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GoGreenNation news

My Dream House and the Pond

News Feed
Tuesday, March 12, 2024

I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond I can’t avoid.The pond dilates and contracts according to water levels. After a string of dry days, it may shrink to a puddle. After a storm, it may stretch to the length of a freight car, spilling into the middle of the street. It’s bad for curb appeal. Its sources are environmental, structural, and complex. On the rare occasion the pond dissipates, it leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise.The pond is almost always there. Our region is getting wetter as the climate changes. More rain, more storms, more often. The infrastructure of our city, at the edge of the rising sea, isn’t fit to handle so much water. Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death traps.In summer, the pond breeds mosquitoes and collects litter: cigarette butts, scratched-off lotto tickets. In winter, I worry the pond will become a slipping hazard. This is what I say when dialing 311, the city’s helpline, in hopes of remediation. An elderly neighbor could slip on the ice and break a bone. The pond could collapse into a sinkhole.Tell it to the DOT, lady, says the Department of Environmental Protection. I do. Nope, says the Department of Transportation; because of the tree, this is a problem for Parks. I follow up. Weeks pass. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs me to the Department of Health. Months pass. What you need to do for ponding, says the DOH, is try the DEP. I write to my city-council member: I’m being given the runaround. Weeks pass without reply. Surely, this wouldn’t happen in the rich neighborhood up the hill. As a city worker myself, I know this dance well—this absurd, disjointed roundelay.[Olga Khazan: Why can’t I just rent a house? ]I ruminate over the pond. It has caused me not just embarrassment but shame. It has turned me scientific, made me into a water witch. I understand that the pond is beyond the scope of any one person, or any one agency, to handle, and that it’s perilous to ignore. The pond is a dark mirror; in it, our house appears upside down, distorted. It reflects deeper problems of stewardship and governance and the position of our house in relation to both. We are privileged to own a home. Yet we live on land that will drown, that is inundated already. The pond is a portal. Sometimes it smells, this vent hole of the netherworld. Beneath its surface, something lies concealed. Given the fact of the pond, why did we buy the house? Now that we dwell in the house, what to do about the pond?Technically, the pond isn’t on our property at all. Our home inspector had no reason to suspect it. It belongs to the city, along with the street where it spreads. This is what we were told on the rainy day we arrived for the final walk-through before closing on the house in the deadly spring of 2020: The pond was up to the city to fix, with taxpayer dollars.Plenty of folks were deserting New York then. I mean hundreds of thousands. That we were committed to staying in the city was both an act of necessity and a point of pride. For my husband and I, the house was a step up from the crowded three-room apartment in Washington Heights where we’d sheltered in place, away from the mad snarl of highways whose traffic had given our boys asthma: a place to stretch out, a sign of our upward mobility. The American dream. To a Black family without generational wealth, some of whose ancestors were property themselves, it signified even more: Shelter. Safety. Equity. Arrival. A future for our children.We fell in love with the house as soon as we saw it, a run-down detached brick home in a working-class neighborhood with a little garden in back and windows on all four sides. The house had solid bones. We rejoiced when our offer was accepted. Yet until the day of the final walk-through, we had never visited the house in the rain.That morning, the pond greeted us like the opposite of a welcome mat, giving shape to whatever latent misgivings we had about making this move. I felt hoodwinked. Buyer beware! I waded into the middle of that bad omen to gauge its depth. Murky water sloshed over the tops of my rain boots, drenching my socks. Good Lord. It was so much more significant than a puddle. I wondered what it was, how to name it, and why it was here. Was what I stood on actually land, or something less concrete? Could it have been a wetland, once? Why hadn’t the pond been disclosed? Because it didn’t have to be, said the tight-lipped seller’s agent representing the estate of the previous owner, an old man named Jeremiah Breen.That night, my husband and I lay awake in bed, discussing our options. Sirens sounded up from the street. People were dying of COVID all around us. Purportedly, the house sat outside the floodplain. But what if the pond got bigger with worsening weather? Would it pour into the basement? Was the house’s foundation as solid as we’d been told? We doubted that the city would handle the underlying issues—not while hobbled by the pandemic. Would flood insurance be enough? Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater? Was it an asset or a millstone? How high would the waters rise? How soon? Did we even believe, deep down in our souls, of ownership of this kind? Why fake like we or anyone else could own the land?Such questions of capital consumed us deep into the night. The bottom line was this: If we pulled out of the deal, we’d lose our down payment, amounting to two years of college tuition for one of our kids. By dawn, we admitted our disillusionment. We’d already crossed the Rubicon, imbricated in the twisted system that brought about the pond. Or so we said because nevertheless, we still loved the house.We renegotiated the purchase price; we moved in.Later, I learned that many current maps for flood risk overlap with maps of historic housing discrimination. Geography determines a neighborhood’s risk and, this being America, so does race. Neighborhoods that suffered from redlining in the 1930s—when our house was built—face a far higher risk of flooding today. The pond suggested a submerged history beneath the daily surface of things.The house was not just a risk but a wreck. Its rusty tanks sweated out oil that looked like blood onto the basement floor. Most of its windowpanes were cracked; its floors, uneven; its doors, out of plumb. It lacked adequate insulation. Under the creaky old planks, we discovered a newspaper dating back to the Depression. The front page addressed the use of antiques in home decoration. It featured a photo of a card room with an 18th-century Queen Anne table being used for bridge. How far back could I imagine? The paper flaked into pieces like the wings of moths when I tried to turn the page.By the time Jeremiah Breen took possession of the house, bridge had fallen out of fashion. At the time the table was carved, this part of the Bronx was marsh. When I input our zip code into the online archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can see on a century-old map what this wetland looked like before it was developed into the grid of streets, shops, houses, schools, and apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood now. In 1900, the land is still veined by blue streams. A pin in the shape of a teardrop marks the spot of our present address, smack-dab in a bend of a waterway called Tibbetts Brook. The brook was named after a settler whose descendants were driven off the land for their royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Before that, it had another name. The Munsee Lenape called it Mosholu. We live on the ghost of this rivulet, just one of the city’s dozens of lost streams.