Area and id like to acknowledge the aloni and other people who have stewarded these lands for 10,000 years. Currently there are many tribe bars and bands working together to restore their culture heal from trauma. Trauma and protect their traditional. I recently started talking with members of the coast miwok council, where i live and have learned a lot from them, encourage you to go beyond these land acknowledgments and meet people and reach out to Indigenous People in your community. They are here for recording todays conversation for the climate one radio show podcast that drops every friday. You can subscribe, you get your pods. We record here about once a month on this stage. Excited that on july jb straubel, cofounder of tesla whove tinkering with electric cars, says he, a young man, is now ceo of redwood materials, an Exciting Company thats trying working on recycling lithium ion batteries really really interesting company. You can register for this and other climate one on our new refreshed website climate one dot org. Or you can create playlists, share them with people. Before i welcome ariana and peter. Id like to encourage you to support us here at climate one. You know, we need your help. Audiences are not what they used to be downtown francisco. Weve been affected and duped by this. You are qr code. You can scan that now or later and make a five or ten or 20 one time a monthly donation to support our Fabulous Team that creates this fabulous content thats our audience has grown from about thousand a week to more than 170,000 a week in the last last few. At the end of this evenings conversation well take questions you and here in our Live Audience youre on the live stream you can put them in the comments section if youre here. Theres a question card on your seat. Please write your name and your concise question. And then megan collect them, our producer, and then well invite to come to the microphone. I think its going to be over here. And the name arianna will call people to come up in that order. And you can read your your question and i founded climate 117 years ago. I went to the arctic. I got scared. I came back, i cried, changed my life. Ive been doing this every week for 17 years and we now have a newer expanded team. If youve been listening to the podcast, youve heard arianna and me more and more so, which is great. Its better now. Theres a reason why that audience is growing because we have a talented team and ariannas big part of that. So now for the first time, im really excited to have her this stage conduct an interview with dr. Peter gleick cofounder, the Pacific Institute and, author of the three ages of water prehistoric past and peril present and a hope for the future. Please welcome arianna and peter peter. Thank you, rick. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, peter. Looking forward to this conversation with you, your new book divides humans relationship with water into three ages. In the first one, humans lived and died in relation to water two their access to water and threats from water major events like floods became part of our cultural and stories and as humanity, so did our ability to control through dams, canals, irrigation so much so that today we mostly consider ourselves insulated against oversupply or shortage, and yet every year we see examples of how fragile this control really is in our climate amplified world. So how well do you think were currently our relationship with water . Well, me start first of all, by by thanking you and greg for for having me here. Its wonderful to be at climate one again and. Also, this is a very three dimensional or something im i think im not that used to the last few years the short answer is terribly were not managing our relationship water well at all. There are all sorts of climate and water related crises. We take water for granted and the history of water tells us that we could and should be doing better than were doing now. And are examples in the past of of doing better would you say. Well there are certainly examples in the past of doing better when we can we can about the current. But in the first age of water this sort of prehistory it didnt matter much. Populations of the planet were very small. We took water, we found it and we dumped our wastes. Where where we could. And it again, it didnt really matter. Life was pretty miserable anyway, and brutal and short. But those early that early era of really helped define humanity. It helped sort of set the stage for for where we are today and today and i think this has actually been true for for quite a long time about 80 of the water we use goes to grow food. And yet cities are growing or populations are growing. We need more and more water. Weve seen major advances in irrigation technology, but i would say shifts to less water consumptive crops, especially in states like my home state where cotton and alfalfa are still mainstay crops. How can we maintain our agricultural economies and Food Production while using little bit less water or a lot less water . Well, this is a key, of course, as you say, 80 of the water that humans use worldwide goes to grow food. Thats partly a result of the green revolution that happened in the last century where we learned really the importance of irrigated water for agriculture. And in fact, 80 of the water that we use in california goes grow to grow food as. Well, its its the same the world numbers and populations continue to grow theres a food crisis as well as a water crisis. Hundreds of millions of people go to go to bed hungry every today and populations to grow. And part of the question is how are we going to continue grow enough food with the Water Supplies that