Human needs and environmental rights to water: a ... - ESA Journals

SPECIAL FEATURE: SUSTAINABILITY ON THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER

Human needs and environmental rights to water: a biocultural systems approach to hydrodevelopment and management B. R. JOHNSTON Center for Political Ecology, Santa Cruz, California 95061 USA Citation: Johnston, B. R. 2013. Human needs and environmental rights to water: a biocultural systems approach to hydrodevelopment and management. Ecosphere 4(3):39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES12-00370.1

Abstract. Large-scale hydrodevelopment involves synergistic processes and generates cumulative effects that include the degradation of rivers and the complex human environmental systems they support. To avert impending crises in water scarcity and food security many nations are reshaping the priorities, regimes, and praxis of fresh water resource management to explicitly recognize and address diverse human and ecological needs. A recent United Nations sponsored study documenting the linkages between water, cultural diversity, and global environmental change argues that a coupled bio/social systems approach to watershed management prioritizing biocultural health over other concerns is needed to achieve sustainability goals, address the complex and protracted conflicts that characterize river basin management, and halt biocultural degeneration. Praxis implications include (1) the need for greater respect for and recognition of the rights, values, and contributions of culturally diverse peoples in the management and use of river systems, (2) expansion of the integrated water resource management model to include prioritized allocation of water to meet environmental and cultural flows. Key words: biocultural diversity; cultural flows; environmental flows; hydrodevelopment; river basin management; Special Feature: Sustainability on the U.S./Mexico Border; sustainability. Received 27 November 2012; revised and accepted 11 January 2013; final version received 20 February 2013; published 18 March 2013. Corresponding Editor: D. P. C. Peters. Copyright: Ó 2013 Johnston. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ E-mail: [email protected]

INTRODUCTION

draws from and illustrates key concepts that shape the political ecology of water (the culture and power dimensions of water quality, use, access and control) and inform the United Nations Economic and Social Council International Hydrological Programme (UNESCO-IHP) expert panel study on water, cultural diversity, and global environmental change (Donahue and Johnston 1998, Johnston 2003). In its review of the degenerative human environmental consequences of hydrodevelopment, the UNESCOIHP study argues for adaptive responses that not

Other papers in this Special Feature explore water management and sustainability issues in the rapidly changing environment of southeastern United States and northwestern Mexico. This paper begins with brief reference to the ecological consequences of dams, diversions, and over extraction in the Rio Grande rivershed as a point of entry into a larger discussion of global patterns, consequences and sustainability management trends in hydrodevelopment. Content v www.esajournals.org

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March 2013 v Volume 4(3) v Article 39

SPECIAL FEATURE: SUSTAINABILITY ON THE BORDER

only incorporate strategies that sustain biocultural diversity (Maffi 2001), but prioritize the moral economy of water in hydrodevelopment and management systems (Johnston et al. 2012).

GLOBAL TRENDS

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the impacts of climate change on river systems. And, they were unable to incorporate and assess the complex consequences of hydroelectric dam development and massive inter-basin water transfers. Dams, water diversions, and accelerated glacial melt in the Himalaya, for example, has had marked impact on seasonal flow of the tributaries of the Ganges and Indus Rivers (Akhtar et al. 2008). The authors were also unable to compile and access global data on the ecosystem effects of toxic contaminants in river systems, such as the pharmaceutical compounds in manufacturing and sewage waste, mining wastes, or emissions from nuclear facilities. Yet, even with a select set of indicators (catchment disturbance, pollution, water resource development, and biotic factors) the picture painted is alarming. The most ‘‘at risk’’ river systems identified were also the most developed: the river systems sustaining the United States, much of Europe, the Ganga Basin, and China’s Yangtze River which are all experiencing high rates in the loss of biodiversity due to the deterioration of water quality and loss of habitat. The less developed world struggles with dual threats to water and food security (Vo¨ro¨smarty et al. 2010). The consequences of these dynamic, degenerative conditions are severe (Johnston 2012a, 2012b). Consider for example, the findings of a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) sponsored study on the role inland fisheries play in ecosystem services. Freshwater fisheries, the study concludes, provide the primary source of dietary protein and economic security for tens of millions of the world’s people, an estimated 100 million in Africa alone (Dugan et al. 2010). This security has been significantly undermined by hydrodevelopment-induced change in riverine systems and the life that such systems support (WCD 2000). New dams and climate change will exacerbate current trends and generate further losses in fresh water species richness and diversity. With freshwater fish representing the primary source of dietary protein for so many tens of millions of people, future food security implications are grim. Globally, degenerative change in the world’s fresh water resources from dams, pollution, agricultural runoff, drainage of wetlands, and the introduction of exotic species now threaten the food and water security for some 80% of the world’s population—nearly 5