[Hannah Ritchie: A slightly hotter world could still be a better one]The teardrop confirmed what I sensed about the true nature of my pond, which was so much more than a puddle, and not mine at all, but rather a part of a much larger body of water.Waterways like Tibbetts Brook were once the lifeblood of the city. As New York grew, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into the world’s supreme port, it counted on such freshwater streams for transportation, drinking water, fishing, and waterpower for grain mills and sawmills. The brook became polluted; eventually, railroad lines overtook waterways as transportation routes. Waterpower was replaced by steam. Steam was replaced by electric power. The banks of the streams became industrial wastelands, which became Black and brown neighborhoods. Plundered water bodies. Plundered peoples.The works of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, and Herbert Kraft, a scholar of the Lenape, help me imagine a preindustrial, pre-European version of my home place. The Wiechquaeseck community of Lenape lived in a settlement nearby, around Spuytin Duyvil Creek, fed by the waters of Mosholu. They lived mostly out of doors and owned no more than they could carry. Wealth was being in communion with one another, and in balance with the abundant natural world, “filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings,” according to Kraft.All I have to do to see a remaining pocket of that natural world that was once my home is walk three blocks east to Van Cortlandt Park, where a narrow belt of lowland swamp forest still survives along a trail around open water. This small freshwater wetland is ecologically precious, home to many plant and animal species. It slows erosion, prevents flooding by retaining stormwater, filters and decomposes pollutants, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.Hunting the swamp are barred owls and red-tailed hawks. Water lilies, swamp loosestrife, and arrowhead each grow at different water depths, thickening the open water by midsummer. Mallards and wood ducks feed, nest, preen, and glide among dense strands of cattail, buttonbush, arrow arum, and blue flag. Eastern kingbirds and belted kingfishers screech from the treetops while painted turtles sun themselves on the lodges of muskrats. These, too, are my neighbors.The Van Cortlandt Swamp is fed by Tibbetts Brook, before the brook divides down into the concrete conduit, its tail buried. This little swamp is a patch of the 2,000 acres of freshwater wetland remaining in the city today, out of the 224,000 acres it boasted 200 years ago.“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Toni Morrison once wrote. From that point of view, the pond in front of our house is not a nuisance but rather the brook remembering itself. Mosholu. How might Thoreau have described my pond? The pond is a gift to the birds who stop there to bathe, and a place for wildlife to slake their thirst at night: possum, coyote, skunk. The pond is a lieu de mémoire, a reservoir. When the sun hits it at the right angle, the pond’s surface dances with jewels of light. When night comes, the pond throws back the orange glow of the streetlight. The pond is the paved-over wetland, reasserting its form.The Lenape believed that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be given thanks, and asked permission before taking from it. I doubt Jacobus Van Cortlandt, landowner, enslaver, and mayor of New York, asked permission when he had the Black people he owned dam up Tibbetts Brook in 1699 to install a sawmill and gristmill on his plantation. Some of the skeletons of those he enslaved were unearthed by construction workers laying down railroad tracks in the 1870s. The mill operated until 1889, when the city purchased the land for its park. At that point, the millpond became a small, decorative lake. Sometimes I walk to this lake, next to the African burial ground, to watch the damselflies and contemplate what lies beneath.At the lake’s south end, in 1912, the brook was piped into a storm drain and rechanneled into an underground tunnel that merged into a brick sewer below Broadway. This enabled the construction of streets and buildings south of the park, including our house, on top of backfill and city trash. What does it mean to live in a place where rivers are harnessed to carry our waste away, so we don’t have to think about it?According to the Department of Environmental Protection, 4 million to 5 million gallons of water flow into the Broadway sewer on a dry day from Tibbetts Brook and the millpond alone. That water runs through the sewer, where it mixes with raw household sewage, and then on to Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. But when it rains, the amount of water can be five times that. At least 60 times a year, the treatment plant gets overwhelmed by rainwater and shuts down. Untreated sewage and rainwater are then discharged into the Harlem River, in violation of federal law.Now there are plans to “daylight” the subterranean stretch of Tibbetts Brook, bringing it back to the surface. This restoration will alleviate flooding by rerouting the buried section of the brook directly into the Harlem River, not exactly along its historic route, upon which our house sits. Instead, it will flow slightly to the east, along an old railway line that accidentally reverted to an urban wetland after the freight trains stopped running in the 1980s. This gully runs behind BJ’s Wholesale Club and the strip mall with the nail salon and the Flame hibachi and the Staples—already rewilding with tall marsh grasses and reeds.There is talk of undoing the past, of giving some of what was taken from nature back to nature. There is talk of a bike path along a greenway costing millions of dollars. If the project comes to pass by 2030 as planned, it will be New York City’s first daylighting story, and we will be in the watershed. Unburying the brook seems like a good thing. I hope, when it beautifies the landscape, that my neighbors can still afford to live here.We were still living out of boxes in early September 2021 when the National Weather Service declared New York City’s first flash-flood emergency. Our boys were by then 8 and 10. More than three inches of rain fell in just one hour, shattering a record set by a storm the week before. Was it even correct to call it a 500-year rainfall event when the past had become such a poor guide to the present? The remnants of Hurricane Ida turned the nearby Major Deegan Expressway back into a river, stranding cars, buses, and trucks in high water. That image, from our new neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city’s unpreparedness. Every single subway line in the city was stalled. A thousand straphangers were evacuated from 17 stuck trains. “We are BEYOND not ready for climate change,” a city-council member declared on Twitter.The pond in front of our house was whipped into waves by the wind. It was as sure a sign as any that we were living on borrowed time. But in the weeks that followed Ida, against our better judgment, we had Con Edison connect us to the gas line under the kettle in the street where the water gathers. We’d have preferred to heat the house with geothermal energy, but couldn’t find anybody yet trained to install it. At times, the house feels like a snare. I mean to say, if I remain embarrassed as a homeowner, it is not on account of the pond.Just as remarkable as the pond out front is the garden out back. Down on my knees with my hands in the soil, I weed and tend the beds. My mother has given me a Lenten rose. It is the first thing to bloom in spring. I marvel at the shoots coming up from the bulbs planted before me by Mary, wife of Jeremiah, whose name was not on the deed but was told to me by our neighbor Eve. Daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, and tulips.I live in Lenapehoking, the unceded territory of the Lenape people, past and present. Generations before we bought this land, it was stolen. I believe we have a responsibility to honor them by becoming better stewards of the land we inhabit. I want these words to be more than words; I want them to be deeds.I’m learning to grow food for our table, sensing that the truest sacrament is eating the earth’s body. I have planted lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peas, and beets. I collect water in a barrel under the gutter spout. I see that our land is a quilt; that our house is only a structure among structures among pollinating plants visited by bees.The pond is part of the place where we live. To prevent stagnation, I sometimes stir it with a stick. Through the front windows, I watch it swell when it rains. I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows. Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.This essay has been adapted from Emily Raboteau’s forthcoming book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse.”

Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater?

I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond I can’t avoid.

The pond dilates and contracts according to water levels. After a string of dry days, it may shrink to a puddle. After a storm, it may stretch to the length of a freight car, spilling into the middle of the street. It’s bad for curb appeal. Its sources are environmental, structural, and complex. On the rare occasion the pond dissipates, it leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise.

The pond is almost always there. Our region is getting wetter as the climate changes. More rain, more storms, more often. The infrastructure of our city, at the edge of the rising sea, isn’t fit to handle so much water. Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death traps.

In summer, the pond breeds mosquitoes and collects litter: cigarette butts, scratched-off lotto tickets. In winter, I worry the pond will become a slipping hazard. This is what I say when dialing 311, the city’s helpline, in hopes of remediation. An elderly neighbor could slip on the ice and break a bone. The pond could collapse into a sinkhole.

Tell it to the DOT, lady, says the Department of Environmental Protection. I do. Nope, says the Department of Transportation; because of the tree, this is a problem for Parks. I follow up. Weeks pass. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs me to the Department of Health. Months pass. What you need to do for ponding, says the DOH, is try the DEP. I write to my city-council member: I’m being given the runaround. Weeks pass without reply. Surely, this wouldn’t happen in the rich neighborhood up the hill. As a city worker myself, I know this dance well—this absurd, disjointed roundelay.

[Olga Khazan: Why can’t I just rent a house? ]

I ruminate over the pond. It has caused me not just embarrassment but shame. It has turned me scientific, made me into a water witch. I understand that the pond is beyond the scope of any one person, or any one agency, to handle, and that it’s perilous to ignore. The pond is a dark mirror; in it, our house appears upside down, distorted. It reflects deeper problems of stewardship and governance and the position of our house in relation to both. We are privileged to own a home. Yet we live on land that will drown, that is inundated already. The pond is a portal. Sometimes it smells, this vent hole of the netherworld. Beneath its surface, something lies concealed. Given the fact of the pond, why did we buy the house? Now that we dwell in the house, what to do about the pond?

Technically, the pond isn’t on our property at all. Our home inspector had no reason to suspect it. It belongs to the city, along with the street where it spreads. This is what we were told on the rainy day we arrived for the final walk-through before closing on the house in the deadly spring of 2020: The pond was up to the city to fix, with taxpayer dollars.

Plenty of folks were deserting New York then. I mean hundreds of thousands. That we were committed to staying in the city was both an act of necessity and a point of pride. For my husband and I, the house was a step up from the crowded three-room apartment in Washington Heights where we’d sheltered in place, away from the mad snarl of highways whose traffic had given our boys asthma: a place to stretch out, a sign of our upward mobility. The American dream. To a Black family without generational wealth, some of whose ancestors were property themselves, it signified even more: Shelter. Safety. Equity. Arrival. A future for our children.

We fell in love with the house as soon as we saw it, a run-down detached brick home in a working-class neighborhood with a little garden in back and windows on all four sides. The house had solid bones. We rejoiced when our offer was accepted. Yet until the day of the final walk-through, we had never visited the house in the rain.

That morning, the pond greeted us like the opposite of a welcome mat, giving shape to whatever latent misgivings we had about making this move. I felt hoodwinked. Buyer beware! I waded into the middle of that bad omen to gauge its depth. Murky water sloshed over the tops of my rain boots, drenching my socks. Good Lord. It was so much more significant than a puddle. I wondered what it was, how to name it, and why it was here. Was what I stood on actually land, or something less concrete? Could it have been a wetland, once? Why hadn’t the pond been disclosed? Because it didn’t have to be, said the tight-lipped seller’s agent representing the estate of the previous owner, an old man named Jeremiah Breen.

That night, my husband and I lay awake in bed, discussing our options. Sirens sounded up from the street. People were dying of COVID all around us. Purportedly, the house sat outside the floodplain. But what if the pond got bigger with worsening weather? Would it pour into the basement? Was the house’s foundation as solid as we’d been told? We doubted that the city would handle the underlying issues—not while hobbled by the pandemic. Would flood insurance be enough? Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater? Was it an asset or a millstone? How high would the waters rise? How soon? Did we even believe, deep down in our souls, of ownership of this kind? Why fake like we or anyone else could own the land?

Such questions of capital consumed us deep into the night. The bottom line was this: If we pulled out of the deal, we’d lose our down payment, amounting to two years of college tuition for one of our kids. By dawn, we admitted our disillusionment. We’d already crossed the Rubicon, imbricated in the twisted system that brought about the pond. Or so we said because nevertheless, we still loved the house.

We renegotiated the purchase price; we moved in.

Later, I learned that many current maps for flood risk overlap with maps of historic housing discrimination. Geography determines a neighborhood’s risk and, this being America, so does race. Neighborhoods that suffered from redlining in the 1930s—when our house was built—face a far higher risk of flooding today. The pond suggested a submerged history beneath the daily surface of things.

The house was not just a risk but a wreck. Its rusty tanks sweated out oil that looked like blood onto the basement floor. Most of its windowpanes were cracked; its floors, uneven; its doors, out of plumb. It lacked adequate insulation. Under the creaky old planks, we discovered a newspaper dating back to the Depression. The front page addressed the use of antiques in home decoration. It featured a photo of a card room with an 18th-century Queen Anne table being used for bridge. How far back could I imagine? The paper flaked into pieces like the wings of moths when I tried to turn the page.

By the time Jeremiah Breen took possession of the house, bridge had fallen out of fashion. At the time the table was carved, this part of the Bronx was marsh. When I input our zip code into the online archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can see on a century-old map what this wetland looked like before it was developed into the grid of streets, shops, houses, schools, and apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood now. In 1900, the land is still veined by blue streams. A pin in the shape of a teardrop marks the spot of our present address, smack-dab in a bend of a waterway called Tibbetts Brook. The brook was named after a settler whose descendants were driven off the land for their royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Before that, it had another name. The Munsee Lenape called it Mosholu. We live on the ghost of this rivulet, just one of the city’s dozens of lost streams.

