As 2012 came to a close after two dry years, many Georgia water watchers thought the region was poised to return to the dry years of 2007 and 2008. Reservoir levels dropped, and farmers worried once again about the next growing season. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 65 percent of Georgia was somewhere between “severe” and “exceptional” drought in January 2013. Then the rains came much as they had in 2009 after three years of drought. By late April 2013, the drought was officially over—and yet the rains kept coming. In the first six months of 2013, more rain had fallen in many Georgia communities, including the metro Atlanta region, than had dropped from the clouds in all of 2012.
There were consequences of extreme “weather whiplash”—a term coined by climate science writer Andrew Freedman—from drought to flood. A number of earthen dams, some dating back to the 1930s, failed along the Ogeechee River and upstream of Lake Lanier in the Chattahoochee River basin. No lives were lost, but sediment flushed downstream and washed out roads. In the Savannah River basin, the Corps’ three major lakes refilled and began releasing water from flood storage. Neighborhood creeks, community parks and boat ramps, and homes in the Augusta area flooded before and during the subsequent dam releases. And the rain kept falling throughout the summer, leaving many farmers with flooded fields and an expectation for lower yields come harvesttime. Dams, reservoirs, levees, and ponds built long ago worked double-time throughout the drought-flood whiplash period—storing water for consumption, managing floodwaters, and generating electricity—much as they have during past whiplash events.1
Nearly all of the dams and reservoirs conceived by municipal leaders behind the Augusta Canal and levees, Georgia Power executives at Tallulah Falls, Duke Power’s draftsmen in the Carolina upstate, Corps officers in the upper Savannah River valley, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Small Watershed Program leaders, and other engineers across the Southeast between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries continue to operate and function today. The region relies on a vast hydraulic waterscape of artificial lakes, agricultural ponds, working reservoirs, and levees. While this manipulation has replumbed southern waterways to match energy choices and solve water problems, it has also clearly created new problems.
Water and power, topics common in histories of the American West, have been equally intertwined throughout the American South’s long environmental history. In the antebellum Old South, energy production and consumption in organic regimes took place where fires burned or at riverside mills and gins. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in parts of the nation described by Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, fishermen with an agrarian past clashed with dam operators, who represented a new economic force. Dreamers also identified electricity as a key to the New South’s post–Civil War economic reconstruction and resurrection.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New South energy companies separated energy production and consumption. New transmission and electrical generation technologies—not to mention concentrations of capital—made it possible for factories to slip the restraints of geography. As the organic energy regime evolved, electricity became an invisible power for residential, commercial, and industrial consumers across the nation. This separation—made possible due to transmission lines—increasingly masked white coal’s role in Henry Grady’s and William Church Whitner’s New South economic juggernaut. During the critical New South period, textile mill owners and energy company executives laid claim to the area’s rivers and put families to work in factory towns scattered across a Piedmont region cultivated by tenants and sharecroppers.
Divergent visions of the New South’s future hardened between the wars. Thomas Martin and William S. Murray considered the privatized Super Power electrical transmission system as a symbol of modernization. They clashed with Rupert Vance and Howard W. Odum, who countered the old water and power dynamic with their own modern liberal economic planning models. The regional planners and New Dealers looked at the monopolistic Super Power system and responded with a big dam consensus, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) experiment, the Rural Electrification Administration, and similar programs designed to use and distribute resources equitably while balancing industry with agriculture. Only after the dramatic droughts of the 1920s did energy generators begin a shift from organic energy sources back to fossil fuels. In the process, the New South abandoned the long quest for an energy regime fueled by renewable and indigenous sources. The New South capitalists initially embraced a diversified energy mix but eventually turned to a system dominated by black coal.
The end of World War II empowered the old independent utility operators. Private energy companies fired back and successfully lobbied against the TVA, but their success emboldened a sleeping giant as water and power continued to drive the Sun Belt’s economic and environmental future. After 1945, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a program to build multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs born out of New Deal regional planning but transformed into pork barrel projects. Some of those projects had higher value, while others—such as the Mississippi flood control reservoir William Faulkner lamented—had narrow missions. In this context, the energy corporations found a new enemy in the Corps’ public energy mission. The Corps and investor-owned utilities soon squared off in the Savannah River valley. They clashed over who would control water supplies, the necessary ingredient for the organic energy systems the Corps set out to complete and for Duke Power’s planned Middleton Shoals (coal) and Keowee-Toxaway (nuclear) generation facilities. Who would get to manage and dictate solutions for Sun Belt water problems—and thus influence commercial development—got increasingly complicated after another major drought in the 1950s.