HYDRODEVELOPMENT

From its Rocky Mountain headwaters the Rio Grande/Rio Norte runs through the heart of Native North America, where the largest concentration of indigenous peoples (Navajo, Apache, Pueblo and other tribes) live on historically traditional lands; through 21 major cities; and across desert barrens with diversions all along the way feeding near and distant agricultural valleys. The river is nourished by the waters of the Pecos, Devils, Chama, and Puerco in the United States, and the Conchos, Salado, and San Juan in Mexico—rivers whose headwaters in distant mountains sustain the traditional placebased ways of life of pueblos and indigenous tribes; rivers whose flows are calculated, diverted and used according to the negotiated terms of water distribution treaties between the United States and Mexico (Donahue and Klaver 2009). These tributaries and the river they feed are dammed some 100 times with reservoirs and canals diverting the river’s flow before it eventually drains, or seeps, into the Gulf of Mexico. Altogether some 10 million people depend upon the increasingly endangered waters of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and its tributaries. Overextraction, dams and the related evaporation from reservoirs in the watershed system, toxic runoff from agricultural fields, mines, urban and industrial activities, salinization, and invasive species are all factors that have placed the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo rivershed on the world’s top ten endangered rivers list (Revenga et al. 1998, Wong et al. 2007). While the World Wildlife Fund and other environmental advocacy groups use the top ten list as a means to focus critical scrutiny on the conditions and threats to major river systems, the list of critically endangered rivers is a long list, and it is growing. A global assessment by restoration ecologists examined indicators of systemic stress in the world’s rivers and found that 65% of the world’s riverine systems are in trouble (Vo¨ro¨smarty et al. 2010). This is a conservative estimate. The authors did not assess v www.esajournals.org

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billion people (Vo¨ro¨smarty et al. 2010). These conditions are decades in the making, reflecting the biosocial consequences of large infrastructure development and the imposition of large institutional water management regimes on the open access or shared use rights water commons. Historically, the river commons have typically been managed by a mosaic of placebased communities whose access and use rights are necessarily flexible to accommodate the fluidity of fresh water resources. Social responsibilities in the river commons are generally codified in formal or informal social relationships and political structures with biocultural stewardship principles assuming the primary goal of management (cf. McCay 2009). Hydrodevelopment and the associated large institutional water management regimes however are based on very different notions. Static concepts of fresh water resources as fixed rather than fluid elements are, for example, embedded in allocation agreements that assume a definitive calculus for the effective management of river flows can be achieved through the concrete definition of volume and flow derived from snapshots in time. Thus, water is estimated in definitive terms, and contained, diverted, and allocated in ways that sustain and drive economies and societal progress. Stewardship principles and the associated flexibility and resilience that characteristically define small-scale community-based management, acequia systems, for example, are disenfranchised as the power to make water management decisions move from the riverside to distant capitals and corridors of power (Peña 2003, Rodrı´guez 2006).

and consumption. Until recently, the installation of dams and diversion systems has generally been perceived to be a societal good—the means to achieve progressive change in economies and the societies they support—with the associated environmental and human harms a necessary trade-off. By the 1990s, when the World Commission on Dams (WCD) first began its global assessment, it became apparent that hydrodevelopment comes with a heavy price. Dams have flooded some of the most productive agricultural lands in the world. Siltation and sedimentation has reduced their operating life and many large dams failed to meet projected energy and economic goals. Changes in downstream water quality have decimated the fisheries, waterfowl and mammals of the world’s deltas, causing for example, by the year 2000 the endangerment or extinction for some 30% of the world’s fresh water fish (WCD 2000). Damming and flood control have also resulted in increases in the frequency and severity of floods (WCD 2000), have played a role in inducing earthquakes (Qiu 2012), and have prompted increases in the transmission and prevalence of vector-borne and parasitic diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis (SanchezRibas et al. 2012). For the people who live in the river valleys, mountains, and deltas that are degraded and destroyed by water diversions and hydroelectric dams, development has literally destroyed the health, economy, and culture of numerous peoples and these assaults have profoundly negative cumulative impact on the world’s cultural diversity. For example, in India dams have forcibly displaced 2% of the entire population but at least 40% of those displaced since 1947 are categorized as tribals and other ethnic minorities (Fernandes 2007). They are fishers, farmers, pastoralists: people who live off the land and have done so for generations in largely selfsustaining communities. Worldwide, it is these members of an ethnic minority or indigenous group that disproportionately suffer displacement, alienation, and loss of a way of life in the name of economic development (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues 2010, WCD 2000). Lacking fertile lands and the means to reproduce a viable way life, development refugees—those people forced out of areas where

GLOBAL PATTERNS, BIOCULTURAL CONSEQUENCES In the period following World War II through 1997, more than 54,000 large dams were built in the push towards modernity, generating an estimated 20% of the world’s electricity and providing irrigation to fields that produced some 10% of the world’s food. Hydrodevelopment helped rebuild a war-torn world, fueled the expansion of intensive agriculture, powered diverse extractive and manufacturing industries, and contributed towards the emergence of a globalized system of production, distribution v www.esajournals.org