[Hannah Ritchie: A slightly hotter world could still be a better one]

The teardrop confirmed what I sensed about the true nature of my pond, which was so much more than a puddle, and not mine at all, but rather a part of a much larger body of water.

Waterways like Tibbetts Brook were once the lifeblood of the city. As New York grew, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into the world’s supreme port, it counted on such freshwater streams for transportation, drinking water, fishing, and waterpower for grain mills and sawmills. The brook became polluted; eventually, railroad lines overtook waterways as transportation routes. Waterpower was replaced by steam. Steam was replaced by electric power. The banks of the streams became industrial wastelands, which became Black and brown neighborhoods. Plundered water bodies. Plundered peoples.

The works of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, and Herbert Kraft, a scholar of the Lenape, help me imagine a preindustrial, pre-European version of my home place. The Wiechquaeseck community of Lenape lived in a settlement nearby, around Spuytin Duyvil Creek, fed by the waters of Mosholu. They lived mostly out of doors and owned no more than they could carry. Wealth was being in communion with one another, and in balance with the abundant natural world, “filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings,” according to Kraft.

All I have to do to see a remaining pocket of that natural world that was once my home is walk three blocks east to Van Cortlandt Park, where a narrow belt of lowland swamp forest still survives along a trail around open water. This small freshwater wetland is ecologically precious, home to many plant and animal species. It slows erosion, prevents flooding by retaining stormwater, filters and decomposes pollutants, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Hunting the swamp are barred owls and red-tailed hawks. Water lilies, swamp loosestrife, and arrowhead each grow at different water depths, thickening the open water by midsummer. Mallards and wood ducks feed, nest, preen, and glide among dense strands of cattail, buttonbush, arrow arum, and blue flag. Eastern kingbirds and belted kingfishers screech from the treetops while painted turtles sun themselves on the lodges of muskrats. These, too, are my neighbors.

The Van Cortlandt Swamp is fed by Tibbetts Brook, before the brook divides down into the concrete conduit, its tail buried. This little swamp is a patch of the 2,000 acres of freshwater wetland remaining in the city today, out of the 224,000 acres it boasted 200 years ago.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Toni Morrison once wrote. From that point of view, the pond in front of our house is not a nuisance but rather the brook remembering itself. Mosholu. How might Thoreau have described my pond? The pond is a gift to the birds who stop there to bathe, and a place for wildlife to slake their thirst at night: possum, coyote, skunk. The pond is a lieu de mémoire, a reservoir. When the sun hits it at the right angle, the pond’s surface dances with jewels of light. When night comes, the pond throws back the orange glow of the streetlight. The pond is the paved-over wetland, reasserting its form.

The Lenape believed that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be given thanks, and asked permission before taking from it. I doubt Jacobus Van Cortlandt, landowner, enslaver, and mayor of New York, asked permission when he had the Black people he owned dam up Tibbetts Brook in 1699 to install a sawmill and gristmill on his plantation. Some of the skeletons of those he enslaved were unearthed by construction workers laying down railroad tracks in the 1870s. The mill operated until 1889, when the city purchased the land for its park. At that point, the millpond became a small, decorative lake. Sometimes I walk to this lake, next to the African burial ground, to watch the damselflies and contemplate what lies beneath.

At the lake’s south end, in 1912, the brook was piped into a storm drain and rechanneled into an underground tunnel that merged into a brick sewer below Broadway. This enabled the construction of streets and buildings south of the park, including our house, on top of backfill and city trash. What does it mean to live in a place where rivers are harnessed to carry our waste away, so we don’t have to think about it?

According to the Department of Environmental Protection, 4 million to 5 million gallons of water flow into the Broadway sewer on a dry day from Tibbetts Brook and the millpond alone. That water runs through the sewer, where it mixes with raw household sewage, and then on to Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. But when it rains, the amount of water can be five times that. At least 60 times a year, the treatment plant gets overwhelmed by rainwater and shuts down. Untreated sewage and rainwater are then discharged into the Harlem River, in violation of federal law.

Now there are plans to “daylight” the subterranean stretch of Tibbetts Brook, bringing it back to the surface. This restoration will alleviate flooding by rerouting the buried section of the brook directly into the Harlem River, not exactly along its historic route, upon which our house sits. Instead, it will flow slightly to the east, along an old railway line that accidentally reverted to an urban wetland after the freight trains stopped running in the 1980s. This gully runs behind BJ’s Wholesale Club and the strip mall with the nail salon and the Flame hibachi and the Staples—already rewilding with tall marsh grasses and reeds.

There is talk of undoing the past, of giving some of what was taken from nature back to nature. There is talk of a bike path along a greenway costing millions of dollars. If the project comes to pass by 2030 as planned, it will be New York City’s first daylighting story, and we will be in the watershed. Unburying the brook seems like a good thing. I hope, when it beautifies the landscape, that my neighbors can still afford to live here.

We were still living out of boxes in early September 2021 when the National Weather Service declared New York City’s first flash-flood emergency. Our boys were by then 8 and 10. More than three inches of rain fell in just one hour, shattering a record set by a storm the week before. Was it even correct to call it a 500-year rainfall event when the past had become such a poor guide to the present? The remnants of Hurricane Ida turned the nearby Major Deegan Expressway back into a river, stranding cars, buses, and trucks in high water. That image, from our new neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city’s unpreparedness. Every single subway line in the city was stalled. A thousand straphangers were evacuated from 17 stuck trains. “We are BEYOND not ready for climate change,” a city-council member declared on Twitter.

The pond in front of our house was whipped into waves by the wind. It was as sure a sign as any that we were living on borrowed time. But in the weeks that followed Ida, against our better judgment, we had Con Edison connect us to the gas line under the kettle in the street where the water gathers. We’d have preferred to heat the house with geothermal energy, but couldn’t find anybody yet trained to install it. At times, the house feels like a snare. I mean to say, if I remain embarrassed as a homeowner, it is not on account of the pond.

