Across the United States —and increasingly across the globe—almost no river is left unbroken. One may be interrupted by a huge reservoir, the next tapped for hydroelectricity. Fossil water sits in plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, while the ancient aquifers like the Oglalla have been pumped dry without any possibility of refilling.  A bay becomes a dumping ground for municipal sewage, the leakage of abandoned mines, or industrial waste.

The philosophies of water use behind the very different kinds of water projects that create these results in disparate locations are characteristic of the Manifest Destiny approaches taken by European settlers. Now, in the Nation of Dams, humans are cut off from meaningful relation to the watershed. Aquatic ecosystems wither. Animals and people and their labor are displaced. Salmon swim towards an uncertain future.

But at the same time there’s another, underground strain of human-water relationship. This underground strain is visible in grassroots groups unearthing buried creeks and cleaning up polluted waterways. It nurtures collaborations between humans and nonhuman creatures and acknowledges their interdependence —enlisting beavers to dam creeks, wetlands to purify sewage, and fishermen to restore fisheries. It is also the eco-hydrological interactions among entities in a given watershed—rocks, animals, plants, and microorganisms—which continue in the absence of, and in spite of, human meddling. It is a loose and variously-membered cadre of artists, scientists, and water activists who share the revolutionary hope for water to rise. It inhabits not the static preordained water infrastructure that we take for granted but a living, shifting nexus of natural, technological, social, and spiritual forces.

Kim Tallbear is our faculty sponsor, check out her blog Indigeneity and Technoscience.

The Riparian Dispossessed Choir sings "Can You Hear the Beaver Slap" at the finale of "The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined" at the Crocker Museum last weekend

I first introduced the Water Underground in the title of a 1999 zine sampling indigenous land/water struggles at Black Mesa and Bay Area watersheds, and my first thoughts toward new water cultures. Since then, temporary configurations of writers, plumbers, gardeners etc. have taken on the mantle of the Water Underground, through work as Greywater Guerrillas, and as collaborators on the anthology Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull, 2007). Most recently, the Water Underground has convened the Hydro Laboratory and staged an epic musical production of The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined, a play Oskar Cole and I wrote while on tour with Dam Nation in 2007.

Through these collaborations the Water Underground has discovered itself to be SIMULTANEOUSLY

* the actual underground water carrying minerals and toxins beneath the city,
* the actual underground water carrying minerals and toxins beneath the city,
* the dispersed local water justice struggles across the globe,
* the eco-hydological interactions among entities in a given watershed—rocks, animals, plants, microorganisms,
* a loose and variously-membered cadre of artists, scientists, and water activists,
* and finally, the revolutionary hope for water to rise.

The Water Underground thinks the human and nonhuman are ACTUALLY COLLABORATING—for example: people and salmon, bears and salmon and trees, people and dolphins. Humans can choose to participate in this space open for collaboration. Joining the Water Underground is a way to accept the invitation always open on the part of the eco-hydrosphere.

Here’s how we framed that invitation in order to recruit singers for the musical The Gold Fish, or Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined:

Who tests the currents?
Who reads the rain?
Who sings for the river?
Who stands by the salmon?
It could be you!

Upcoming wild ensemble piece at Crocker Museum in Sacramento, titled “The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined.” A one-act slapstick musical in which a poor wayfaring Salmon has to pawn her eggs to gamble for river passage, a Water Nymph casino dealer confronts its water-wars PTSD, the Army Chorus of Engineers gets lost, the Water Tycoon’s dirty dealing ends in cataclysmic wash-out, and the Riparian Dispossessed Choir arises.

(A little background:

Last summer, Nicole Antebi and Enid Baxter-Blader of the art-water media book Water, CA invited us to stage The Gold Fish at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, as part of the exhibit Liquid Assets (which runs through December). We recruited filmmaker Sarolta J. Cump to direct, and performance artists J. Dellecave and Qilo Matzen to play the roles of Water Nymph and Tycoon of the Ages (Oskar Cole played the Coho Salmon). Oskar turned the minimalist 3-actor short into a one-act musical, complete with a Ghost Crocodilian (Stormy Knight), Singing River (Ivy Jeanne McLellan), Army Chorus of Engineers, and Riparian Dispossessed Choir. )

Here are some more shots from the show:

As the play opens, a barmaid with a big dream and the ghost croc who's seen it all sing "I'm Gonna Be A Waterfall" while the Water Nymph and Salmon look on

To the tune of Peggy Seeger’s “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer”:

The Salmon must trade her eggs for chips, then win her way upstream by playing Crapjack. A Water Nymph, traumatized by the water wars, deals estuaries, sewers, storm drains, and dams, which appear on the screen as the cards are laid down.

