While many of us lose sleep at night grappling with the existential stress of our planet’s fresh water situation, West Michigan Environmental Action Council’s Director of Environmental Programs Carlos Calderon is doing something about it.
Fresh water.
There is only so much of it. There is no adequate substitute for it. We don’t know of a single organism on Earth that can live without it. It is the stuff of life, plain and simple … and today, it is constantly under threat.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to make it, either. Desalinating a cubic meter of salt water requires about 0.86 kWh of energy (1), which is equivalent to the amount you’d need to run a 100-watt lightbulb for around 9 hours. That’s not a huge number, but consider how much water the average human uses in America: about 300 gallons per day (2), which equates to roughly 1.1 cubic meters.
As of the most recently available numbers, there are roughly 127 million households in the United States (3). To supply our country with freshwater, we’d need to run about 127 million lightbulbs all day.
That’s a lot of lightbulbs. And it’s just our country.
While it’s true that many other countries are facing much more dire water crises than we are, the U.S. is experiencing its own water shortage. And even where we have plenty of it — like in the Great Lakes Basin, which Carlos Calderon helps to manage — there exist numerous issues related to cleanliness and stewardship.
Ecogardens was lucky enough to catch up with him to talk about his work with the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, WMEAC; what he thinks of the fresh water situation today; and his hopes for sustainable development and population growth in the long term.
Protecting Earth’s Most Precious Resources Through Education
As Director of Environmental Programs for WMEAC, Carlos Calderon is never far from a reminder of water.
“Right in front of my computer is the big Erb Family Foundation Great Lakes Watershed Map,” he says. “Every day I sit down at my desk and stare at the basin from Duluth, Minnesota to the confluence of the St. Lawrence River. It’s a large geographic and diverse area of ecosystems, cultures, state and local governments, and weird ordinances.”
Taken together, those factors provide ongoing challenges for effective environmental management and education, though Calderon is uniquely suited to dealing with them. He was born in Grand Rapids but grew up in Northern Michigan along the Straits of Mackinac. He has watched environmental issues play out across the Great Lakes his whole life.
Today, with a background in water resources and a graduate degree in watershed ecology, he’s responsible for bringing the sustainable mindset to his team and disseminating it to the businesses, organizations, and youth with whom they work. This is a primary component of what WMEAC does.
“We’re an all-in-one environmental organization,” he says. “We provide a variety of programs and work with a variety of partners in a variety of communities.” The West Michigan community is diverse, he says, and “we try to support and collaborate with any and all of them.”
In the course of any given day, he might educate youth about watershed health, teach businesses about their stormwater management options, or set up rain barrel workshops. WMEAC also runs cleanups, helps people install rain gardens, and drafts inclusive policies for future water management efforts.
With everything they do, they ask one simple question: How can we protect our resources most effectively?
A Matter of Quality
When many of us think about water, we think scarcity. Is there enough of it for everyone? Are we living in the wrong places? (Looking at you, Las Vegas.) How can we get it from A to B sustainably? How do we balance human population growth and effective, long-term resource management?
Yet as common as these questions are, they’re not the only issue. Quality matters too.
“One of the things that folks born after 1980 might not remember is that we used to have leaded gasoline, and it legacy pollution throughout the ecosystem,” Calderon says. Much of the pollution occurred pre-Environmental Protection Agency, so no one was regulating what went up into the atmosphere, which then came down as acid rain. Because of this, “We have a history of contamination in every waterway in the Great Lakes Basin.”
This is tragic for native flora and fauna, but it matters greatly to human activities as well.
“The biggest concern that we have as a scientific community is the myth of clean, fresh water. There’s no such thing; the impact of the Industrial Revolution has polluted and contaminated everything. There’s not a single body of water that is uncontaminated, which has a lot of implications for what we can eat from it and how we use it on our crops.”
~ Carlos Calderon
It’s no surprise, really, that this has happened. However, many laypeople — raised on the binary distinction between fresh water and salt — don’t understand how un-fresh much of our “fresh” water really is. You can’t simply abuse a system for the hundreds of years, Calderon explains, and expect there to be no fallout.
“One water body might have multiple designated uses, and all of those uses are impaired because of this legacy,” he says. “Lead, mercury, PCB. Those will not go away. They cannot be remediated. They will be here forever. That’s where we’re not so concerned about the quantity of water being reduced, but how the quality is going to be impacted.”
That said, the quantity of available fresh water is also very much a concern.
The Water Wars Have Commenced
Many have predicted that water scarcity will be the defining issue of the 21st century. That leaves people in drier climates asking: “Where will my water come from?”
If they live in a resource-rich area, such as the Pacific Northwest or the Great Lakes Basin, the concern is a bit less immediate but no less existential, because the question becomes “Where will their water come from?”
(You guessed it: This is where the side-eyes emoji goes.)
When asked about this, Calderon replies that “The easy answer is there’s no way that water is going to leave the basin. There are international laws that prevent a significant amount of diversion outside of the Great Lakes.”
That’s not to say you can’t take water from one of the Great Lakes at all. You can, but not in containers bigger than 2.5 liters.