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development projects are undertaken—typically live in impoverished resettlement compounds and camps or migrate from countryside to the city to seek employment within their nation and abroad (Johnston 1994, WCD 2000, Scudder 2005). In their assessment of the performance of large dams worldwide, the World Commission on Dams calculated that between 1945 and 2000 some 40 to 80 million people worldwide were forcibly evicted to make way for the development of some 54,000 large dams (WCD 2000). These figures were admittedly conservative (WCD 2000, Scudder 2005) and have since been revised. In India, for example, scholars challenged the numbers reported by the Government of India to the WCD, reexamining hydrodevelopment documents and state compensation files to find that the Government report of 14 million people displaced between 1947–1999 failed to include some 46 million people who lived in communal fashion on common lands, tribal and ethnic minorities who lived in forests and other lands claimed by the state (Fernandes 2007). All told, at least 60 million people in India were evicted to make way for water development projects. Similar reassessment has occurred in China where the Government originally reported some 13 million people as displaced by large dam development since 1947 (Reservoir Development Bureau of the Ministry of Water Resources of China 1999). In 2006, the number of dams built was reported to be 85, 160; with some 18 million rural farmers (heads of households) deemed historically-displaced and 23 million people eligible to receive retroactive compensation (Cernea 2008). Other assessments suggest a much larger figure, estimating as many as 60 million have been historically-displaced by hydrodevelopment in China, a figure that acknowledges the many people who moved to urban regions and are not eligible for the national government compensatory stipend (Shi et al. 2008). These numbers continue to grow as large hydrodevelopment projects continue to be across China. The displacement of people is not the only significant social impact from hydrodevelopment. A 2010 review of the social impacts from large dam development worldwide found that a sizeable proportion of the human population relies upon the natural productivity of river v www.esajournals.org

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ecosystems for food and economic security, and dams have disrupted natural ecological processes adversely affecting the livelihoods of a conservatively estimated 472 million river-dependent people living downstream (Richter et al. 2010). Assessments such as these suggest that historical hydrodevelopment, displacement, and related biodegenerative change in freshwater systems has caused hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable peoples to suffer the loss of homes, community, and traditional livelihood to make way for dams, reservoirs, and diversions. Historical enclosure and loss of the river commons is a significant factor driving global poverty rates (WCD 2000, Scudder 2005, Johnston 2012b). Despite the evidence that large dams and diversions produce short-term gains with huge long-term costs, for a number of reasons a large infrastructure approach to hydrodevelopment is again in vogue. Hydrodevelopment purportedly improves local and national economies, strengthens national security, and combats global climate change (carbon credit is granted to hydroelectric dams under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism). Thus, more than 200 large dams are in various stages of planning in the Amazon basin, an area that contains 15% of the world’s fresh water, 60% of the remaining tropical rainforest and hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples (Finer and Jenkins 2012, Fundacioń Proteger et al. 2012). In the Mekong Basin a series of dams planned or under construction in China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam threaten river fisheries and the primary source of protein and livelihood for some 60 million people (Li 2012, Matthews 2012). And large dams and water diversions are being built, planned, or proposed for every major river and tributary on both sides of the Himalayas, throughout Africa, the Americas, and Australia. How will a new generation of dam-affected people respond to the threats posed by the enclosure of water commons, the related loss of ecosystem services, and the immense social and cultural upheavals associated with developmentinduced displacement? Where will these people go? How will they survive? Will the world see an escalation in global rates of poverty, health, 4



misery, and violence, as a result of the collective experiences with this new round of development and displacement? In response to this latter question, many governments are imposing a security framework over water to insure the priority of sovereign rights to manage and use strategic resources. Defining water as a national security resource militarizes the water commons, and people who protest the consequences of dams can be charged with crimes against the state under legislation modeled after the US ‘‘Patriot Act,’’ which the US encouraged other nations adopt following 9/11. In 2009, for example, indigenous activists protesting state hydrodevelopment and the related loss of their traditional lands and resources were arrested and charged with violation of the national security act in Chile, Turkey, El Salvador, China, India, Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Borneo, Sudan, the United States, Canada, Australia, Greece, and Brazil (Johnston 2012b). Some critics see the Southeast Anatolia project in Turkey as a prime example of this militarization of the water commons (Ronayne 2006, Warner 2008). The Southeast Anatolia Project consists of 22 dams in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, in the heart of ancient Kurdistan. Turkey’s water development projects will create large reservoirs on their national borders, a watery fence that is easily patrolled by boat. The rising waters will also drown ancient cities, create a watery barrier between Kurdish populations in Iraq and Syria, and forcibly displace many of the remaining Kurdish communities within Turkey. The construction of the Ataturk Dam alone displaced some 11,000 Kurds. The Ilisu Dam project proposes the dispossession of about another 36,000 people (Ronayne 2006, Warner 2008). These reservoirs will also capture and store a critical resource of potential marketable value for thirsty countries, as evidenced by Turkey’s construction of water pipelines to Cyprus and Israel. Meanwhile, downstream nations who historically relied on the Tigris and Euphrates for water, energy, and food struggle with drought, crop failures, desertification, sandstorms, and expanding dead zones in the once fertile delta and seas. The management of fresh water resources increasingly relies upon a technocratic process v www.esajournals.org

