The lecture was only a few hours away. Chuck Norris was pitching his new book on post at the same hour. In desperation, I turned to Facebook. “I've got just 50 minutes with the cadets at West Point today to talk water, conflict, and cooperation. What are the most compelling examples you would use to make both hard security and human security points, both threat and opportunity points? I ask in part because it is proving harder to decide what to leave out than what to put in!”

Within seconds, experts from the Departments of State and Energy, USAID, and National Geographic responded with examples, including the Tibetan plateau and glacial melt, the lower Jordan River, and more. I used these cases and others to break through to an audience that included both those skeptical of “treehugger” issues and those eager to learn. The map of Chinese current and planned hydro projects produced audible gasps and wide eyes among the class of future officers.

While at West Point, colleague Meaghan Parker and I met with geography faculty to better understand how and what they are teaching on environmental security and demographic security. The professors on the banks of the Hudson face similar challenges to their non-military brethren; today’s students have shorter attention spans and lack experience conducting in-depth research (or getting beyond Google).

But some challenges are unique to the service academies: isolation from academic peers; the need to make sure the material is relevant to future military leaders; and most of all, the physical and mental demands on cadets’ time placed by army training. I saw it as a sign of success that I only had three stand up during my lecture, the military’s sanctioned way to keep yourself awake in class. (LTC Lou Rios USAF, one of the faculty members we met with, wrote about teaching environmental security at West Point previously on New Security Beat.)

Video, blogs, and other new media seem like a way to bridge some of these gaps. We’re especially excited that the cadets in at least three courses will be using the New Security Beat as part of their classes by reading posts, commenting, and proposing a post on a topic of their choosing. We’re looking forward to a cadet joining us next summer for internship with ECSP.

All of these outreach efforts are part of our strategy to both understand how all types of actors—including future army officers—come to understand environment and security links while providing insights and analysis to that same diverse group.

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If you don't border the Great Lakes, keep your grubby hands out of 'em. That's the general message of a bill that would bar any major water diversion from Lakes Erie, Ontario, Huron, Michigan, and Superior, unless all eight lake-bordering states approve. The so-called Great Lakes Compact, which has passed Congress and heads to the welcoming pen of President Bush, also holds Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to new conservation standards and requires that they regulate their own large-scale water use. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have agreed to similar conservation measures. The compact -- which exempts diversions of fewer than 5.7 gallons, a favor to bottled-water producers -- eases fears that thirsty states and even countries would try to siphon the lakes, which hold 90 percent of North America's fresh surface water and 20 percent of the world's supply.

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Americans' seemingly insatiable thirst for bottled water seems to be slowing, according to new industry stats. Annual U.S. bottled-water consumption shot up nearly 46 percent between 2002 and 2007, to an average 29.3 gallons per person. But the Beverage Marketing Corporation predicts that bottled-water guzzling will grow only 6.7 percent in 2008, the smallest increase this decade. The editor of Beverage Digest isn't concerned: "If the economy improves and consumers begin to feel better, we're going to see at least some increase in the growth rate of bottled water again." Adds an industry spokesperson: "We have enjoyed meteoric growth in the past, but that's bound to level off." But greens laud an effective Think Outside the Bottle campaign, noting that dozens of cities are phasing out the bottled beverage. Says one tap-water promoter, "Instead of being a badge for health and status, bottled water has now become a badge for environmental wastefulness. ... [B]eing charged for water is like being charged for gravity."

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The U.S. EPA has vetoed a giant, expensive plan to build the world's largest water pump in the Mississippi River delta. The so-called Yazoo Pump flood-control project would have sucked 6 million gallons of water a minute from 67,000 acres of wetlands along the Yazoo River. The scheme, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and first authorized by Congress in 1941, would have cost $220 million. The EPA concluded that maybe, just maybe, sucking all that wet out of the wetlands would have been damaging to fish, wildlife, and migratory birds. "The EPA truly deserves our thanks for killing this unnecessary and economically wasteful Corps of Engineers project," says the Sierra Club's Ed Hopkins. "The natural, and free, flood protections offered by these wetlands are far more effective than an expensive pumping project." Today's veto was only the 12th time since 1972 that the EPA has put the kibosh on a Corps project; the last was in 1990.