“Oh Dam! Hoover! I’m stuck here!”, laments the Salmon while the Army Chorus of Engineers prepares to sing “The End”.

The Army Chorus of Engineers toasts the end of rivers running free

....then gets lost and needs to survey. A hermit crab plays piano while the Ghost Croc looks on.

The black crowned night heron plays bass.

Ghost Croc: “Some of these boys used to love the swamp, even knew their way around a little. But one way or another these boys dragged us all here.”

The Salmon is dealt a turbine, gets the bends, and collapses.

The Water Nymph wonders why there’s not a single wild card in the deck, and decides to shuffle.

Tycoon, tap dancing: "I'm the only one who gets to shuffle around here! Back me up, will you boys?"

But all this extension stresses the water system, creating another overlay of protest and rebellion (as happened 5 years ago when water came only twice a month, and people tied the executive engineer of the water board to a post. Such uprisings catch the attention of the World Bank, which decides to fund a project improving the pipes. A private company does the work, which is paid for with higher water rates, and safeguarded with volumetric billing (paying a set rate per liter of water used). This new service it is very desireable to the extensioners, for whom paying 400 Rp. a month for water is trivial. It also offers many benefits to the people in the old “slums”–the buffalo herders and craftspeople and rickshaw drivers who spend hours each week waiting for and storing water. But once they hear how much they will pay for this service, some, especially the buffalo herders, say they did just fine on their common ponds and taps. Though water wants to be free, the infrastructure to pipe it to people’s homes, and the plants to make it safe to drink, are expensive to build and maintain, so someone “needs” to pay for this water service. Though the water tariffs in Hubli-Dharwad are supposed to include a “lifeline” rate for the first 6000 L a month, buffalo herders and people with large families often find themselves facing large bills.

When I tell this story to Zach Burt, a co-investigator, he points out that this is the pattern that urbanization follows everywhere (minus the buffalo perhaps). He says that in Rohnert Park, the Sonoma town he’s from, conflicts between new subdivisions and existing water users over groundwater extraction are the rule, followed by arguments between the city and residents of new areas over who will pay to extend water and sewerage there.

Field trip

I found the headwaters of our little lost lake, they are in the forest that we pass on our way to the good fried noodle place on Station road. There are two large chunks of pasture there, one just below the tracks, bisected by the road, and one alongside Udai Hostel road. The first is forested in Eucalyptus, and gullied in its upper end, above the road. Below the road it drains towards one corner, where there is taro and reeds. It drains between two large apartment buildings, into a large storm drain that gathers more drains and then flows past our house on its way to Shivgiri Lake.

I stopped to take photos of the boggy area on the corner. There’s only one house there, and like most (all?) in this neighborhood it’s raised up about 3 feet above the top of the drain. I talked with the guy who lives there for a while, and he said the lake dried up 10-15 years ago. Then the subdivision was built. But the drains weren’t built right at the beginning, so during the monsoon all the runoff from the neighborhood up the hill would run down into the depression, turning the basin into a lake and the houses into islands. Then the boys would bring their buffalo down to the muddy waters to give them a bath. They weren’t supposed to do it, and other people would yell at them, but not him. Then the developer put in the drains, and the flooding eased. The drain in front of his house is clear, but the drain across the street clogs and floods sometimes.

The very first house I visited in Hubli was a household that kept buffalo, and their water bill was roughly double that of their neighbors. Weeks later, in Dharwad, this point came up in an interview with a neighborhood activist in a low-income 24/7 zone, who gave both political and economic arguments against the 24/7 water regime. While the service had improved, he objected to the idea of paying for water. “We should follow the rule of Gandhiji–for salt and for water we will not pay,” he said. On the economic side, he brought up the case of buffalo-keepers.