are already over tapped. We already use more water than i think is sustained possible and yet populations to grow. And so one of the key questions really is how can do more with the water . Were already using . How can we grow more food . How can we meet our needs with less water . And are there going to be i mean, do think that theres a audience for some of these changes in the u. S. . I mean, just speaking to the u. S. And the amount power, the agricultural lobby has, theres a lot of water that is that goes grow things that we dont eat you know goes to grow food for cows or food for other animals. Is there a way to i mean, do you see a future where that changes where . We take some of that water for other uses . Well, it depends on who you mean by receptive audience. There are lots of different audiences out there in general, really care about water. If you look at Public Opinion polls about environment that have have gone back for many, many decades, water access, safe water and the availability of water and protecting the quality of water has always been right at the top of those Public Opinion polls. People care about water. And in terms of changing the the way we do what we do, it depends on who were asking to change. And the benefits are. We already see farmers growing more food with less water when theres a shortage of water, theres pressure on Water Resources. Then farmers think, well, what can i do . How can i do what i want with water . So we see that in california. We see that around the world. There are changes in irrigation practices now that are moving us in the direct the right direction. But laws and water rights and institutions sometimes very hard to change and sometimes very slow to change. Yeah, staying with agriculture for just a couple more minutes because it uses lot of water. We have already seen stretches of u. S. Farmland go out of production because. Wells have gone dry, groundwater wells or here in california, you know, the pumping has gotten either too expensive or its and also led to subsidence what going to happen what will happen to these regions when it just becomes impossible pump any more water . I mean, will will they recover . Will we see them recover. So is again where history sort of is interesting to me in the first stage of in the first stage of water, we didnt think about irrigation. We we grew crops once agriculture invented where water reliable where there was reliable rain, where there were reliable rivers in ancient mesopotamia, the indus valley in india, in china. But populations grew. And as we outgrew those local Water Resources had to think differently about where to get our water and today a vast amount of our agricultural water comes from something that was not possible a long time ago and that resulted from the green revolution today a lot of the crops that we grow are grown with what i describe as groundwater. That is, we pump groundwater faster than nature recharges it. And like oil. When you pump something faster than nature recharges at the stocks go down, it becomes harder and harder to find it. It becomes more expensive, use it. And in the long run its not sustainable. And thats agricultural crisis today. A substantial amount, maybe 30 or 40 of the worlds production comes from nonrenewable groundwater, and it simply cant continue. Groundwater levels are dropping. Its happening in california. Its happening in the great plains, northern china, india we have to think about how to replace that water, how to grow more food with with less water. Thats, again, part of the challenge one of the really interesting things i learned your book is that groundwater pumped from aquifers eventually ends up in the oceans and actually contributes to sea rise. And this i dont know think about what youre talking about. You know this larger point of water being the supply is continuous, constant, but we just kind of move it around. And in a way, weve moved so much of it around this maybe second age of water that weve really changed the dynamics. And so can you tell us a bit more about that because i thought that was that news to me. Yeah, thats right. There are actually two there are lots of kinds of water. But but theres renewable Water Resources. The rivers that flow, the rain that falls the hydrologic cycle that we all remember, Elementary School and nonrenewable water, the groundWater Resources that have been laid down over thousands or tens of thousands of years and then are stuck there. But theyre when you use them get used up when, we use groundwater and take groundwater out of that stock and put it on crops. It goes back to evaporation it runs off back to the oceans, strangely enough, contributes a little bit to Sea Level Rise because youre moving a stock from underground into the renewable hydrologic cycle. You know, we think about Sea Level Rise, of course, the tremendous impact of Climate Change on Sea Level Rise. But theres a little additional increment, Sea Level Rise thats happening because were moving water from the stock underground back into the active part of the hydrologic cycle. Thats amazing. Well, so this second page of water is what you define as our current age. And this has been defined by advances in engineering that have essentially plumbed the entire planet and brought along untended pollution, ecologic disruption, conflict, Climate Change, and then a term that you you use water, poverty. Can you define that for us . And tell us how thats impacting women and girls around world especially so water, poverty is what i mean by that is simply the failure to provide everyone the planet with safe water and sanitation and the inequities we see in the way our Water Systems and institutions