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to assess plans, anticipate relative positive and negative costs, and conduct stakeholder consultations to communicate, modify, and mitigate in ways that ideally result in public buy, or, more pragmatically, reduce the threat of social and political upheaval. The legal mandates driving the technocratic process (i.e., environmental and social safeguards) are derived from international environmental and human rights treaties and norms, national constitutions, laws, and the regulations governing the banks that offer internationally financed development loans. Ideally, safeguards insure that affected peoples are able to exercise their rights to free and prior informed consent, meaningful participation in development decision-making and management, fair and just compensation that sustains an improved quality of life, rights-holder status in development and management of hydrodevelopment, and rights to remedy when develop is inept, corrupt and abusive. In reality, post-project performance reviews of hydrodevelopment and associated displacement demonstrate that safeguards are rarely implemented in full, with most projects failing to achieve stated goals of a healthy environment and an improved quality of life (Donahue and Johnston 1998, Cernea and McDowell 2000, Johnston 2000, 2010, WCD 2000, Scudder 2005, Oliver-Smith 2009, Moore et al. 2010).

WATER AND BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY: ENVIRONMENTAL, CULTURAL, SOCIOPOLITICAL SYSTEM DYNAMICS Our ability to assess conditions and demonstrate complicated consequences is unique in human history. Global assessments demonstrate alarming trends. Yet, the scope and scale of our human environmental crises generate widespread concern and potential political will for transformative change. Decisions made today will have profound effect on planetary futures. A recently concluded global assessment of water, cultural diversity and environment change sponsored by UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme, the United Nations University Traditional Knowledge Initiative and the Center for Political Ecology argues that restoring and sustaining the world’s freshwater systems requires fundamental transformations in how we 5



as individuals, societies, and a community of nations value, use, access, and control water and the biocultural systems that water sustains. At the heart of this transformative change is the recognition of the diverse understandings and values of water, and complex cultural contexts in which these social interactions play out; that is, the cultural dimensions of the political ecology of water (Johnston et al. 2012). It is useful to consider these water/culture dynamics in further detail. While all human communities are unique, there are certain universals in the human/water relationship. Culture is a universal. All humans have learned behavior expressed in the patterns we call culture. These learned patterns of behavior serve many functions, not the least of which is the ability to interact, engage, and adapt to changes in the environment and in society. Cultural ways of life are also universal. We all have ways of understanding, engaging, communicating, sharing, and reproducing our knowledge, values, beliefs, and expressions. While all cultures evolve and change, the means to support and sustain a cultural way of life may be destroyed, and this destruction can have profound impacts on the ability to utilize and reproduce culturally distinct knowledge, values and traditions. Everything is culturally mediated, in all societies: economic activities; politics; the way we think about and interact with the material environment. And every social group and every actor in society has a cultural engagement with water. Some of this human/water engagement is manifested in the form of waterscapes—where human endeavor produces a material form which contains, shapes, moves, disperses, reveres and celebrates the essence of water (Klaver 2012). Other aspects of the human/water engagement are manifest in water culture: the knowledge, traditional customs and behavior that allow the development and reproduction of a stewardship ethic, or the political organization of societies to manage and maintain water resources (Strang 2009). Culturally-distinct communities, indigenous and otherwise, especially those with a long term relationship to place, enjoy a way of life that sustains the local environment while nourishing the social relationships and cultural meanings v www.esajournals.org

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that define their community. The production and reproduction of a way of life involves ways of knowing that result from the long-term systemic interaction between people and their surroundings. This knowledge is rooted in cultural practices and spiritual values and enshrined in customary laws. It is these bio-cultural experiences and relationships that have over the millennia allowed human groups, and the environs on which they depend, to survive and thrive. It is in the interaction between cultures and communities that complex resource relations evolve, producing change in water quality, shaping patterns of water access and use, and sustaining or undermining the viability of water systems and the varied life that it supports (Johnston 1994, 2003, 2006, 2011, Donahue and Johnston 1998). These culture and power dynamics also influence our understanding of and experience with water scarcity. Generally defined as the imbalance between availability and demand, the water supply and demand dynamics that generate the experience of scarcity more broadly reflect a socially constructed reality influenced by human actions, cultural norms, historical conditions, societal inequities, and the loci of control over water and other critical resources (Johnston et al. 2012). Freshwater supply is affected by changes in the hydrologic cycle: the amount of water entering the system; the volume of water captured and stored in surface and subsurface reservoirs; the amount of water running off land, entering rivers and streams, and eventually lost to the oceans; and the amount of water held by vegetation and released into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. Human activity also affects water availability. Some 69% of the world’s freshwater budget is used for irrigated agriculture, which, in turn, is responsible for 70% of the world’s water pollution. Freshwater may be in abundant, but safe drinking water may be scarce as a result of biological and chemical contamination from agriculture, extractive and manufacturing industry, and urban life (Johnston 2012a). Water demand is also a relative construct. Demand may simply reflect numbers—increasing populations require greater amounts of water to meet basic human and household needs. Even in the case of increased population, however, 6



changes in water use behavior and technology may represent a source of increased demand, but they may also decrease total water consumption. Perception of scarcity of water for irrigation, for example, may dissipate when farmers change the crops they grow and the technology they use, thus reducing their water demands. Perception of water scarcity not only reflects relative supply and demand, but also the cultural and economic values associated with water. Access to water, patterns of water use, and ability to influence water management and distribution all shape an individual or community’s perception of water scarcity or abundance. Thus, scarcity might reflect a person’s economic ability to pay for water, or the customs, social conditions, and relationships that privilege access for one person or group while withholding access from others. And, while water may be plentiful, human activities can significantly degrade supplies and effectively limit access to safe water.

