Forum | Dean's Page
$100 MILLION TO SAVE THE WORLD
By William L. Chameides
Duke is an interesting place, full of surprises and challenges. Here’s a case in point.
Last fall, shortly after I arrived here, I was invited by Duke Chapel Dean Sam Wells to a public conversation in Love Auditorium. The topic: if you had $100 million, what would you do with it? I accepted. The conversation was not scheduled until late February, and I figured I would have plenty of time to come up with an answer. But in a flash, it was Feb, 1. Time to get on the stick.
Not surprisingly, environmental stewardship is paramount for me. For example, it is difficult if not impossible to reduce poverty and prevent disease when ecosystems are not functional. And access to clean freshwater is essential.
When scientists search for extraterrestrial life they generally limit themselves to environments where liquid water can exist. And yet for many of the earthbound, freshwater is in short supply. More than half of all freshwater in the world is being appropriated for human use. In many areas of the world, competing demands for freshwater for agriculture, drinking, manufacturing and sanitation are seriously straining supplies and depleting aquifers. Millions die each year from diseases brought on by water shortages, or its inverse, floods.
In water-scarce areas, such as the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the western United States, water demand already far exceeds natural replenishment, resulting in aquifer depletion and water-quality deterioration. Severe droughts such as that being experienced this year in the southeastern United States threaten to leave millions living in a developed economy high and dry. Severe droughts also have been implicated in regional conflicts such as that currently in Darfur.
Water quality is also a growing problem. Farm runoff fouls rivers and streams and causes huge dead zones in the ocean for months at a time (for example in the Gulf of Mexico). Water pollution and poor sanitation contribute to the high rates of mortality in developing countries, even in places where water is not scarce.
The prognosis is not encouraging. Rising populations will demand more water. Climate change is melting high altitude glaciers and causing increasingly severe droughts. These are further straining water-supply systems and almost certainly will make the problems more severe in the coming decades. Perversely, climate change also will bring about more severe downpours and storms and with them more severe flooding—a major cause of intestinal diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and cryptosporidia.
Left unattended, water scarcity and pollution could spell a global catastrophe with hundreds of millions dying from either lack of clean water or regional wars triggered by the lack of clean water. I believe, if we want to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, we should focus on finding ways to assure an ample supply of clean freshwater to the peoples of the world. And that, I decided, is how I would spend the $100 million.
All well and good, you say, but when you are in the business of trying to save the world, $100 million does not go all that far. Hundreds, indeed billions of dollars, already are being spent by foundations and governments on large water infrastructure projects. My paltry sum would be a drop in the bucket. I was stumped.
Then I had an idea. Remember the first President Bush’s “thousand points of light?” How about two thousand points of light? Building reservoirs and water treatment plants and the like is important, but those large projects cannot succeed in the long run without knowledgeable people working with local communities to allocate and conserve water resources properly, and to adjust policies in a world with rising temperatures, populations and standards of living. In short, we need an army of professional environmental managers.
At the Nicholas School we can train an environmental manager for about $50,000. With $100 million we could train 2,000 managers. They could be deployed around the world in strategic locations—changing people’s lives for the better, while spreading the ethic and knowledge of environmental stewardship.
Of course there is still a problem; how do you educate 2,000 environmental managers? Certainly not in a standard classroom. We would need to use a virtual classroom capable of teaching 1,000 students or more. Setting up a classroom and making it accessible will cost money. Anybody have another few million?