Currently, Calderon says, there’s no limit on how many bottles you can fill, though: “You can load a thousand semi-trucks of those bottles, but there’s never going to be a pipeline that takes water from the Great Lakes to anywhere outside the basin.” There are a few exceptions, but they are all carefully controlled.
For instance, Waukesha, Wis., is an interesting case study. One of the rules dictated by an international treaty with Canada and agreed upon by the federation of eight Great Lakes states is that “If a community is on the border or part of a county on the border, they are able to withdraw water as long as they are able to return that water to the basin,” Calderon says. While Waukesha is one of these communities outside of the basin, the county that it’s in (Waukesha County) is a suburb of Milwaukee and straddles the line.
The city’s groundwater supply is contaminated by radon, so they needed a non-local alternative, but they’re located far enough away from Lake Michigan that it became a huge controversy. Ultimately, after the case did a stint at the state’s Supreme Court, the ruling came back: Waukesha could remove the water as long as they return it … after it undergoes a thorough wastewater treatment program, of course.
That happy ending aside, it’s only natural to wonder about the wider availability of resources in our world. With rivers drying up and countries already tussling about water that crosses borders, eyeballs are turning to other nearby-ish sources of fresh water. Containing 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, the Great Lakes Basin is a natural bullseye.
Calderon, though, doesn’t believe we should sacrifice the health of water resources for the sake of redistribution, nor bring people to it.
Despite its wealth of fresh water, “The Great Lakes Basin contains only about half a percent of the world’s population, so we have a disproportionate amount of responsibility to manage those resources,” he says. “So when people ask, ‘Should we encourage people to move to the Great Lakes?’ I say no. The more people who move here, the more we will degrade the quality of the water, because we as a society have chosen to have a high impact on our natural resources, not a low one.”
He acknowledges that this is a hard stand to take, what with Mexico and the United States fighting about water and lots of desert communities predicting trouble over the coming decades. But fresh water is, as discussed at the beginning, not a resource you can simply make yourself. Sustainability must come first.
Speaking of which …
A Vision for Sustainable Urban Development
While much of his job involves ensuring the highest possible standards for water stewardship, that’s far from everything Carlos Calderon does. Sustainable urban development is another main concern of his, and a passion as well.
Having lived in West Michigan for 25 years now, he’s had ample opportunity to witness urban sprawl, even in the formerly small community of Grand Rapids.
“Where we used to have farm fields, now there’s a big housing development. Where we used to have natural lands, now it’s a shopping mall,” he says. WMEAC tries to influence this development in a positive direction whenever possible.
“One of the things we advocate for with all the municipalities and governments we work with is trying to get sustainable development to be a standard of practice,” Calderon explains. That includes green commercial buildings and low-impact designs, living roofs and stormwater management infrastructure — services that companies such as Ecogardens provide. As an early adopter of such practices, Grand Rapids is well positioned to help lead the green infrastructure charge.
Any new or redevelopment in the City of Grand Rapids has to meet a high standard for stormwater management, he says, but development affects far more than waterways.
“When you have green or natural spaces in the city, you’re helping to improve air quality, reduce the urban heat island effect, provide for better mental health, and more. Sustainable urban development is green, period.”
~Carlos Calderon
The question becomes, then, how to balance economic and population growth, both desirable things, with the impact they inevitably have on the environment. That’s where businesses can help.
What Can Businesses Do?
Aside from participating in green building practices, ideally even above what is required by municipalities, the best thing businesses can do to help the environment is trying to reduce their emissions, Calderon says.
Green roofs are one way to do this, because they help to regulate temperature and thus to reduce the heating and cooling needs of your building. Living infrastructure also decreases the amount of energy you’ll use pumping water, because it can capture it closer to the source. Other good ideas include:
- Converting natural gas appliances to electric
- Buying electric vehicles
- Using alternative energy sources where possible
There’s a long road ahead, Calderon says, but there is hope.
“I inherited too much stubbornness to give up hope. We know what the problem is; we know how to remedy it and that we can do it. It’s just getting the decision-makers to buy in.”
~ Carlos Calderon
But, he says, “as a well-informed scientist, it’s difficult to see a hopeful path forward. Unfortunately, most of the decision-makers have been bought out by corporate interests.”
That’s where WMEAC’s mission comes in. It is, as Calderon sees it, to continually educate the electorate and make them see the importance of a better way.
“That’s the hope that I still have,” he says. “That maybe it’s not our parents’ generation that’s going to make the big change. Maybe it’s not our generation, but we’ve got the next generation coming up.” That’s why a lot of the programs at WMEAC are geared toward K-12 “pre-voting citizens.”
Calderon invests so much in his educational outreach with youth because he believes that even young children should understand how the world works and how they impact it. Ingesting the right ideas when small sets them up to prioritize the environment once they register to vote.
“If you want a future,” he tells them, “we need to make change now.”
It’s a message that applies to all of us.
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SOURCES:
Energy requirements of desalination processes. (n.d.). DESWARE. https://www.desware.net/energy-requirements-desalination-processes.aspx
How we use water. Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). EPA. https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
Quickfacts: United States. (n.d.). United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410223