practices that conserved the river as a source of social and spiritual life. This meant demonstrating respect for the mauri (life force) of the river; respect for the river’s waahi tapu (sacred sites); the gathering of particular foods in appropriate seasons and times; and the avoidance of despoiling or destroying the river and its life. When the iwi cared for the river, it treated them most generously. Beginning in the 1950s, Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill and the Caxton Mill at Kawerau discharged effluent into the Tarawera River, directly for the first 20 years, and then beginning in the 1970s through slow seepage from sludge settlement ponds. The ecosystemic health of the river changed and the place took on a new name, the Black Drain (sludge seepage blackened the rivers waters). Fish and local plants became contaminated or disappeared. Water became unsafe even for bathing, let alone consumption. As conditions deteriorated, the relationship between iwi and the river changed. While people still occasionally gather some of the traditional foods, there are hazards in collecting as well as consuming such food. The inability to gather customary food and herbal medicines undermines diet, health and social customs. Similarly, the inability to enjoy the river, to drink it, to swim in it, to play in it, undermines community cohesion as families move away from the river to nearby towns, or further, to avoid living anywhere near the polluted river. The chemicals required to process pulp and paper and the nature of this industrial process meant that high rates of toxic substances (organochlorines, dioxin, and petroleum) were discharged into the air, soils and the river. Exposure through contact, respiration, ingestion and immersion has undermined the health of surrounding Maori communities. Complaints include increased rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases, skin diseases, particularly skin cancers, early death and fetal and birth problems. While there are provisions in New Zealand’s Resource Management Act that recognize Maori rights and responsibilities as stewards and guardians of the land and thus their rights to participate in the management and use of that land, the right to discharge toxics was granted by the State as recognition of the economic benefits

BIOCULTURAL CONSEQUENCES OF MANUFACTURED WATER SCARCITY: TARAWERA RIVER NEW ZELAND Consider for example the biocultural effects of effluent discharge from pulp and paper mills on the Tarawera River in New Zealand documented by Materoa Dodd (Dodd 2010, Johnston 2012a). Located in the Bay of Plenty of the North Island of New Zealand, the Tarawera river is home to three iwi (Maori tribes): the Tuwharetoa ki Kawerau who live on its banks and around the greater Kawerau area, the Te Arawa of the subtribe Tuhourangi who inhabit lands near the source of the river at Tarawera and its outlet at the town of Matata, and the Ng¯ati Awa iwi reside along the tributaries to the east of the river. The river, its tributaries, and its near shore environs are the heart and soul of these cultures. The river carries the birthright of chiefly lines, is central to the history and legends of each iwi, is a symbol of mana (prestige) amongst the respective iwi, with each tributary and its landmarks contributing to the social personae of the tribe, and the river’s abundance historically fed the community and allowed the gracious hosting of guests. The relationship between iwi and the river was traditionally controlled through customs and v www.esajournals.org

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of the industry and the local jobs that such industry brings. Local and national complaints over industrial practice and its obvious impact on the ecosystem were, until very recently, ignored. After decades of protest, in March 2010, the Ngati Awa, Ngati Rangitihi and Ngati Tuwharetoa side-stepped the Resource Management Act process and signed a memorandum of agreement with the owners of the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill in Kawerau, one of the key sources of toxic effluent discharged into the Tarawera River. The agreement establishes a formal consultation process between the industry and the iwi acknowledging their status as rights-holders (tangata whenua, people of the land). In establishing a formal consultation process, the company is demonstrating its compliance with the terms of its new 25-year pollution permit signed in October 2009. Through consultation it is hoped that the industry take direct remedial action, such as discontinuing dumping of chemicals directly into the river and installing new technologies to clean effluent before it is discharged (Davison 2010). Whether consultation truly respects iwi rights and leads to ecosystemic restoration remains to be seen.

