A Jewel of the Finest Water

Karl Muth argues that water will be the defining issue for climate change watchers and politicians in the near future.

Water has a linguistic history to match its biological importance.

In French poetry, there are medieval roots to its metaphor for purity, freshness, and virginity. In the Arabic literary tradition, water is commonly analogous to clarity not only in substance, but in mind or intent. In Chinese poetry, my maternal grandmother’s area of study and expertise, the flow of water illustrates persistence, power, and inevitability. In English, water is often held as the standard of clarity (literally) but also holds currency as a measure against which other (imperfect) things are judged.

This blog post covers property, water, and politics and how the three are increasingly related. Hence, I thought it appropriate to allude to the famous property case of Armory v. Delamirie, 1 Strange 505 (King’s Bench, Lord Pratt CJ E, 1722), a case with which all law students in the common law tradition are familiar within a year of study. In the case, a boy, a simple chimneysweep, finds a jeweled ring in the course of his duties and takes it for appraisal. The appraiser asks to weigh the jewels and, in so doing, steals them. The boy brings an action in trover and the question is whether the boy has a property right to the gems for, if he does not, he does not have standing to bring suit.

The procedural context of the case is irrelevant here. What is relevant, and has stuck with me ever since I read the case as a first-year law student, is the (metaphorical) use of water by Lord Pratt (himself an Oxford-educated scholar and lover of poetry) in the case’s judgment as the standard by which a jewel might be judged for its clarity and quality. Here, Chief Justice Lord Pratt writes of the value the jury should ascribe to the lost jewel:

“[Experts] of the trade were examined to prove what a jewel of the finest water that would fit the socket would be worth; […] unless the defendant did produce the jewel, and [showed] it not to be of the finest water, [the jury] should presume the strongest case against him, and make the value of the best jewels the measure of their damages[.]”

Years later, in Africa, looking at a jewel glinting in the African sun, freshly mined and only hints of future facets revealed, I found myself asking, “Will it be of the finest water?” Such was the impression this particular passage from Lord Pratt had upon me (Lord Pratt’s highly unusual hearing of a case brought by an impoverished young chimneysweep was among his many kindnesses toward the young and poor, culminating in provisions in favour of children that allowed his home to eventually become what was known as the Hospital for Sick Children after his death and is known today as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children).

These linguistic seductions of water predate our modern, post-industrial times wherein water is scarce. We live on a planet where drinkable water is vanishing. But this is not a doomsday blog about the scarcity of water. And, as those who know me will no doubt quickly note, I wouldn’t call myself – or allow myself to be called – an environmentalist.

I am, however, concerned about the cost of water. The economics of water run increasingly toward the availability of water only for people who are wealthy and white in the global north, which is problematic from a policy standpoint, a security standpoint, a geopolitical standpoint, and even a logistical standpoint.

I write this blog on the island of Dominica, a gorgeous place blessed with the abundance of fresh water. In fact, every major river on the island is safe to drink from. I took a hike the other day and drank from the Breakfast River, one of many such rivers. The coming election will determine whether the incumbent party will retain power and, indirectly, whether the water on the island will be sold to either Danone or Nestle, the companies with the largest holdings of fresh water reserves in the world. By some estimates, of all the water that can be owned on earth, over half is owned by either Danone or Nestle.

I see a policy change on the horizon around environmentalism and so-called “green” political parties (which are generally different from other political parties only in the minor, meaningless detours of marketing that distinguish “reality shows” from “game shows”). Environmentalism, as a policy framework, has been weak because it has little relationship to any meaningful implementation. In other words, it lacks the utilitarian or practical edge that other schools of thought have been forced to integrate.

When a person pushes a so-called political environmentalist – as I do at nearly every opportunity – one finds several unresolved problems with the integrity of the position as a set of standalone politics. One is the relationship between labour and environmentalism (the strangeness of developed world liberal politics seems to align labour and environmental issues, even though the two are naturally opposed in dozens of ways). The second, which is more fascinating, is the integration of the antiquated anti-nuclear sentiment of the 1960’s into a modern environmental framework. It is this pair of symbiotic political agreements that I suspect will fade away in the coming one to two decades, and it will be due to the water issue. Before discussing this, however, we must take a step back.

