Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity by Heal Geoffrey

Author:Heal, Geoffrey [Heal, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Watersheds and wetlands are a good place to begin this journey: some of the most ubiquitous and important components of our natural capital, supporting life for billions of people, they do far more than just collect water and route it to end-users. Watersheds clean the water and stabilize its flow with their sponge-like soil, absorbing water when the rain falls and releasing it slowly over time. Wetlands absorb huge quantities of water when there are floods, often directing potentially harmful water flows away from populated areas. And they also play a cleansing role, removing many impurities. Could we replace watersheds and wetlands by built systems if their functioning were compromised?

When it comes to the cleansing role of watersheds, we have been able to fabricate substitutes. Filtration plants can perform the filtration and sedimentation roles of soil, removing small particles and microorganisms, and chlorinating and other disinfectant processes can perform some of the additional purification roles. But these synthetic substitutes for the soil in watersheds may be much less cost-effective than the original old-fashioned watershed, as the story of New York City’s Catskill watershed shows.

Two watersheds serve New York City, one in the region of nearby Croton and one in the Catskills—a range of hills about 3,000 feet high and 120 miles northwest of the city, abutting the Hudson River whose estuary forms New York’s harbor. The Croton reservoir and watershed were the first to be used by the city and originally provided drinkable water without filtration or any form of chemical treatment. Development near the reservoir soon changed this, through pollutant runoff and a reduction in the amount of soil available to purify the water. Subsequently, New York invested in the Catskill watershed system, constructing in a sparsely populated region the largest surface water storage system in the world, which for many years provided water of very high quality without filtration. Indeed, New York City water was known as the best in the United States, and in the 1930s and 1940s was bottled and sold in other cities—the equivalent of Evian or Perrier today. Good restaurants served New York water, and even today New York tap water regularly beats expensive bottled water in blind tasting tests. It is even imported into England for tea making and to several other American cities for making pizza and bagels.

But the “Champagne of drinking waters,” as it was referred to, came under dire threat in the 1990s. The quality of the water from the Catskills began to fall, so precipitously that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned the city that it would shortly have to construct a filtration plant. Facing capital costs estimated in the range of $6 to $9 billion and annual operating costs on the order of $300 million—an immense sum even for a wealthy city—New York inquired why a watershed that had functioned so well for decades was now beginning to fail.

The answer was simple: pollution from development and from the intensified agricultural use of land in the Catskills. Local communities had expanded and city dwellers had built summer homes.

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