Water ResourcesPeople and Issues
A: Back in the early sixties, after I had gotten well along with the flood studies
at Chicago, I found myself most interested in how decisions were made about
water use and management. The Rockefeller Foundation very kindly offered
to support me in anything I wanted to do for a couple of years in this field of
research. I decided I would like to look into the most elemental decisions
made about water and see if that could not provide some new insights into
water management.
My wife and I picked East Africa as an area in which there's tremendous
diversity of both culture and environment. We went into about 35 different
sites and inquired about how people decide to use water. At least 60 percent
of the people on the earth go and draw water from someplace outside the
household every day, including a lot of people in the States.
We did something which is rudimentary but nobody had done before. We
found out where they got their water, how much they used, and what it cost
them to use it in terms of time, energy, money, and health. To do the health
part of it and for general perspective, we were fortunate to join forces with
a British medical biology researcher, David Bradley. Out of it the three of
us produced the first examination of what is involved in carrying domestic
water to a household, and how people make their choices as to where they
will go. In almost all cases people have alternative sources from which they
can draw the water. Thus, they make two decisions everyday: how much
water they'll draw, and where they will go to get it, which involves who will
go to get it, generally "she."
We were able to work this out with the assistance of field interviews by
students from Kampala, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. Since then, it has been
done hundreds of times in other places. This led us into all sorts of
collaboration with people in various countries and in other
disciplines--economists, engineers, sociologists, anthropologists-all interested
in the same problem of providing potable water. Then the United Nations
Drinking Water Decade was established in 1981. We were involved in
several of the plans and preparations for that. That's been another
international activity related to decisions about water.
Q: While it's not exactly a natural hazard, I am curious about the extent, if any,
you've gotten involved in these recent concerns about nuclear winter. I
understand there's a central international consortium which has been organized
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