What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti

What happens when we change our relationship to water? Can we stop trying to control water and just go with the flow?

Erica Gies, environmental journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge sits down with host Jay Famiglietti to discuss how the engineered control of water sometimes does more harm than good. 

We also hear from Nicholas Pinter about 'Design with Nature' and how communities are managing retreats from the floodplains.

The Endhó Dam north of Mexico City has been called “the largest septic tank in the world” and “Mexico’s toilet bowl”. Once designed to solve water problems in the region, it now receives wastewater from local industry and Mexico City.   

Arizona State University doctoral students Raquel Neri, in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and Diego Pantaleón, in the School of Social Transformation, join host Jay Famiglietti to discuss the devastating impact the contaminated water is having on local communities and water sources in Hidalgo, Mexico.  

We also hear from Yury Uribe, activist and member of El Movimiento Social por la Tierra - Social Movement for the Land in Mexico. She has been in the community all her life and lived near the  Endhó Dam for 20 years.  

By June 7, 2024, officials from Mexico's federal health department met with community leaders to discuss ways to address public health concerns related to contaminants in the waters of the region, including the Endhó Dam. Read the official statement from Mexico's federal government announcing it has begun work to declare the Endhó dam as an ecological restoration zone: 

What happens when science gets in the way of ambition, politics, and progress?

With a look back at the historical figures and forces that led to the overallocation of the Colorado River, and the consequences that continue to play out today, John Fleck joins Jay Famiglietti on What About Water? Fleck is a Water Policy Researcher at the Utton Center, University of New Mexico and co-author with Eric Kuhn of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.

We conclude the episode with a perspective on how we can use the latest science and technoligy to both map and protect the earth’s biodiversity. Greg Asner explains what AToMS (Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System) can do and where the technology is headed in the future. Asner is the Chief Science Officer for a satellite mission called Carbon Mapper and director of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science.

Humans are burning through our fossil fuels, and we're burning through our groundwater at an alarming rate. But are the powers that be even listening?  

On this episode, Dr. Upmanu Lall joins host Jay Famiglietti to discuss why we’ve reached an “all hands on deck” moment with our groundwater crisis. Lall and Famiglietti discuss (along with Dr. Bridget Scanlon) before the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) which advises President Biden in December 2023. Hear how and why these researchers are urging political leaders to give groundwater their full attention before it is too late.   

At the end of the program we hear from Dr. Bridget Scanlon, the Fisher Endowed Chair and Prieto Fellow in Geological Sciences at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She's also a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology.

The World Bank estimated in 2016 it would take $1.7 trillion USD to achieve universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030. By other estimates that amount is now even higher. 

Gary White is the CEO and Co-founder, along with Matt Damon, of Water.org and WaterEquity. The two also co-wrote the book The Worth of Water: Our Story of Chasing Solutions to the World's Greatest Challenge.

White joins host Jay Famiglietti to discuss the inspiration behind his organization, the financial plumbing it will take from investors, and how women around the world are pivotal in solving the global water crisis.

We conclude the episode by hearing Matt Damon describe his interest in water and why it has become a personal issue for him.

What is the true price of water? Considering growth and climate, how do we address the gap between demand and supply? Could we achieve water security by moving it across borders to dry regions like the American Southwest?

John Take, Chief Growth & Innovation Officer at Stantec, discusses importing water, desalination efforts, and whether no infrastructure is the best infrastructure.

At the end of the program, Dr. Denise Fort reflects on over a hundred years of infrastructure and development in the West. What would we do differently now, and how do we make that transition happen?

Freshwater is essential for life on Earth, but analysts at the World Bank say more often than not, there's either too little, too much, or the water is contaminated and polluted.

We look at whether desalinating ocean water and piping it across the desert would really solve water scarcity, why some cities and towns keep flooding, and how much is too much, when it comes to pumping freshwater out of underground aquifers. 

In Season 5 of What About Water, host Jay Famiglietti connects with scientists and regular people who are trying to solve some of our planet's trickiest water problems. Armed with the latest scientific expertise, he brings listeners a message of hope for this planet’s water future.