Just as remarkable as the pond out front is the garden out back. Down on my knees with my hands in the soil, I weed and tend the beds. My mother has given me a Lenten rose. It is the first thing to bloom in spring. I marvel at the shoots coming up from the bulbs planted before me by Mary, wife of Jeremiah, whose name was not on the deed but was told to me by our neighbor Eve. Daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, and tulips.

I live in Lenapehoking, the unceded territory of the Lenape people, past and present. Generations before we bought this land, it was stolen. I believe we have a responsibility to honor them by becoming better stewards of the land we inhabit. I want these words to be more than words; I want them to be deeds.

I’m learning to grow food for our table, sensing that the truest sacrament is eating the earth’s body. I have planted lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peas, and beets. I collect water in a barrel under the gutter spout. I see that our land is a quilt; that our house is only a structure among structures among pollinating plants visited by bees.

The pond is part of the place where we live. To prevent stagnation, I sometimes stir it with a stick. Through the front windows, I watch it swell when it rains. I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows. Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.

This essay has been adapted from Emily Raboteau’s forthcoming book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse.”

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How Last Year’s Wildfires Reignited a Battle Over Water Rights on Maui

Native Hawaiians have always understood the value of water. In the Hawaiian language, the word for fresh water is “wai”—and the word for wealth is “waiwai.” An essential asset, water was a resource Hawaiians shared, and they made sure to return what they didn’t use back to the stream. But the 19th-century sugar barons who […]

