Workman, who served as an advisor shaping national and global policy under US Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Nelson Mandela, addresses this complex riddle in a dramatic and compelling multimedia lecture program.

Program Description

H2Ownership: A Fresh Approach to Unlocking the Three Paradoxes of Water

For all of the loud talk about “efficiency” and “conservation,” natural resource managers are confounded by three profound and deeply entrenched paradoxes when it comes to water: Value, Efficiency, and Monopoly.

Water is priceless in use, and yet worthless in exchange. The more efficiently we use water – drip irrigation, timed sprinklers, low-flush toilets, high-pressure nozzles – the more water we actually use.  And, ironically, saving water eats into utilities’ revenue, forcing them to ‘punish’ conservation by charging more per unit to recover costs.

In his lectures, Workman draws on a decade of experience with the last free Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who inspired his award-winning book Heart of Dryness, and his new business that translates the Bushmen’s proven coping mechanisms into a Web 2.0, online exchange platform for earning, owning, accumulating and trading water efficiency credits, or EcoShares™.

The resilient Kalahari Bushmen have inspired a bold new approach that is unlocking a more responsible and egalitarian approach to water. H2Ownership replaces top-down rationing and restrictions with secure and equal incentives in which all metered customers can earn, track and exchange water efficiency credits, or EcoShares. This form of creative capitalism can motivate a widespread race to conserve and make today’s vulnerable cities increasingly ‘climate-proof.’

Workman has come to realize that “water scarcity” comes not from a shortage of supply but an excess of demand, and that the real “experts,” the only “water managers” who really matter, are the 6.8 billion untrained end users: the locals – i.e. all of us.

How this works, in practice

Workman anchors water security – and unlocks the paradoxes — via a new yet timeless concept: H2Ownership™. Families and firms no longer must depend on rent-controlled monopolies that unilaterally dictate who deserves how much water for which uses at what rates. Instead, each of us can ‘own’ a virtual and equitably defined and tradable ‘share’ of water. In this way water at last has value in exchange. Efficiency reduces overall use. And scarcity motivates all parties to eliminate waste in a widespread race to conserve.

In pilot demonstration projects in the West, AquaJust™ unlocks water conservation through equitable local ‘click’ markets within a utility’s natural ‘brick-and-mortar’ monopoly. Median accounts who consume all their EcoShares pay nothing; profligates over the threshold pay higher tiered rates. But frugal consumers now earn and accumulate unused shares, tracked on AquaJust, where they can save, donate or sell them to firms or families who want more. The approach replaces rationing and restrictions with fair and voluntary incentives in which all metered customers benefit from choices, conservation incentives, political momentum for raising rates, and AMI technology that can meet their growing demand for real time data and feedback.

Because when we reduce demand we erode revenues needed to improve our water supply. With no choice, competition or incentives to conserve, our ‘natural monopoly’ welcomes overuse yet punishes families and firms who save water. No politician promises voters he’ll deliver higher water, food or energy bills, so we ensure pipes leak and waste worsens. A vicious cycle hardens demand, escalates conflict and erodes trust. Democracy pits water utility vs. customers vs. nature.  This is a battle with no real winners.  A new, enlightened and collaborative solution must be put forward.  With Workman’s example, we may have finally found the answer.

Deep in the Mojave Desert sits Las Vegas.  In Sin City, a torrent of water flows freely in massive fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and casinos.  Meanwhile, across the country in places that are not particularly dry or hot, communities, farmers, and factories are struggling to find water, and even running out altogether.  America’s self-inflicted water crisis is spreading, and more quickly than you might think.

In a book that is both frightening and wickedly funny, acclaimed author Robert Glennon captures the tragedy–and irony–of water in America.  From the Vegas Strip to faux snow in Atlanta, from our supersized bathrooms to mega-farms, from billion-dollar water deals to big time politics and personalities, Unquenchable tells the shocking stories of extravagances and waste that are sucking the nation dry.

Our water woes will only grow with new demands for this forgotten resource.  Take Washington’s love affair with biofuels: it will turn to heartbreak once America realizes that thousands of gallons of water are required to produce one gallon of fuel.

Glennon argues that we cannot engineer our way out of the problem with the usual fixes or the zany, but very real, schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska or divert the Mississippi River to Nevada.  America must make hard choices–and Glennon’s answer is a provocative market-based system that values water as a commodity and a fundamental human right.

Bio

A recipient of two National Science Foundation grants, Glennon, the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Arizona School of Law, serves as Water Policy Advisor to Pima County, Arizona; as a member of American Rivers’ Science and Technical Advisory Comittee;

Glennon’s best-known publication is Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (Island Press, 2002), which received accolades from Scientific American, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.

Glennon has contributed commentary and analysis to various television and radio programs, appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Diane Rehm Show, C-SPAN2’s Book TV, and numerous National Public Radio shows.  He is a frequent blogger for the Huffington Post, and his work has also been published in the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic.

Royte shows readers and audiences how we can all make a difference by understanding and acknowledging both the upstream and downstream impacts of our consumption, and then taking steps to shrink our environmental footprints — as individuals, community members, and voters.  As we continue to exploit the planet’s precious natural resources, Royte cautions that positive, regenerative change can only be possible if we honestly reassess our relationships with waste, water and our own daily routines.

Program Descriptions

Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water

In Bottlemania — one of Entertainment Weekly, Plenty, Seed and Time Out Chicago’s Top Nonfiction Books of 2008 — Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, a source of Poland Spring water, to explore the roots of our fascination with bottled water and to examine its modern-day frictions, now threatening to spill over into cultural warfare.

Moving beyond the environmental and social consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte parses the quality of both bottled and tap water (you may be surprised at what she found). And while more than 90 U.S. colleges have restricted or banned bottled-water sales, Royte favors a more holistic, education-based approach that has the promise to ripple far more widely through communities seeking sustainability.

Ultimately, Royte’s lecture makes a case for better protection of public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure, and–in a world that’s hotter, more crowded and more polluted–for better allocating and sharing the precious freshwater that remains.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Out of sight, out of mind…

Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels … But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away?

In Garbage Land, one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 2005, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling–often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak among sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste.

Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what really happens to the things we’ve “disposed of,” Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume.

Bio

Elizabeth Royte’s writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.  A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Royte is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor for OnEarth, where she writes the blog The Royte Stuff.  A correspondent for Outside magazine, and a contributing editor for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.  (www.thefern.org), her work is also included in The Best American Science Writing 2004 and 2009.  Royte’s first book, The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2001.