorsed resolutions proclaiming the rights of people and cultures. In 2010, we (again through the UN) even recognized the right of every person to have safe water to drink. Clearly, we are making progress! The second truth in Leopold’s account is that for all our recent progress
in caring for the larger human community we have not yet made room for nature in our ethical sphere. The way we treat our rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, and estuaries is largely, if not entirely, governed by expediency. The easiest place to discharge industrial waste is the river that is flowing by, and the easiest way to expand urban water supply is to build a reservoir on that river upstream of the factory where the water quality is still good. The environmental movement of the 1970s and the new paradigm of sus-
tainable development, which emerged with the report of the Brundtland Commission in 1987 (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) and the Rio Conference in 1992, seemed to demonstrate that the ethical evolution Leopold anticipated was now taking place. Yet 20 years later, at the time of the Rio+20 meetings, the path to an ecological ethic seemed neither immanent nor inevitable. There is no dearth of analytical tools and concepts (e.g. ecosystem services, green economy, etc.) but these very concepts, like “sustainability” are too easily twisted into the old concepts with new names. The problem, it seems to me, lies more in “how” we are thinking than
“what” we are thinking; how we are using the analytical tools. There is nothing wrong with the tools themselves. Ecosystem services is a powerful concept with far-reaching implications. But then, cost-benefit analysis is also a powerful and valuable tool which has been around for many decades, but has not really helped us along the Leopoldian path of evolution. What’s missing? In a word, ethics. We have ethics, personally, and there are
normative ethics in every society (which is what we anthropologists like to study); we have them, but we are not using those values when it comes to water. Somehow we have gotten used to the idea that water management is a
technical subject better left to the experts. That’s partly right; water management is technical, but there are lots of value assumptions embedded in the technical choices. Moreover, the governance of water, the laws, policies, and institutions which set the context for technical water management, is anything but technical. Water governance is all about values, and if we don’t take the trouble to offer our own values to the water discourse, we are going to be living with the values of the people who do take (and often make!) trouble. Imposing our personal ethics onto water discussions in our home com-
munities is not necessarily going to get us very far along Leopold’s path either. What I believe Leopold had in mind (and he was rather vague about the details) was that through reflecting on both the moral and practical implications of alternative courses of action (e.g. whether to build the dam to provide more water or, alternatively, to start a water conservation campaign to create water savings), we would learn to discern the better choice. Eventually we would also realize that interfering with natural processes, like flowing rivers, has limits, and if those are exceeded (e.g. taking too much water out of the river) we will undermine the natural productivity that our self-interest relies on. Bringing nature into our ethical sphere is not necessarily an act of altruism, though it can be. It is also, I believe, in the long-term self-interest of our civilization, and our very survival as a species. The message of this book is that an awareness of ethics can contribute to
better decisions about water management and governance. My assumption is that the process of thinking through the ethical implications of alternative water policies and practices will favor outcomes that are better for us as people, and for the planet on whose health we ultimately depend. If our management of water becomes more sustainable, we will be further along Leopold’s path, and further away from a water crisis. It is in this sense that water ethics has the potential to “solve” the water crisis.