Native Hawaiians have always understood the value of water. In the Hawaiian language, the word for fresh water is “wai”—and the word for wealth is “waiwai.” An essential asset, water was a resource Hawaiians shared, and they made sure to return what they didn’t use back to the stream. But the 19th-century sugar barons who diverted water to irrigate their plantations did not share those traditions. On Maui, the most important was Alexander & Baldwin, founded in 1870 by the sons of missionaries, which wielded great political and economic power for more than a century. At its height, it sustained its operations by draining plentiful streams of 165 million gallons a day to irrigate its plantation in Maui’s central plain, moving it through 70 miles of tunnels, ditches, flumes, and reservoirs. As stream levels dropped and taro patches dried up, Native Hawaiians, unable to grow their own food, were forced to move. The network became a subsidiary company—East Maui Irrigation—which still controls this water diversion system. Today, EMI is jointly owned by Alexander & Baldwin and agribusiness company Mahi Pono. EMI has been the source of long-running legal battles on Maui, as farmers and environmental groups seek to stop it from sucking up fresh water from the island’s streams. “For more than two decades, Native Hawaiians and the environmental community have been using legal avenues to try to restore at least some flow to these streams,” says Sierra Club attorney David Frankel. “At every turn, A&B and [the Board of Land and Natural Resources] have worked hand-in-hand to thwart those efforts.”   An A&B spokesperson disputes this. “There are laws and statutes in Hawaii that govern the flow of water in streams and these legal processes were followed by the BLNR, A&B, and the Native Hawaiian and environmental communities,” the spokesperson says. “Significant amounts of water have been restored to East Maui streams. A number of priority streams…have been permanently and fully restored and will not be diverted in the future.” The battle over Maui’s water supply intensified last August, when wildfires tore through the island and devastated the community of Lahaina. Earlier that summer, EMI’s legal opponents had scored a victory when a state court reduced the amount it could suck up from Maui’s streams by a quarter. But a day after the historic town was all but wiped out, the state of Hawaii petitioned its Supreme Court to stop the court order and increase the amount of water diverted, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting fires in Upcountry Maui. The state’s petition seemed like a backdoor way to reverse the earlier ruling against EMI, especially when it soon became clear there was more than enough water available to fight the Upcountry fires. And it raised local suspicions that the state was doing the bidding of corporations. Frankel called the effort a “brazen attempt to capitalize on tragedy to subvert the judicial process.” The state Supreme Court ultimately denied the petition. But a year after the Maui fires, the fight at the heart of that case—over who controls the island’s water supply, public or private interests—remains as fierce as ever. The hall of historic Waiola Church in Lahaina and nearby Lahaina Hongwanji Mission are engulfed in flames in 2023.Matthew Thayer/The Maui News/AP Hawaii’s sugar plantations started closing one by one in the 1950s, as production moved to countries where costs were lower. The last of them, A&B’s Central Maui sugar operation, shut down in 2016. The company is now in the commercial real estate and development business, with a portfolio spanning 39 properties and 3,500 acres across Hawaii. On Maui, A&B’s legacy remains complicated. For some it is an extractive force that has denied Native farmers their cultural lifestyle. For others, it is a benevolent presence that provided jobs, medical care, housing, and scholarships for students. “A&B was a major employer on Maui for over a century,” says Lucienne de Naie, the chairperson of Sierra Club Maui Group. “There were people who were very grateful to A&B. They gave immigrants a chance to work in the fields.” But cross the company, de Naie says, and “you were blackballed. It was hard to get any kind of job on Maui.” Because of its history on the island, any issue having to do with A&B, including water, has deeply divided the island community. “While we can’t speak for our predecessors, we are encouraged by the re-emergence of taro cultivation as a cultural practice and important food source in East Maui,” says an A&B spokesperson. De Naie lives in Huelo, a small town in northeastern Maui, where there is no public water supply. Residents retrieve water from streams or through water catchment. If those sources are dry, they have to purchase water. “We live in an area where our water is taken for other people to use, but we have to buy water from people that come in trucks and deliver it,” de Naie says. Hawaii’s constitution declares that water is a public trust for the benefit of all citizens, and the state government is the only entity that can administer this resource. But there’s a loophole: Businesses, such as A&B, can control and sell the use of their water diversion systems. “The operators of the diversion system end up having a significant amount of leverage over who gets how much water,” says Jonathan Scheuer, co-author of the book Water and Power in West Maui. “This is partly because of the amount of information they have available on how the system operates. Other players have to trust them often when they say this is how much water is available.” The state leases water rights to EMI and other companies. For decades, EMI has received one-year revocable permits from BLNR to divert water from Maui’s streams. In exchange for the use of water for its own purposes, EMI must deliver water to rural residents in Upcountry Maui, for which it is paid 6 cents per thousand gallons by the Maui Department of Water Supply. In 2018, the newly incorporated company Mahi Pono bought 41,000 acres of former plantation lands from A&B for $262 million, making it Maui’s largest landowner. The deal also included a 50 percent interest in EMI for $2.7 million. The company currently employs 350 Maui residents. By the end of 2024, it projects it will complete planting 14,830 acres with a variety of crops, including citrus, coffee, macadamia nut, watermelon, and onions. Though Mahi Pono’s name is Hawaiian—it means “to grow responsibly”—the company is not. It is majority owned by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP), which manages approximately $200 billion in assets and has been buying up water rights worldwide as long-term investments. “It makes perfect sense for them to invest in water,” says Shay Chan Hodges. She served as vice chair of the Maui County Board of Water Supply from 2018 to 2019, and chair from 2019 to 2021. “Obviously there’s value to 40,000 acres of land, but the real value is the water attached to that land.” Water moves slowly through Lowrie Ditch in 2016 as it passes through a Haiku weir on its way to a siphon on the island of Maui.Matthew Thayer/Maui News/AP That’s something A&B and Mahi Pono evidently agree on, too. Per their sales contract, if A&B is unable to secure water leases with the state of at least 30 million gallons per day or if it’s unable to secure a long-term water lease of 30 years, it must pay Mahi Pono rebates of up to $62 million. Indeed, Mahi Pono’s allocation had been cut below that contractual threshold shortly before the state and A&B petitioned to increase the water usage of the East Maui Irrigation System last August in the wake of the Lahaina blaze. “If Mahi Pono can obtain a 30-year lease from the state allowing for tens of millions of gallons a day (upwards of 90 mgd), the lease itself is an asset that can be monetized and potentially transferred or sold. This adds significant value to Mahi Pono’s holdings,” says Hodges. After the Mahi Pono deal, A&B moved quickly to pursue a 30-year lease to divert up to 92 million gallons per day from Maui’s streams, with 85 mgd earmarked for Mahi Pono’s agricultural holdings. As part of its lease application, EMI filed an environmental impact statement that made plain the Faustian bargain at the heart of Maui’s water system. If it was not granted water rights, its water deliveries “would terminate,” a prospect that would leave tens of thousands of Maui residents without access to fresh water. This language predictably caused local alarm, and the Maui County Board Department of Water Supply created a Temporary Investigative Group in 2019 to research the feasibility of purchasing and maintaining the EMI system. “The Temporary Investigative Group believed that public ownership of the system was necessary for protecting the public health,” says Hodges, who was part of the group. “Because why are we being held hostage? The basic message was, ‘if you don’t do what we say, you won’t get any water.’” Hodges and her colleagues recommended either purchasing or condemning the EMI system, or for the mayor to step in to acquire the long-term leases and give control back to the government, but nothing came of it. For years, A&B and Mahi Pono have sought to influence local politics. “These corporations’ executives have held a number of influential positions in both the state and county governments,” says Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, a member of the Maui County Council. “A&B and Mahi Pono have long donated tremendous amounts to elected officials’ campaigns.” Hannibal Tavares, one of Maui’s former mayors, was a veteran of the sugar industry and an employee of A&B prior to winning office in 1979. The current vice president of A&B also served on the state’s Commission on Water Resource Management (the arm that decides how much water companies can divert) from 2002 to 2005 while working for A&B. Another sugar industry leader twice served on the commission. Since 2006, A&B and its top executives have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to state and county politicians. They’ve donated more than $10,000 to Gov. Josh Green in the past two years. Mahi Pono’s executives began donating to political campaigns in 2020. Thousands of those contributions flowed to Green, too. “This is a case of our elected leaders choosing to be beholden to a private entity,” Hodges says. Workers cut sugar cane at Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, the state’s last sugar plantation, in this 2010 file photo.Audrey McAvoy/AP Even before last year’s wildfires reinvigorated the fight over Maui’s water supply, activists had begun to gain some ground in their effort to wrest control from A&B and Mahi Pono. Since the former and present mayor didn’t step in, in 2022, voters approved the creation of the East Maui Community Board water authority, which gives the people the power to negotiate water leases with the state. Hodges says she was surprised there was no pushback from corporations when it was put on the ballot, but there was some controversy with the appointment of its 11-member board. After the deadline to apply had closed, the county council received requests to open the process up again. When the county did so, new applicants included a former Mahi Pono executive and former Mayor Alan Arakawa, who had opposed the water authority and said it would “kill Mahi Pono.” (When the 11-member board was eventually approved, it included Arakawa, taro farmers and several water resource experts, including Scheuer, who became the chair.) Delayed by the fire, the water board began holding bimonthly meetings in February, and the director seat will soon be filled. But whether the community water authority and board successfully take East Maui water leases out of the hands of A&B and Mahi Pono, or if more challenges emerge, remains to be seen. If successful, it would be the first time in more than 100 years that the people of East Maui, and not a private corporation, will determine how its water is divided and shared. It could prove to be a model for the rest of the island, where other corporations hold its own separate systems. Currently, EMI has a one-year lease from the state covering 2024, allowing 31.25 million gallons per day to be diverted from East Maui’s streams to Mahi Pono’s land—and the Sierra Club Maui is keeping a sharp eye as its legal battles continue. It’s fighting to stop the issuance of one-year leases, which avoids the rigorous review afforded to long-term leases. De Naie says these court battles will make a difference for the future. “Eventually…we will see a standard set for trusteeship of public resources that should have been in place in the first place.”

Water
Activism
Food

New California water measures aim to increase fines for violators, protect wetlands

California legislators passed a bill to increase fines for those who violate the state's water curtailment orders. The measure awaits Gov. Newsom's signature.