or slipped through the molecules of storage containers, percolating into the valley’s water table (Schoenberger 2002). The resulting contamination of Silicon Valley groundwater and its related health consequences were first publicly reported in 1982, when the Fairchild Semiconductor facility in San Jose was charged with leaking underground tanks and resulting trichloroethane contamination of ground water supplies. Residents sued Fairchild Corporation, and the lawsuit stimulated epidemiological, environmental geology and toxicology studies that demonstrated health consequences, including a documented pattern of miscarriage, birth defect, increased cancers, and a host of debilitating disorders. The California State Department found three times the expected number of birth defects in the neighborhood near the plant. The Regional Water Quality Control Board found 85% of the underground tanks in Silicon Valley leaking. In 1983, the County of Santa Clara developed the first Hazardous Materials Storage Ordinance in the country, regulating underground storage tanks and enacting public-right-to-know legislation. A statewide initiative was passed in 1984 based on the county ordinance, and similar federal legislation was adopted in 1986 (SVTC 2001, Johnston 2006). Lawsuits, the eventual plant closure of the responsible party, and increased regulations involving the use of solvents and other hazardous chemicals and underground facilities resulted in profound changes in the way high tech businesses are run. When Fairchild closed its plant other high tech companies took notice: increased environmental protection brought increased costs. Companies began to move the dirtier aspects of manufacturing to more hospitable political settings. The ground water problems originally concentrated in Silicon Valley are now emerging in the many manufacturing sites of a globalized industry. By 2003, almost all components of the desktop personal computer, including microprocessor and software, were manufactured in places like China and shipped back to the United States for final processing and sale (Johnston 2006, 2012a). The problems of high tech-generated ground water pollution and related environmental health risk are not restricted to the manufacturing process. Rapid improvements in technology

MANUFACTURING WATER SCARCITY: SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA Another example of the sociocultural consequences of manufactured scarcity is demonstrated in the emergence of the high tech industry in California’s Silicon Valley (Johnston 2006). By the mid-1990s, electronics companies consumed 24% of the city of Santa Clara’s water (1994–1995) and produced 65% of discharged wastewater. By the late 1990s, the production of each six-inch silicon wafer chip required 2275 gallons of de-ionized water, 20 pounds of chemicals and 22 cubic feet of various gases. Arsenic, trichloroethylene, and 1000 or more chemicals were used at that time to manufacture silicon chips. Trichloroethylene, for example, is a known carcinogen, and according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a suspected toxicant affecting cardiovascular, developmental, gastrointestinal, kidney, sensory organ, neurological, reproductive, and respiratory systems (ATSDR 1993). This chemical waste was stored in underground tanks and, when treated with solvents, leached, leaked, v www.esajournals.org

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produce a limited life for computers and products containing computer components, and many functional products are discarded as ‘‘out of date’’ electronic waste. Landfills and recycling centers are typically unable to accept such material, however, as state and federal regulations prohibit disposal of e-waste given its hazardous content and threat to subsurface aquifers. Thus, an estimated 80% of electronic waste collected in the United States is shipped to scrap brokers in developing countries, mostly located in Africa, India and China, with the largest portion going back to China (Basel Action Network 2002). Recycling electronic waste is a messy and dangerous business, with byproducts including heavy metals, radioactive elements, and a wide variety of toxic chemicals. Often this recycling occurs in primitive conditions, among the living space of the poorest populations. The experience of the Chinese town of Guiyu is illustrative. According to a study by Huo et al. (2007), some 60–80% of the town is involved in stripping down parts for their valuable elements, most of which is done in small family-run workshops. Tons of e-waste materials and process residues have been dumped in workshops, yards, roadsides, irrigation canals, riverbanks, ponds and rivers. The resulting extensive contamination of soil and water has produced serious health implications. Samples taken in 2002 from the Lianjiang River–Guiyu’s public water supply— showed levels of lead to be 190 times higher than World Health Organization drinking water thresholds, and river sediment samples demonstrated high rates of lead, zinc and chromium. Environmental health studies have found high levels of skin damage, headaches, nausea, chronic gastritis, ulcers, and significantly elevated levels of lead in children’s blood. Children are especially vulnerable to permanent brain damage and other injury as a result of continued exposure to lead (Puckett et al. 2002, Qiu et al. 2004, Huo et al. 2007).

INEQUITIES

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international community in banning the export of hazardous wastes. The Basel Convention on Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal opened for signature in 1989 and entered into force in 1992. As of 2010, Afghanistan, Haiti, and the United States of America are the only signatories of the Basel Convention that have not deposed instruments of ratification (UNEP 2010). Without ratification, there are no implementing laws, and the U.S. can continue to legally export hazardous waste. The result is transnational environmental inequity, where first world consumers dispose of e-waste toxins in the impoverished recipient communities of import nations. Such practice reflects the socioeconomic inequities between nations as well as a cultural mindset that deploys a ‘‘NIMBY’’ (not in my backyard) rationale. The notion that ‘what is unacceptable in my backyard is perfectly acceptable when disposed of in a less-developed nation’ suggests that the fundamental human right to water, as currently experienced, is a highly privileged right. To further illustrate this point that water scarcity often has less to do with the total quantity of available water in a given time and place than it does with a range of human actions, cultural norms, historical conditions, societal inequities, and the loci of control over water and other critical resources, consider the struggles over water in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. The San People, a relatively small group of indigenous people who live a largely nomadic and subsistence-oriented way of life, were evicted from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve by their government in 2002, whose development policies favored the expansion of ecotourism and diamond mining in the Kalahari. A subsequent court case cited national and international human rights law and confirmed the San right to return to their ancestral lands. The Botswana government then refused to allow the returning San access to water. The water allocation necessary to support the Kalahari San is relatively minimal to overall supply in the aquifer. What was at issue is the contested notion of development rights to a region legally recognized to be the indigenous homeland of the San, and the rights of the state to determine the prioritization of water allocation. Thus, the Botswana Govern-