The people who suffer the most are the people with animals, he said. Now they use the corporation water not only for the buffalos to drink, but also for washing the buffalos. They used to wash the buffalos in a lake, but the lake was turned into an extension [ development]. Then they used the borewell water to wash the buffalos–they have to do it daily–but with 24/7 the borewells all got shut down. So now people use corporation water, and their bill is 1000-2000 Rp per month. Very few people are paying their bills because they can’t afford to. Or people are choosing between washing their buffalo and some other use of water.

I decided to interview another family, one that keeps buffalo in an area that gets water every 5 days. They have two buffalo adults and two calfs, and their mother in law has more–12 total. Together, these buffalo drink 500 L of water per day! Plus, they wash them a lot.

In the rainy season they wash the buffalo every 2 days. In the summer (dry season) they wash them twice a day. I ask if this is because the buffalo get hot. No, it’s because they provide milk every day, and they need to keep the buffalo clean so the milk stays clean. They can’t sell milk that smells like dirty buffalo.

It takes 2 buckets of water to wash each buffalo. These are big, 50-L buckets. Water for buffalo drinking and washing comes from nearby corporation borewell tank or tap. If they have to wash more than 2 buffalo they take them to the borewell tank and tie them to a tree, then wash them there with buckets. They use 50 kodas (800 L) per day for washing the buffalo.

On a different day, I interview two men (father and son) who live in a big house on the end of the new development where I live. In the course of a conversation about water conservation, they bring up buffalo-keeping as a very water-intensive activity, especially if there are no lakes for the buffalo to swim in. They tell me that there used to be lots of lakes and ponds–10-12 lakes around Dharwad alone. “Keri” means lake in Kannada, and many dry areas do bear this name. These lakes are where people would go to wash buffalo, clothes, cars. Then, from ’91 to ’98, there was a drought. In this area, the deep water table dropped 200 feet. Many lakes dried up. Then the corporation aquired the land (that ‘s what my notes say, but it could be that the corporation owned the land, then sold it to private developers, or that the common was simply sold off). The lake was filled in, the stream that fed it diverted into the concrete channel that runs by our house, and houses built in the flat former lake bed. The words they used were “deveopers have blocked catchment areas with buildings–there’s less catchment to feed the ponds and they have diverted the water that would flow into them.” They also emphasize that the old lakes, and pastures adjoining them, were commons, “not privatization”. The urbanization started in the early 1980s according to the older man.

Dharwad used to be a very famous buffalo breeding ground, they tell me. Before their subdivision was there, you used to see 800 buffalo come down to the pond every day for their bath. There are still maybe 100 a day, but no bath, just short grass and a drain to vault over. There are still some pastures in theis area, rural remnants amidst the gaudy concrete mansions. These, too, are contested–the commoners fighting for their pastures against developers who want more mansions. Once the extensions (subdivisions) come in their wastewater (“seepage”) fouls the lakes. “The seepage has destroyed the lake’s beauty”. Other lakes tell a similar story. Now there’s nowhere people can wash the buffalo, and many people who have them in their house have nowhere to graze them.

No, some of the lakes are being “restored” into public parks for recreation only. No washing bathing, or buffalo permitted, and a 5 rupee entrance charge to keep away the poor.

Back at the buffalo-owner’s house, I ask how the development my neighbors mentioned, and the closure of the lakes, is affecting their buffalo-based livelihood. The man tells me they used to go to Salvan Keri (a lake nearby) every day during the summer. Now it is closed, turned into a park, so they go to Kelgeri (another lake, a little farther away). They rent land there, a forest area, to graze buffalos. The corporation is planning to close Kelgeri for buffalo bathing and clothes washing.

Near Selvan Keri the gov built a public tank and borewell for the buffalo, so they have a place to drink / wash them outside the park. The grazing lands there are gone, however, and grazing land elsewhere in the Dharwad area is becoming extremely scarce.

The area they rent now is police department land. They went in on the grazing contract with 6 other poeple, and bid on it at auction. They pay 15,000 to 20,000 rupees per year. This year the PD said they can only graze until December, after that they are building a new police training school and barracks.