Under California law, anyone caught diverting water in violation of a state order has long been subject to only minimal fines. State legislators have now decided to crack down on violators under a newly approved bill that sharply increases penalties.Assembly Bill 460 was passed by the Legislature last week and is among the water-related measures awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. Other bills that were approved aim to protect the state’s wetlands and add new safeguards for the water supplies of rural communities.Supporters say increasing fines for violations will help the State Water Resources Control Board more effectively enforce its orders to curtail water use when necessary.“It helps the water board enforce the laws that they have on the books,” said Analise Rivero, associate director of policy for the group California Trout, which co-sponsored the bill.The bill, which was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), is intended to prevent the sort of violations that occurred in 2022 in the Shasta River watershed, when farmers and ranchers who belong to the Shasta River Water Assn. defied a curtailment order for eight days and diverted more than half the river’s flow, flouting requirements aimed at protecting salmon. Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science. The state water board fined the association the maximum amount for the violation: $4,000, which worked out to about $50 for each of its members. Those small fines didn’t deter farmers and ranchers from reducing the river’s flow to a point that threatened salmon and affected the supplies of downstream water users.The case in Siskiyou County led to widespread calls for larger fines and stronger enforcement powers.The legislation increases fines for violations of state water curtailment to as much as $10,000 per day, plus $2,500 for each acre-foot of water diverted. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or enough to cover one acre a foot deep.)“This bill closes that loophole and makes the existing law stronger, and it’s an important step in disincentivizing water theft,” Rivero said. Rivero said being able to impose larger fines is important as California grapples with the effects of climate change on water supplies.Leaders of a coalition of environmental groups urged Newsom to sign the bill. In a letter, they said enforcing harsher penalties for violators is crucial for the state water board to “fulfill its mission of protecting fish, water, and people.”Bauer-Kahan said that for too long, breaking the law and paying the fines have been seen as the cost of doing business by some illegal water diverters.“Although we did not go far enough in ensuring that our water rights system functions in times of scarcity, we did take an important step,” Bauer-Kahan said.The legislation raises penalties to “better hold those who steal water accountable,” she said. “Water is a precious resource, and we must do everything possible to ensure its protection.”Proponents of the bill made some sacrifices to secure sufficient support in the Legislature, dropping a provision that would have given the state water board authority to act faster in emergencies to prevent “irreparable injury” to streams, fish or other water users.The result was a relatively modest reform, but one that serves an important purpose, said Cody Phillips, staff attorney for the group California Coastkeeper Alliance.“Being able to get the California Legislature to agree to increase fines in water is a major deal for the practical consequences of preventing water theft, but also to show that we can change these important details about our water rights system, and the sky doesn’t fall,” Phillips said. Other proposals have recently encountered strong opposition from agricultural groups and water agencies.Phillips and other environmental advocates supported another bill, AB 1337, which sought to clarify the state water board’s authority to issue curtailment orders for all diverters, including senior rights holders that use a large portion of the state’s water. But that bill didn’t secure enough support to pass this year in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.“Water is often referred to as the third rail in California politics, and we’ve seen that any changes, even modest changes, like 460 and frankly 1337, are met with ferocious pushback,” Phillips said. “But we can’t avoid these issues — climate change, overallocation, they’ve all led to a system where the way that we deal with water just doesn’t work.”Some legal experts said the bill is a step in the right direction.“We know that water is the single most important resource in the state, and yet we do not have a clear understanding of who uses it, where, and when, and we do not have a robust system for correcting unlawful use,” said Jennifer Harder, a professor at University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law.Harder said the state needs to continue improving collection of water use data and should adopt measures to improve oversight of water rights. She said she is optimistic that “local water suppliers will come to understand that state-level standards can support and enhance local management.”One of the other water-related measures passed by the Legislature included a bill intended to protect California’s wetlands after the rollback of federal protections under a Supreme Court decision last year. The court’s ruling in Sackett vs. EPA rewrote the federal definition of wetlands and removed federal protections for many streams that do not flow year-round, leaving ephemeral streams vulnerable to development and pollution.If signed by Newsom, the bill, AB 2875, will codify an executive order that then-Gov. Pete Wilson issued in 1993 establishing a state policy of “no net loss” of wetlands and calling for a long-term increase in the acreage of wetlands. Despite that policy, the state has continued to lose more wetland acres to development during the last three decades.“We have wetlands that only flow certain times of year, and they are seasonal, ephemeral streams that were stripped of protections, and yet they are really, really important biologically and for habitat,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who introduced the legislation. Wetlands and a riparian forest are sustained by groundwater at the National Audubon Society’s Kern River Preserve. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) Friedman and other supporters of the measure have stressed that because more than 90% of California’s original wetlands have already been drained and destroyed, strong protections for those that remain are vital. They say since the Supreme Court has scaled back the Clean Water Act’s federal protections for wetlands, the state will need to play a bigger role.“We care about our state’s natural resources here in California, and it’s a shame that we right now have a Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the kind of destruction that we’re seeing to our environment,” Friedman said. “It falls on states to really play whack-a-mole and catch up, because we have relied for a long time on existing, long-standing federal regulations.”Scientists have documented major declines in North American bird populations since the 1970s, and they cite causes including the loss of habitats and warmer, drier conditions driven by climate change, among other factors.The bill was sponsored by leaders of Audubon California, who called the measure an important step toward protecting wetland habitats that birds need to survive.The bill doesn’t create a new regulatory framework but does make “a strong statement that California will protect and add wetlands,” said Mike Lynes, Audubon California’s director of public policy. “We’ve already lost so much of our natural wetland habitat. We’ve seen a decline in biodiversity, and there’s a ton of benefits by creating wetlands, not only for ecosystems, but also for flood control and for recreational opportunities, whether it’s birding, hunting, just hiking out in wetland areas.”Another bill that was approved, AB 828, is aimed at improving safeguards for managed wetlands that are sustained by groundwater pumping, as well as rural communities that depend on wells. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D-San Rafael), would allow these managed wetlands and small communities to temporarily continue to pump amounts of water in line with historical averages without facing mandatory reductions or fees imposed by local agencies under the state’s groundwater law.Supporters said they proposed the change after several local agencies proposed groundwater allocations that would excessively limit supplies for communities or wildlife areas while also limiting pumping by agricultural landowners who are the largest water users. “It sets a pause on pumping restrictions for small community water systems and managed wetlands, and on some fees, until those issues and their needs are considered,” Lynes said.Some communities in the Central Valley have faced unworkable requirements to cut water use dramatically and start paying high fees for exceeding those limits, said Jennifer Clary, state director for the group Clean Water Action.“We wanted a long-term exemption, but there was a lot of concern in the Legislature about that,” Clary said.