WATER

In the above example, the United States, while developing high domestic standards for disposal of hazardous waste and minimizing contamination of water sources, has yet to join the v www.esajournals.org

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ment argued that the right to determine access to this limited scarce resource is a state right, and the state prioritization of economic development (tourism and diamond mining) supercedes the indigenous rights of the San to surface and subsurface fresh water resources. In 2010, a High Court ruling confirmed the legality of the Botswana government decision to withhold water in San communities. In 2011, in a final court decision, the Botswana Court of Appeals overturned the High Court decision, citing the fundamental human right to water (confirmed by the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission in 2010) and ruling that the San, as lawful occupiers of land, have an inherent right to water that includes rights to access and use of subsurface water through existing boreholes and the right to drill new boreholes (Survival International 2011). Cultural ways of life evolve and adjust to local conditions, thus these desert environs sustained the San people for over ten-thousand years. Broader political and economic factors and agendas often play significant and determining roles in the experience of water scarcity, denying ancestral rights to place and ways of life. And, an evolving recognition of fundamental human rights, including the rights to life and means to sustain a healthy way of life, are increasingly playing role in these contestations between peoples and the State. This example is not unique. Similar contestations are occurring in water basins around the world.

uses, and traditions). To remedy this imbalance and devise more sustainable water management strategies, resource planners are increasingly utilizing a calculus to identify ecological values and determine a minimum flow to service and sustain the ecosystem. This integrated economic/ ecological approach is commonly known as integrated water resource management approach (IWRM) (Falkenmark and Folke 2000). IWRM takes an ecosystem perspective of water together with its human uses; encourages broad stakeholder participation; and stresses that water, in all of its competing uses, must be valued as an economic good . The overall goal of IWRM is to manage water resources in ways that sustain the place and society in both immediate and long-term timeframes. This means managing water to achieve equitable, sustainable, and guaranteed access to water (thus involving and addressing the views and concerns of diverse resource users); consciously recognizing the relationship between water development and the health and productivity of the economy (including varied agricultural, industrial, and energy uses of water and water energy); creating a sustainable drinking water supply and improving quality of water in rivers and other sources to ensure a healthy population; and recognizing the principal role of water for ecosystems and ensuring release of water to sustain and restore ecosystems and the biodiversity sustained by such systems. This latter function is known as environmental flows. A healthy flow of water will sustain livelihood, recreation, and esthetic concerns, and the addition of environmental flows to the IWRM calculation is having documented restorative impact in certain settings (Brisbane Declaration 2007). Arthington et al. points to the increasing use of environmental flow assessments to modify water management regimes and restore the ecosystemic wealth of rivers and related fisheries as an important element in implementing the environmental flow concept (Arthington et al. 2010, Poff et al. 2010). Environmental flow assessment in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, for example, documented and quantified the social and health impact of the loss of river resources for displaced communities in Lesotho and South Africa (e.g., food fishes, Arthington et al. 2003), and these calculations were converted

ASSERTING BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY INTO INTEGRATED WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT In most water management settings the allocation of resources reflects the dynamic tension between culture (what are important values and uses for water?) and power (what values and uses are prioritized over others, and who defines these priorities?). Allocation priorities are typically defined, adjusted, or legitimized with the use of cost benefit analyses: where all varied needs are identified, quantified, and ranked in relation to a predetermined calculus, one that often privileges quantifiable political and economic needs (especially agriculture, industry, energy) over more qualitative needs (environmental services, biotic health, cultural values, v www.esajournals.org

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to compensation estimates for riparian people (King and Brown 2010). However, flows for the environment, and societal uses of that environment are heavily skewed towards economic considerations, omitting or discounting the less quantifiable sociocultural dimensions of the river commons. For example, the connections held by Indigenous people to water and to particular features or dimensions of the waterscape may be essential in the production and reproduction of societal existence, yet such values are not always reflected in environmental flow allocations. The concept of cultural flows offers a way to further expand the IWRM model to manage water resources in a holistic, equitable, and sustainable fashion (Johnston et al. 2012). Cultural flows refers to the dynamic ways in which water sustains cultural beliefs, values, and ways of life; as well as the ways in which cultural groups value, care for, and sustain the health of the aquatic system (river, lake, spring, estuary, salt marsh, etc.). Thus, sustaining cultural flows not involves managing flows to sustain the ecosystem, it involves managing water resources in ways that recognize, respect, and sustain cultural ways of life. One strategy used to operationalize the cultural flows concept is to document qualitative descriptions of the varied meanings that waterways have for people, and the knowledge and relationships that people have with these waterways. Such efforts produce a set of social and cultural indicators that are then used to structure and monitor management goals. A more complex strategy is to document the relationship between cultural values and ecosystem services. Examining values in customary fisheries, for example, and the knowledge of them held by indigenous people, provides a useful starting point in the identification of significant indicators and the quantification of Indigenous values for water planning. Both strategies recognize that indigenous communities and other cultural groups whose long-standing ties to the land and customary ways of life constitute a rightsholder status (a status briefly explained in the above Tarawera River example). An aggressive effort to implement the environmental and cultural flows concept in water resource management is now underway in v www.esajournals.org