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John McCain stirred up a tizzy last week with a comment about a Colorado River compact that allocates water among seven Western states. The compact "needs to be renegotiated over time amongst the interested parties," McCain told Colorado's Pueblo Chieftain. "I think that there's a movement amongst the governors to try, if not, quote, renegotiate, certainly adjust to the new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource." Coloradans on both sides of the aisle objected, taking McCain to mean that he favors diverting water away from upper basin states, including Colorado, to give to lower basin states, including McCain's home state of Arizona. They also pointed out the contract was just renegotiated in December. McCain said this week that his comment was "mistakenly construed as a call to rescind" the compact. Colorado Democrats, however, remain unimpressed. "The word 'renegotiate' does not have double meaning," says Gov. Bill Ritter, adding that McCain's statement "just showed to me either a naïveté or even a hostility toward water usage in Colorado."

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Longstanding drought has wreaked havoc across Australia, drying up lakes into shallow, acidic puddles and threatening drinking-water supplies. Unable to coax rain from the sky, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fast-tracked a plan to buy back water entitlements from the heaviest irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin, an agricultural stronghold which produces all of the country's rice, nearly all of its oranges, most of its pigs, half of its wheat and apples, and much of its cotton. The region covers 14 percent of the Australian continent but consumes 52 percent of its water. Environmentalists applaud Rudd's plan on paper, though point out that there is, in fact, little water to buy back. "I don't want to say that there's some magic solution here," admits Rudd. "I am trying to turn around a situation which has evolved over many years ... and we are dealing with the real consequences of climate change."

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Dear Umbra,

My name's Jon and I'm a diet pop addict. My diet right now is 70-80 percent local, organic, or both, but I just can't help myself when it comes to getting my fix. I drink several 20-ouncers a day of diet and just can't seem to stop. Is my habit hurting the earth? Common sense says that water from my stainless steel canteen is a whole lot better than chemicals from a plastic bottle, but my addict brain is grasping at straws, hoping that diet pop is one of those rare exceptions.

Jon B.
Lakewood, Ohio

Dearest Jon,

As you no doubt know, your question is funny, and the answer is: Of course your processed beverage and its container have an environmental impact. Plus, it's gotta be horrible for you. The ingredients were made in a lab, and I'm not sure the new fortified Coke or Pepsi diet sodas (Niacin! B vitamins! Chromium!) will close the nutrient gap. Several countries and at least one American state have tried to ban aspartame, that pop-ular artificial sweetener. Health isn't my bailiwick, though. I get to ignore your teeth, intestines, and major organs and focus on the planet.

Aspartame the beast.

Is your habit hurting the earth? Sure -- the manufacturing process for the chemicals (synthetics and "natural flavors," anyone?) all have emissions impacts. But more on the carbon footprint of soda ingredients in a moment -- first we must speak of Coke and water. I use Coca-Cola as a whipping boy (er, representative example) because there is ample documentation about how the soda giant operates.

Water is the primary ingredient in all Coke products, and a major component of pop-making in general. Each liter of a Coke product requires approximately 2.5 liters of H20 -- and that's just at the bottling plant. In 2006, for example, Coca-Cola apparently sucked up about 80 billion gallons of water for use in its drinks, for growing the ingredients, and for general manufacturing uses. The mildest thing we can say about your addiction in this context is that it wastes water. A harsher comment might be: You are actively complicit in global corporate water hogging, stealing a scarce resource from impoverished communities.

We can also get a little extrapolative climate change information on your addiction from our new toy, the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute's Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment model. Remember, EIO-LCA is an online tool that calculates the overall environmental impact of producing certain dollar amounts of various products. In this case, we click on the "food, beverage, and tobacco" industry, then choose "soft drink and ice manufacturing," which, the model reveals, involves power generation, grain farming, wet corn milling, trucking, aluminum production, paper mills, oil and gas extraction, and more. Forgive my ignorance -- do you spend somewhere in the dollar-and-change range on those 20-ounce plastic bottles? If so, and if "several" per day means three, you're drinking more than $1,000 retail per year, which must be at least $500 worth of wholesale soda per year. For each $500 of economic activity in wholesale soft drink and ice manufacturing, 0.439 metric tons of CO2 equivalent are released. Given those very approximate numbers, and leaving lots of wiggle room to account for variations in soda brands, your fizz fixes emit maybe half a ton of CO2 equivalent a year. To what is this comparable? Flying round trip from Cleveland to New York City.

As to the packaging, I sweetly refer you to the many discussions in this space about the importance of reusable vessels over disposable (search Grist for "plastic bottle" and prepare to be rewarded). Yes, your stainless steel canteen, used many times, is better than a single-use plastic bottle. And it's certainly better than virgin aluminum -- gadzooks. In sum, as we already knew, your diet soda habit is not remotely compatible with the rest of your organic, local food lifestyle. You alone can decide if the impact of the addiction is acceptable to you and by extension to your fellow earthlings. Water also has a large advantage over diet drinks: It is good for you. In fact, you can't live without it.

Drippily,
Umbra

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