So this family is going to sell their buffalos and build a new home. They want to get out of the buffalo business. There’s no food for buffalos now. It’s more costly to bid on grazing land because everyone is building new apartments. I ask if he thinks grazing and dairy are dying out in the city. Whoever has their own land will keep buffalos. Others will get rid of them. Is water a factgor in decision? I ask. No problem with water. The problem is land. 1 buffalo has to roam for 4 to 6 hours, and walk 6 km, to get enough to eat. Since there’s no more grazing land nearby, they have to go farther for pasture. The only land they could lease next year is 20 km from their house. The buffalo and herders will get too tired on the 40 km round trip.

The buffalo graze outside my window, get washed in the wastewater river, and give milk that is delivered by bicycle each night. The goats and sheep presumably give milk and meat. The chickens are very pretty. The cows are everywhere– the males, and the females too old to give milk, are turned out to “pasture” on the streets, where they eat compost and trash. The pigs are only rarely eaten (by Christians?) but until then roam feral eating grass and scrapping with the feral dogs.

Intermittent water supply is the norm in India, for a variety of reasons. Leaky pipes, illegal connections, and conservation are all rationales for intermittent water supply put forth by water managers, the Asian Development Bank, and local residents alike. In Hubli-Dharwad, twin cities an hour’s bus ride apart, most households pay a low flat fee of 90 rupees per month for their water, if their connection is metered at all. Nonetheless, this water is not cheap, because everyone has to pay for tanks to store it in, wait around for it to come, and fetch borewell water when they run out. For the rich, this means building an underground storage tank, buying roof tanks, and using a pump to pump water to the roof. The poor store water in barrels, buckets, pots, plastic water bottles–anything that will hold water.

House in a wealthy neighborhood whith two roof tanks. Such homes typically have a 3000 to 10,000 L underground tank that holds enough water for 2 weeks or more. A pump lifts the water to the roof tanks, which connect to sinks, showers, and toilets.

Drinking water storage in a small house in a low-income area. Metal kodas and kolagas store drinking water, while buckets and barrels store water for washing.

I’m here to study how much water people use–and waste–in intermittent supply areas and in pilot 24/7 (continuous) supply wards. The local water utility and Veolia, a French multinational, are collaborating to provide water 24 hours a day, a project that involves pipe replacement, tarriff increases, metering and, eventually, penalties for those who don’t pay there bills. The project is Indian test case for 24/7 water supply and public-private partnerships–the controversial “privatization lite” rolled out after the Cochabamba, Bolivia water uprisings of 2000. The triple goals are cost recovery for the utility, improved service, and better water quality. Three Berkeley PhD students (Zach Burt in ERG, Emily Kumpel in Environmental Engineering, and Ayse Ercumen in Public Health) have been working with professors Jack Colford, Kara Nelson, and Isha Ray to study the impacts of the change to 24/7 supply. Zach and Ayse are surveying 4000 households to assess the health and economic impacts, while Emily is measuring water quality under the two regimes. Two years into the study, they realized that figuring out how much water use in the unmetered intermittent wards was no small task, so I get to spend my summer here observing how people use water.

I measure a drinking water storage container in a house in Hubli while buffalo keep watch outside.

Here’s a brief overview of this complicated system, and a rationale for the study. Pipes leak everywhere, but in Hubli-Dharwad they leak a lot–about a third of water is unnacounted for–lost to leakage or “theft”. But because there’s usually no water pressure in the pipes, they leak inward, so raw sewage from the open drains seeps in, then mixes with treated municipal water whenever that water flows. Ayse is testing the hypothesis that with continuous water service, fewer kids will get sick from contaminated water. Why? Because water quality in the pipes will improve, and drinking water will become less contaminated during storage (or, ideally, not be stored at all). Emily is looking at water contamination in both regimes, and trying to understand how and where contamination happens. Zach is trying to understand the full social and economic cost of water under both regimes, and to see how those costs vary across income, caste, religion, and social status. Three more Berkeley PhD students (John Erickson and Anne Thebo from CEE and Sharada Prasad from ERG) are, like me, here for the summer, working on different pieces of the water-wastewater puzzle.

Anne, Sharada, Kara, and John hard at work in our Dharwad kitchen.

John and Madhu collect a water sample in a low-income area of Dharwad.

Kara Nelson explains rapid sand filtration to Sharada at a local water treatment plant.