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Australia. Australia’s Federal Water Act 2007 and the Water Amendment Bill 2008 recognize cultural flows as Traditional Owner rights and articulate Traditional Owner responsibilities in the issues relating to water management in Australia. This legal framework has prompted a new model of dialogue with Indigenous peoples that force a broader basin-wide perspective on what was previously fractured approach to freshwater resource management. Revision of the management plan for the Murray Darling River Basin, Australia’s most significant water course, to include indigenous values and demands for cultural flow allocation to sustain freshwater swamps and the associated biodiversity, has served as an opportunity to implement (and test the limits of this new political relationship) between Federal, State and local levels of government and indigenous communities. Traditional owner objectives imply, at one level or another, recognition of sovereign rights, a recognition that is not without controversy. Their goals include a free flowing river that moves according to natural cycles; access rights for Indigenous people to continue cultural practices such as traditional fishing/hunting; and the formal provision of Cultural Flows and the associated allocation as a means of sustaining Indigenous cultures and livelihoods into the future (Morgan 2012). The above example represents an effort to implement international human and environmental rights law, especially that body of law that pertains to the rights of indigenous peoples. All project-affected communities have the right to participate in planning and decision-making negotiations, the right to just compensation for the damages and losses associated with development, and, the right to materially benefit from development. Indigenous Peoples, however, have additional rights with regards to development. As recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Article 32[2]), they have the right ‘to give or withhold their free, prior and informed consent to actions that affect their lands, territories and natural resource’ (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People 2007). The right to free and prior informed consent not only reflects a matter of international law, but also more importantly, offers an opportunity to 11



manage water resources in ways that sustain the long-term biocultural diversity of the region.

ported. Indigenous and local communities are invaluable partners in this regard: their practices constitute a vast body of resources for excellence and innovation. Thus we see the reinvigoration of traditional water harvesting practices in India, qanat groundwater systems in Syria, community-based acequia management in the US and Mexico, and the emergence of environmental and cultural flows concepts that revitalize and restore biocultural systems in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, as well as several North American contexts. Local water practices, however, do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in specific socialecological systems governed by organizational mechanisms that contribute to maintaining adaptive capacity in the face of change. When water resources are brought under centralized, bureaucratic control, the resilience of local governance may be diminished. Thus, achieving long-term sustainability may require re-embedding the social, cultural, political and institutional aspects that govern water use in local contexts to enable sustainable water resource governance.

CONCLUSION Clearly, the collective human need for water forms both a basis for collaboration and conflict related to uses of, access to and control over water. Multi-leveled collaboration is required to build and manage large-scale water supply, hydroelectric energy and transfer systems. Such endeavors often support national and international interests while adversely affecting upstream and downstream communities—typically populated by indigenous and other marginalized groups—leading to conflicts as various actors struggle over their rights. Developing sustainable water resource management strategies requires recognizing and addressing the tensions, potential conflicts, as well as the considerable strengths inherent in the dynamic and evolving relationship between human and environmental systems. Sustainability cannot be achieved unless economic, environmental, and socio-cultural needs are factored into the water resource management equation by policy-makers and governing bodies. These realities point towards the need for more holistic approaches towards water resource development and management, approaches that recognize and prioritize the ‘moral economy of water’ (Trawick 2001). Cultural diversity—meaning the variety of human societies, religious communities, regional cultures, and traditional ways of life—has a tremendous influence on the ways that people perceive, use, and manage natural resources. Interdisciplinary and systematic efforts that recognize and assess the relationship between water and cultural diversity and incorporate cultural values in water resource management can increase public awareness, enhance education strategies, and help sustain cultures and the environment. Water users worldwide have and continue to develop cultural practices and technologies that affect water in accord with their cultural priorities and in response to changing environments. The increasing vulnerability of water resources calls for diverse new approaches to water management to be recognized and supv www.esajournals.org

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank W. Hargrove and the organizers of the Sustainability on the Border: Water, Climate and Social Change in a Fragile Landscape conference at University of Texas–El Paso where this overview was presented. This project was supported in part by NSF Grant Number EAR-1039127. Portions of this paper draw on insight and detail from previously published works (see Donahue and Johnston 1998, Johnston 1994, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012, Johnston et al. 2012). My understanding of these issues and dynamics have been greatly enhanced by the international and transdisciplinary community of scholars participating in the World Commission on Dams original study (WCD 2000) and its’ 10-year reassessment (Moore et al. 2010); and, by my fellow expert advisors and the larger community of scholars, engineers, policy makers, advocates and activists who form the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme’s Water and Cultural Diversity initiative. The ‘‘cultural flows’’ concept and its practical application in water resource management has gained prominence through the efforts of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations in Australia as a means to engage on their own terms in statesponsored water resource management initiatives. I am most grateful to Monica Morgan and Marcus

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SPECIAL FEATURE: SUSTAINABILITY ON THE BORDER Barber for introducing me to the concept and the varied efforts to operationalize it.

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