People in the lower Colorado River basin are now witnessing drastic cuts to their allotments. In many cases, developers find alternate sources of water by drilling into underground aquifers. But in places like Pinal County, Arizona, that groundwater is already becoming scarce. We hear from Stephen Q. Miller, who sits on both the Pinal County Board of Supervisors and the board for the Central Arizona Pipeline. Without sufficient water for crops, and facing some of the highest temperatures on record, he says farmers in his area will fallow up to 70 per cent of their land this year.

As Phoenix and its outlying suburbs start limiting development because of water shortages, those who stay put rely increasingly on wells and groundwater.

Arizona State University professor Kathryn Sorensen explains why consuming water from deeper wells is one solution – but it’s not ideal. The ancient freshwater underneath much of Arizona will never be replenished during our lifetimes. With high-tech cloud computing centers and some of the world’s biggest microchip manufacturers expanding their reach — and water use — we look at the desert future of the southwest. 

With increasing water scarcity across the lower Colorado River basin states, we look at the technology of the future – and the role of cloud computing centers. How much water do they consume, and what does that mean for people in water-stressed areas? Amazon Web Services has set a goal to become water-positive by the year 2030, and we hear how the company is recycling and re-using water, with Will Hewes, AWS’ Global Lead on Water Sustainability. 

Outside Phoenix, Intel Corporation has been a presence for more than four decades, with two recent expansions of its 700-acre campus in the desert. Those expansions allow Intel to manufacture more of the microchips that we rely on in modern life, powering everything from cell phones to automobiles. We hear from Intel vice-president and chief sustainability officer Todd Brady. He says the public-private partnership Intel struck years ago with the city of Chandler, AZ means a more sustainable, predictable supply of recycled water. 

Water scarcity is also having a profound effect on the desert south’s political landscape. In this episode, we hear from Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, and we check in with Patrick Adams, water policy advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs. 

Our last word in this episode goes to the University of Arizona’s Kathy Jacobs, director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions. 

The meat and dairy industries are some of the biggest water users in the American West, thanks to one of cows' favorite foods – alfalfa. As aridification continues across the American southwest, water is becoming far more scarce on the Colorado River. A critical source of water for roughly 40 million Americans, we look at why so much of the Colorado River's freshwater goes toward growing water-intensive hay crops, and at what can be done to significantly scale back consumptive use in the future.

In this episode, we hear from people who've traveled from around the world to see the Hoover Dam. With white bathtub rings marking a long-past high water mark, Lake Mead is severely overdrawn. Together with Lake Powell, America's two biggest man-made reservoirs are losing water faster than ever as cities, towns and farms withdraw their legal allocations.

To find out why farmers in this region keep growing such water-intensive crops, our producer Megan Myscofski meets up with alfalfa farmer Larry Cox. They tour his farmland near Brawley, in California's Imperial Valley. With no potable water, Cox's home, farm and livelihood depend entirely on his farmland's senior water rights from the Colorado River. Leaving the fields fallow is not an option.

Jay then sits down with Dan Putnam, an expert on alfalfa and other forage crops at the University of California, Davis, and Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy. They discuss why it's so difficult legally and economically to uproot water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, and they bring up solutions to get ‘more crop out of each drop’. They also discuss what cities and urban areas will have to do, to ensure there's enough water to support everyone in the lower Colorado River basin. 

When Autumn Peltier was eight, she learned the tap water on a neighbouring reserve wasn’t safe to drink, or even to use for hand-washing. That injustice triggered her decade-long advocacy campaign for safe drinking water. She made headlines as a 12 year-old, admonishing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at an Assembly of First Nations event for the choices his government had made for her people. 

In this bonus episode for World Water Day 2023, Peltier and Jay discuss the way her life shifted, as she started campaigning for clean water. Peltier also shares what it was like to shoot her documentary The Water Walker, and lets us in on her plans for the future now that she’s finished high school. 

On a day devoted to improving the way we manage, consume, and use water, the message is ‘Be The Change’ – something Peltier takes to heart. Two billion people still live without clean water, and the United Nations says member countries have fallen behind on their goal to bring everyone safe water and sanitation by the year 2030.

“The message is so much more powerful and so much more stronger when it's coming from a young person,” said Peltier, the chief water commissioner for the Anishinabek Nation. “That's when you know something is wrong, and something has to be done.”