Water
Nature
Climate

Amazon says it’s going "water positive" — but there’s a problem

The company’s pledge to conserve water at its data centers doesn’t account for thirsty power plants they rely on

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America — and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion. This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up. The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power. Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance. While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist. The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of U.S. power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool. Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels.  “Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.” It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom. In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that U.S. data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark.  It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo.  Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors — in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures.  Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the U.S. is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms. “A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio — they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.”  Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability. To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways. The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses.  But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity. “They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said. Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far. Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said. As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft. “If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.” Correction: This story has been corrected to clarify that Amazon’s “water positive” pledge applies only to its web services division. This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/technology/amazon-data-centers-water-positive-energy/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org Read more about environmental impacts

Water
Business
Conservation

EPA workers' union calls for telework options over legionella bacteria in three cities

The union representing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff called on the agency to allow temporary remote work after legionella bacteria was found at multiple EPA facilities around the country. Officials have reportedly closed certain sinks, water fountains and other water sources at EPA buildings in Washington, D.C., Houston and Chicago after positive tests for the...

The union representing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff called on the agency to allow temporary remote work after legionella bacteria was found at multiple EPA facilities around the country. Officials have reportedly closed certain sinks, water fountains and other water sources at EPA buildings in Washington, D.C., Houston and Chicago after positive tests for the bacteria. Legionella is associated with various infections, including the pneumonia-like illness Legionnaires’ disease, although the type found in the EPA facilities is not the type most commonly associated with the disease. The General Services Administration, which oversees many federal office buildings, has said repairs are ongoing to address the test results, which also found lead and copper in the Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago. In a statement Thursday, Marie Owens Powell, President of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, which represents thousands of EPA employees, called on the leadership of the agency and the GSA to make telework options available while the outbreak is resolved. “EPA employees work day in and day out to keep our communities safe from environmental hazards. The irony of legionella, along with lead and copper contamination, being found in EPA buildings across the country, is not lost on us. Legionella can become airborne and deadly,” Powell said in a statement. “Expecting staff to come into the office and put themselves at risk of exposure is completely unacceptable. We have the ability and the technology to allow our workers to continue working safely from an alternate work location while the situation is being remediated.” AFGE Local 704, which represents the Chicago facility, has also filed a grievance noting that its contract requires telework options when the agency "cannot provide a safe and healthful workspace,” and also requested a shutdown of all drinking water sources in the affected buildings. The Hill has reached out to the EPA and the GSA for comment.

Water
Government
Technology

Water bosses could be jailed if they cover up sewage dumping under new law

CEOs in England and Wales could face two years in prison under proposals to force firms to supply data quicklyWater bosses in England and Wales could be jailed for up to two years if they cover up sewage dumping, under legislation proposed by the Labour government.At the moment, CEOs of water companies face fines for failing to comply with investigations by the Environment Agency (EA) and the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), but there have been just three such fines since privatisation three decades ago. Continue reading...

Water bosses in England and Wales could be jailed for up to two years if they cover up sewage dumping, under legislation proposed by the Labour government.At the moment, CEOs of water companies face fines for failing to comply with investigations by the Environment Agency (EA) and the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), but there have been just three such fines since privatisation three decades ago.Civil servants at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told journalists on Wednesday that they planned to tighten compliance rules to force companies to hand over sewage data quickly, and that the maximum sentence for covering up this information or failing to release it would be two years.Ministers also plan to pass legislation that would force water companies to pay the EA and DWI’s enforcement costs if they are under investigation. The EA has found it hard to inspect polluters owing to funding cuts, so ministers hope this would provide the money to increase the number of prosecutions. Defra has been looking for savings after the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, asked it for £1bn in spending reductions.The new legislation being introduced to parliament on Thursday will also give the regulators powers to ban bonuses for water company CEOs who fail to meet environmental and consumer standards, and if their company is not financially resilient. Journalists were briefed that these environmental standards had not yet been decided by the regulator, Ofwat.Last year, Liv Garfield of Severn Trent took a £584,000 bonus despite her company having been fined £2m for dumping sewage, and the firm scored highly on the EA’s environment rankings despite taking this human waste spillage into account.The environment secretary, Steve Reed, said: “Under this government, water executives will no longer line their own pockets whilst pumping out this filth. If they refuse to comply, they could end up in the dock and face prison time.“This bill is a major step forward in our wider reform to fix the broken water system. We will outline further legislation to fundamentally transform how the water industry is run and speed up the delivery of upgrades to our sewage infrastructure to clean up our waterways for good.”Campaigners and experts said the announcement did not go far enough, and that the whole system needed to change as it had “failed”.The sewage campaigner and former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey said he was still planning to march on parliament next month because he viewed the measures as inadequate.He said: “I have called for a mass protest for a coalition of the concerned to ensure clean, healthy rivers. We need transformational information and action. I see none of that before me. We will still be marching on 26 October to demand clean rivers and strong action.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGuy Linley-Adams, a solicitor for the WildFish charity, said the government was not using existing powers to force the regulators to crack down on polluting water companies.For example, he said that without any new legislation, ministers could remove the “growth duty” from regulators, which prioritises economic growth over the environment.He said: “If the new government really means what it says, that it will not tolerate poor performance across the water sector, then it can start now by issuing new and unambiguous policy steers to Ofwat and the EA right now that force a much tougher financial and environmental regulatory approach, one that prioritises investment in the environment.“The government should also disapply the regulators’ code and the statutory growth duty that currently shackle both the EA and Ofwat’s regulation of the water companies.“And they should direct the EA to stop using soft-touch enforcement undertakings for water company offending and always prosecute water companies aggressively for causing pollution. None of the above requires new law. It can all be done right now.”Charles Watson, the chair and founder of the campaign group River Action, said: “If the secretary of state believes that the few one-off actions announced today, such as curtailing bosses’ bonuses – however appealing they may sound – are going to fix the underlying causes of our poisoned waterways, then he needs to think again.“Only a comprehensive and holistic review focusing on all sources of pollution and that delivers a transformational action plan, with tangible targets and milestones, can reform our failed regulatory system and end the daily polluting of our rivers, lakes and seas.”The Tories claimed that Labour were “attempting to pass off measures implemented under the Conservatives” as their own, pointing to a ban on bonuses for water company bosses whose companies commit serious breaches as an example.The shadow environment minister, Robbie Moore, said: “It was the Conservatives that introduced 100% monitoring for storm overflows and set out a plan to transform our infrastructure to ensure safer, cleaner waters.”

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