Those are the Berkeley characters. In future posts I’ll introduce the Hubli-Dharwad collaborators–professors, students, engineers, bureaucrats, field investigators and research subjects (the last anonymously, of course). I’ll also spill ink for the nonhuman collaborators–the buffalo that graze the vacant lots in our upper-class suburb, the stinking waters that flow down the open drains, the monsoon clouds, the feral pigs, the traffic circle elephant, et al.

It’s dusk when the water comes, spurting air out of a hundred open taps. The line at the public tap has an order I did not recognize in the day. There are 7, 8, or 9 women there always, plus a man or two, and a pack of kids off to the side in the open triangle field between the main road and the slum lane. But they are not the same women: the woman in the blue sari whose vessels I measured earlier takes the first shift. The Christian woman in the yellow dress, whose daughters lured me in for chai with calls of “uncle, uncle” and then gave me chapatti and dal their mother heated on the wood fire while they whispered at me behind their hands, this woman does not start waiting until full night has fallen and the copper pots in the muslim house are full. Next to the tap is a government borewell tank that has not held water in two months. Never mind that the water is salty and full of pathogens, it is still carried, koda by 16 liter plastic koda, to plastic barrels and motor oil buckets and shining steel pots inside.

What we foreigners do is walk intricate pathways through these “slum areas”, small rural villages transplanted to the urban outskirts, or narrow strips of land between wealthy subdivisions, where the black smoke trains’ rumble and whistle vibrates the bones, or old city, thick-walled adobe and stone mangers where people leave banana skins and cabbage leaves for the cows and buffalo. I look like an engineer, with my maps and spreadsheets and orange Forestry Supply notebook. Lots of kids speak English flawlessly. “What are you writing in your notebook, uncle?” “Our water doesn’t come from rainwater, it comes from the [name I can't remember] dam on the [name I can't remember] river.” Then they run off to carry water from the tap down the lane.

The water comes on at 6, and stays on until ten, or maybe eleven. I walk circles between my three randomly selected houses and the public tap. My pantomime and Kannada/ Hindi are improving, though my vocabulary is little bigger. But I don’t know that a translator has the patience for this, and anyway they tend not to translate all the details, and I can get some from the smattering of English words everyone knows: timing, problem, actually, working, speed (for water pressure), and numbers. . .

The flow in the water lines fluctuates between a trickle and a fast stream that I measure with a nalgene from hoses that people hold out of the barrel for me. I drink a last cup of chai on a hard metal bed with a guy who fixes two wheelers at a shop nearby. Then he says it’s time for me to leave so I do.

The rain fills with red silt from the unpaved roads and pools in depressions in the buffalo pasture / cricket field out my window. It runs into the open drains and whips the shallow stream of greywater and sewage into a creamy cafe au lait foam. The drains come together in bigger drain, or end in unpaved stream channels that frequently serve as garbage dumps. It’s a similar story to Oakland, except that everything’s visible on the surface, and there’s a little more sewage and trash here. It’s even more similar to San Francisco’s plight during the winter months, when combined sewers carrying both storm water and sewage overflow into the bay. Only here, the water pipes run UNDER the open drains, and water pipes run in or over them. So storm water that floods and overflows ends up directly in the water mains (which are often empty because water is delivered intermittently) via water pipes with no taps, or ends up in the groundwater, where it can infiltrate into leaky water mains when the Corporation water is not flowing.

Everywhere, we humans take clean water, shit in it, concentrate it, addd detergent and chemicals, and then pipe it away. but along the way it comes back to trouble us, either in our water pipes, or fish dinner, or our swimmer’s ear. In the U.S., we also bury our streams / sewers. Here, pigs root around in them, dogs drink from them, and, beyond the city limits, farmers use the nutrients to fertilize their crops (not without public health risk, however). In California, we mostly bring rivers to fields and cities, giveing each household personal springs and riverside washing areas inside the house. Here, river interlinking is in the news alongside neglected but viable local strategies like the baoris and the bunds of Tamil Nadu. In parts of Tamil Nadu, there are still enough functioning rainwater recharge ponds that newspaper articles warn of the dangers of catchment closure–infiltrating so much rainwater that little rain runs off on the surface, in streams. San Francisco, with its annual discharges of 700 million gallons of untreated sewer overflows can only dream of such a problem.