have been developed. The second age of water was was really an age when we discover what water was, we discovered what oxygen was and hydrogen and the molecule that makes up water. It was the scientific revolution that helped us build the Water Systems that we have today that let us build aqueducts not a few kilometers out of dirt as we did in ancient times, but hundreds or thousands of kilometers long and through mountains, and build the huge dams that provide water and Flood Control and drought protection and hydropower and Smart Systems that help deliver to us safe water and sanitation. The things most of us take granted, you know, the idea that that we can turn, tap and have incredibly cheap, incredibly pure water delivered to us is something not many of us in the sort of richer part of the world take for granted. But there are billions people today worldwide that dont have access to safe water and sanitation, and thats really what i define as water poverty. And even in the u. S. , as you said, tap water is almost always safe to drink. We have underinvested in our public Water Supplies, so much so that, though, we need to repair. We need to repair and replace most of our infrastructure in the next 15 years. And we dont have really the funds to do it. Has that changed the infrastructure law and the inflation reduction and the infusion of money that weve seen those it has to some degree, thats another important part about water poverty. Know we take it for granted that those of us in the wealthier part of the world have safe water and sanitation. But thats true. Only as long as we invest in our Water Systems and the disaster in flint, michigan, a few years ago where a good water system went bad because of underinvestment and mismanaged demand and the disaster today in jackson, mississippi, and the communities in the Central Valley that dont have access to safe water still, and the native American Communities that have never had access to safe water in this country. Its not water. Poverty is not just a problem in the developing world, a problem here. And part of it is the failure to provide safe water and sanitation to those communities. Part of it is, as you say, the failure to continue to invest in the Water Systems that we have were not adequately investing in upgrading, maintaining our urban water. And most places that leads to things like flint, michigan and. Jackson, the failure in jackson. The Inflation Reduction Act and passed by congress and signed by President Biden provides a lot of money for water provides a lot of money for all sorts of infrastructure in the u. S. , which is great. It. 15 billion for example to remove lead pipes. We still have lead in our cities in the united, which is an embarrassment and and a travesty in many ways. It provides money for that. It provides money for investing in new systems and upgrading Water Systems. So it is a step forward a lot of that money ought to come from our own pockets. You know, we we pay water bills. That that water goes to our Water Utilities. Those Water Utilities are responsible for maintaining and upgrade in our urban systems, but they havent been maintained. The they ought to be. Well, this is one thing you also write about in the book. This sort of necessity that you argue to continue investing in our public supplies as opposed to privatizing them, and maybe the. Can you kind of explain that argument, maybe the problems that might come from privatization of water . Yeah, i do talk in the book about the trends toward water privatization and that can be defined in a lot of ways bottled water, a way to privatize public Water Systems as well. And i talk about bottled in the book, too, but was a trend a number of years ago more a little more than a decade ago, there was this belief that because of the challenges we face with our public Water Utilities, that maybe private companies could do a better job. And this was true in the United States and was true worldwide in the u. S. Most of our Public Water Agency or most of our Water Utilities are public. And theyve always been public. A small fraction, maybe 15 . Our but there was this belief that because of problems with public water agencies, that maybe we should turn them over to private entities. And the world bank was arguing in developing countries, we should let Companies Run water agencies because public agencies and governments been a failure. So that was a bit of a trend. There was a lot of opposition at the time. There were riots in cochabamba about an effort to privatize the water system in bolivia, and people died in those riots and at the same time were a number of public water agencies that saw the threat of privatization and realized that one way they could maintain public control was to improve their operations. And it turns out a wellrun Public Agency is just as good as a private water agency, and rates tend to be lower for public water agencies and. The profits, which go to a private Water Company dont tend to leave the community. And if you maintain a Public Water Agency, those those, there are no profits really. Those those moneys are reinvest it in the public system. And so there is still pressure in some places to, privatize Water Systems. But i think the lesson that learned is that a wellrun Public Agency is a better idea. So we talk on climate about the individual and the systemic, the ways people can have agency and try to, you know, work for Climate Agency in their own lives. And im curious if theres a water intersection here. I mean, as a Water Utility member, as somebody who pays water bills, is there something you can do to kind of keep your utility working for you . I mean. Well, yes. In fact, you know, most what