Most people live near the coasts. This has been true for at least three centuries and is unlikely to change. For every person who lives inland, roughly four to six of his or her countrymen (depending upon the continent being discussed) live near the coasts. I’ve written before on the appeal of tidal power (despite the current immaturity and inefficiency of the underlying technology) for this very reason: most people live within two to four power-grid-widths of a coastline that experiences tides. But there is another coastal coincidence that will increasingly drive political change.

Coastline nuclear reactors, so long as they are well-sited (which, for instance, the Japanese reactor complex was not), offer many advantages. They not only have a natural source of cooling water (if water-cooled reactors are used, though I would propose LMFR designs be used going forward), but they can put any excess power (and at non-peak times most nuclear reactor facilities have a large amount of excess power) into desalinisation. Israeli and Taiwanese reactors (and, to a lesser extent, South African reactors) near coastlines have been doing this for years. In essence, any extra energy (which would often be wasted otherwise) is used to turn salt water into fresh water. The problem with desalinisation is that it is outrageously energy-intensive. With this groundwork laid, we can return to examining environmentalism and how water might push environmentalists away from labour groups and anti-nuclear groups.

For many environmentalists their political-philosophical evolution can be traced broadly to French structuralism, which experienced both revision and popularity in the late 1960’s, the time of the Chinese rift (as seen from the Chinese perspective) in socialist political thought and the separation of Althusser and others from the mainstream (from the Continental perspective). One pollution that occurred during this period, which comes through political convenience rather than logical extension, is an opposition to nuclear power (or nuclear technology or Ludditeism generally) and an unlikely allegiance to workers’ parties proposing “fair trade” and a variety of other well-marketed ways of employing lots of people by doing things inefficiently.

Both of these affiliations, I propose, will be reversed. To be an environmentalist, whatever that means (and the meaning today is so diluted as to be confusingly vague), will mean to be pro-nuclear and anti-labour. And allow me to explain why.

Water will become not only an instrumental issue in environmentalism, but, soon, the only issue. Other issues environmentalists claim to care about, such as food production and responsible irrigation design, are inextricably intertwined with water. For water to be accessible to the masses, coastline nuclear reactors driving large desalinisation operations will be required. On the order of three hundred such reactors will be needed in the coming century. This also will require giving good, safe plans for nuclear powerplants to everyone (I’ve proposed in the past giving nuclear weapons blueprints to everyone as well) – the LMFR reactors designs, which are liquid-metal-cooled and hence can be run at ambient pressures, would be good candidates for an “open source reactor design.” For environmentalists to claim that solar or wind energy will be sufficient to run desalinisation plants on this scale is foolish; even with a 10,000% increase in the efficiency of these technologies and a 1,000% increase in the energy efficiency of the process itself, this would not be possible. Nuclear technology and tidal power are the two options with enough energy involved, and the latter is still too technologically-immature.

The second change is that most things that are done more safely from a water-preservation and water-cleanliness standpoint are done in ways that are mechanised. In some cases, done in ways that require almost complete mechanisation of the underlying processes due to danger, potential contamination, precision, or a mix of the three. The environmentalist will no longer struggle with the question of “hmm… my political allies want employment building these sport-utility vehicles, but they’re bad for the environment…” because these political alliances will – finally – become both electorally untenable and conspicuously hypocritical. The break between Labour in the UK (and the Democrats in the US) and the environmentalists will be the biggest political switch since African-Americans started supporting the Democrats, even in the South (despite the fact that the Democratic Party that had provided 18 of the 19 Senators who launched a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act for nearly two months). Environmentalists will stop with the "green jobs" concept that Obama has found politically perilous (and later presidents will no doubt find politically suicidal) and finally be willing to sacrifice jobs to preserve water.

I don’t know what will follow the current environmental movement, or where the war over water will lead. But I am certain that water, whether purified from the oceans or gathered from the glaciers, will be the primary resource driving human discussion, conflict, and poverty in the future. And until we have the capability to refine, desalinise, or purify water for everything and everyone (ever wonder what Starfleet policies are on shower length?), then the great lakes of America and Canada, the great taigas of the Siberian frontier, the rare lakes of Africa, the interior rivers of Brasil, and the unusual islands like Dominica will truly be, in Lord Pratt's elegant words, jewels of the finest water.