The world’s oceans and seas, which contain 97 percent of the water on our planet, create seasonal rains, replenish rivers, lakes, and streams and make crops grow.

Oceans play a major role in the production of oxygen, accounting for about 70 percent of the air we breathe. Ocean water also absorbs carbon dioxide and other toxic gases hostile to life, yet today, more than 40 percent of the world’s oceans are severely impacted by human activities, including over-fishing and pollution.

A current subtle shift in the ocean’s chemistry caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and forests could disrupt shell-forming plankton and reef-building species.

The supply of freshwater is unevenly distributed, and water use per capita is increasing as the world population grows. Today, one in five people on the planet does not have access to safe drinking water. Every day, 8,000 people die of AIDS, but 300 percent more, 25,000 people, die from diseases related to unsafe drinking water.

According to the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, by 2020 over 76 million people will perish from water-related disease, more than from the AIDS pandemic, unless immediate and urgent action is taken.

Sobering statistics such as these have bubbled to the surface, but are only part of a roiling challenge: water management in the 21st century.

Mountainfilm’s Moving Mountains Symposium, which is all about water, happens on Friday from 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m., at High Camp, the Telluride Conference Center.
Water expert and journalist (New Yorker, L.A. Times and Harper’s) Wade Graham is moderating.
“The Symposium will be a discussion of the state of the world’s water and will include possible solutions to some of the issues,” explained panelist Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute and an internationally renowned expert on the subject.
The day’s agenda includes the relationship between water and health, water and climate change, privatization versus globalization, conflict and resolution. 

Freshwater is the focus of the morning session.

In America, we consider life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — water, manicured green lawns, swimming pools, and golf courses — inalienable rights.

“We in the U.S. have come to expect water as a right, something that comes from the tap just because we turn on a faucet,” explained Dennis Dimmick, a returning panelist and executive editor of National Geographic. “That we even have a tap, for that matter.
We are lucky that way compared to most of the rest of the world. More than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and almost a third of humanity does not even have access to sanitation — toilets that work.”

Dimmick, the event opener, has been cast in the role of Cassandra. Hopefully, however, his pronouncements will be believed.

Using an array of National Geographic stories he has been involved with over the years, he plans to paint a picture of the world’s water in crisis. One of his points will be the universal failure to meet basic human needs such as sanitation and clean drinking water. He will talk about the flagrant disregard for our ecosystem, which has led to such travesties as the drying up of the Aral Sea in central Asia, China’s Yellow Sea, and the Colorado River in Mexico, endangering salmon as well as numerous other species of fish and wildlife.

The Symposium will also take an in-depth look at the inextricable link between global climate change and water.

“Rising temperatures change rain patterns,” explained Gleick. “The loss of glaciers, rising oceans, and other related phenomena mean that climate change has become a new challenge for water managers, who must also find ways to mitigate escalating conflicts over water.

“If we are to sustain ourselves and the nature we love, we need to lower our expectations, realign our wants to the needs presented by the realities of the limited water landscape, which can sustain us if we are willing to restrain desire,” Dimmick said. “The era of limitlessness has limits. The sooner we recognize this fact, the better prepared we will be to face of future of uncertain water supplies.”

“I believe there is a human right to water, literally and in a legal sense,” said Gleick, “That does not mean, however, that water should be free or that we should take it for granted, live where we want, do what we want, in the belief that someone will always come up with more water. The focus should not be the use of water, but improved individual and social well-being per unit of water used.”

Gleick plans to respond to the crises Dimmick outlines with a few promising options.
“There is a need for new thinking about the supply, use, management, and infrastructure of water,” he explained. “It is easy to be pessimistic, instead I will present a relatively positive vision as to how we might solve water-related problems. Smart, innovative things are happening around the world right now: fish flows are being restored, people in Africa and Asia  are beginning to have access to safe drinking water, others have made inroads in response to climate change, conflicts are being settled,” he said.

He described two approaches to water management. One, what he calls the hard path, dominated the past century. It saw the construction of massive dams and treatment plants, centralizing the world’s approach to water. The other he calls the soft path.

“The ‘soft path’ is a smarter combination of large and small,” explained Gleick. “It involves centralized and decentralized approaches. Big only gets us so far. When big leads to the complete devastation of rivers — think China’s Three Gorges Dam — we have lost something fundamental.”

According to Gleick, new technologies enable us to manage water more locally
“Small water purification systems allow us to move away from the centralized approaches that dominated the 20th century, and are more user friendly.”

Even in the developing world, more efficient toilets play a key role, as does the way we grow our food and what we choose to eat.

Rounding out the discussion on freshwater, environmental engineer Brad Udall will connect the dots with regard to the Western water economy and the Four Corners region in particular. About 60 million people live West of the 100th Meridian, and many are supported by vast capture, storage, and distribution systems.

“This house of cards depends on adequate rain and snow falling in the river valleys, where dams are, and as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns change, supplies of adequate water are not assured,” explained Dimmick. “Snow pack surveys of the West for the past 50 years have shown we are slowly, surely, losing the snow we need to sustain ours and nature’s water needs. Yet we live like there is no tomorrow.”

Following lunch, the focus of the Symposium shifts to saltwater: what is happening to our oceans and seas.

Azzam Alwash, founder of Eden Again, returns to town after four years to describe what he and his wife Suzie have managed to do to restore some of the marshes of the world’s largest wetland in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers known as the Fertile Crescent. The place is the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden, and was destroyed by Saddam Hussein, who felt threatened by the “rebellious” marsh people.

Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of the legendary ocean explorer, is working to launch Going Blue, an international education campaign about global water resources.
Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle, perhaps the world’s best known oceanographer, returns to town after a decade to discuss the deteriorating state of our oceans and what we can do to mitigate the situation.

“We have a moral obligation not to destroy that which we cannot put together again. Just try making a fish or a tree,” she said.

According to Earle, the ocean is the place where the history of life is found, not in fossils, but in living creatures that represent life as it has been. Yet we treat the ocean as our ultimate sewer and refrigerator. Our survival as a species is at risk.

The Symposium is open to all Wilson, Ama Dablam and Patron passholders and includes the lunch. Individual all-day tickets can be purchased at Mountainfilm Hospitality at Chair Eight restaurant at the base of the gondola, for $65.

For further information, go to www.mountainfilm.org.