ANAHEIM, Calif. -- The supply, quality and protection of water resources will be critical in the 21st century and will present Washington, aided by the nation's reservoir of academic brain power -- particularly in land-grant colleges -- with a "grand national challenge," a Cornell environmentalist warns.
"If there is light at the end of the aqueduct, it's because the pipes aren't filled with water anymore and that in itself should tell us something," he said. "It should remind us that our precious aquifers, the natural underground reservoirs that took thousands of years to fill, are being depleted much faster than they're being recharged. The era of big dam-building is past, yet populations continue to grow and so do demands for water."
Speaking last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Theodore L. Hullar, director of the Cornell Center for the Environment and coordinator of the newly established National Water Initiative, called the American West an ideal laboratory for testing solutions to water-related problems the rest of the world is facing. He spoke during a session on "Water in the West: Investing in Management and Research for the 21st Century."
Speaking for the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the Universities Council on Water Resources and the National Institute for Water Resources, Hullar said the solutions to the nation's looming water problems should come from the nationwide network of land-grant colleges, state universities and others with water-resource expertise.
"It is absolutely essential that we marshal all available resources and apply research-based knowledge to solve this grand national challenge," Hullar said. "This requires a new kind of collaboration among universities, states and federal agencies."
Hullar and other representatives of universities consider the Cooperative Extension model an instructive one. What Cooperative Extension did for American agriculture -- transferring university-generated knowledge to food producers -- the National Water Initiative can now do with new knowledge about the most fundamental resource of all, he said.
Meeting this national challenge, he said, will require recognition of the problems and full cooperation from national agencies, such as the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. But the research work should be decentralized and distributed to the state level, he believes, because that's where the water-related problems are and where the university-based expertise can be found.
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