The private utilities discovered unlikely allies in the postwar environmental and conservative “rights” movements. Some Sun Belt conservatives defended free enterprise and championed freedom from federal intervention in economic matters. Others, who called the Corps’ energy and water projects “big dam foolishness,” turned to the USDA. The USDA’s Small Watershed Program, in some critics’ opinions, represented a better and more democratic plan to control water where it fell on the land. Luna Leopold watched the national flood control debate unfold and believed the two federal water control programs worked together in harmony better than one in the absence of the other. Other critics also emerged. Sun Belt countryside conservationists and environmentalists challenged the old corporate and the new federal dam builders. They defended free-flowing watercourses in the Savannah River watershed from pollution and energy development. They organized their local communities, not around the old issues of water quantity and conservation but around water quality. They recognized that free-flowing water and lots of clean water were critical components for emerging Sun Belt commercial and leisure economies. “Locals,” particularly those with no political power, no interest in waterskiing, or no desire for whitewater rafting, did not see value in levees, reservoirs, or protected rivers that eliminated existing communities or limited individual behavior. Within this conservative and environmental discourse, the Sun Belt’s few wild rivers—such as the Chattooga National Wild and Scenic River, best described by James Dickey’s fiction and John Lane’s nonfiction—revealed a power to engage communities and empower individuals, for better and worse.
These loosely constructed time periods produced particular projects to meet particular needs or to solve a particular problem—southern, water, or other. As has been clear throughout this book, the hydraulic waterscape tells us three things about southern environmental history. First, water supply solutions have almost always been linked to energy choices. Second, drought history tells us water supply had never been secure, and increasing supplies or controlling floods only represented short-term solutions. Southern droughts have a history, too, and the recent droughts were not one-offs but part of a longer pattern of cycles and weather whiplash. Finally, water will continue to drive the regional political economy as population and an increasing array of economic sectors demand additional water resources. Conflict over water—for energy, economic development, and recreation—is not new.
Given this history, the future of regional water quantity and quality will continue to demand the public’s attention and engagement across the modern U.S. South. Today’s citizens increasingly ask the region’s private and public water and energy managers to operate projects and provide benefits for which they were never designed. The legal tussle over Lake Lanier’s official designation as a municipal water supply source during the mid-2000s drought and metro Atlanta’s subsequent flooding in 2009, in addition to the Carolinas’ settlement in a brief bi-state water war, poignantly demonstrate the persistent nature of the Southeast’s water problems and political landscape.2 Georgians, South Carolinians, and their neighbors have toiled for more than a century to use and control water resources to manage flooding and drought risks. But for all the corporate, state, and citizen investment, the flooding and droughts continue to compromise ever-growing communities, cut into corporate bottom lines, and mold river valleys. Flooding and drought, the so-called natural disasters, have shaped the Southeast’s political economy for more than a century and a half. As time has demonstrated, droughts and flooding will return, and these anticipated environmental conditions make our future energy, agricultural, and municipal energy and water choices matter.
Southern energy companies and the Corps continue to define and obscure the relationship between water and power. Energy utilities’ authority and vulnerability surfaced dramatically in 2007, just as they had in the 1920s and 1940s. As a stinging drought dried out the region’s rivers, including two major river basins embroiled in protracted water wars, representatives from the Southern Company, Duke Energy, Progress Energy, South Carolina Electric and Gas, Santee Cooper, Dominion (Virginia Power), East Kentucky Power Cooperative, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative (Alabama Electric Cooperative), the TVA, the Southeastern Power Administration, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Environmental Protection Agency convened at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to discuss “drought in the Southeast and the potential electricity sector impacts.” When asked by federal representatives about the drought’s anticipated influence on energy generation and utility operations, delegates from the Southern Company responded, “The issue is how much water are we gonna get” from the Corps’ five facilities that worked in sequence with the company’s fifteen hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, and nuclear generation facilities spread throughout the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. In other words, the investor-owned company’s organic, fossil, and mineral energy regimes wholly depend on the federal government’s publicly financed water storage operations at Buford Dam (Lake Lanier) and other Corps hydroelectric, flood control, and navigation projects. Beyond the ACF’s example, the major goal for the meeting’s private and public representatives remained figuring out how energy utilities—from Alabama to Virginia and from the Carolinas to Kentucky—would continue generating electricity for millions of Americans in the face of diminishing water supplies in all of the region’s major river basins. The attendees also controlled what the public would learn; they did not want “any P.R.” regarding the meeting.3
Messaging is important for any institution. The nation’s two largest utility holding companies have a far-flung family of current and former employees who remain close to the region’s political structure. Duke Energy (the nation’s largest utility) and the Southern Company (and its Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, and Mississippi Power subsidiaries) do more than generate energy for residential, commercial, and industrial consumers. They lobby state capitols and the Capitol in Washington on a variety of issues—environmental legislation, climate change science, federal subsidies for clean energy—by spending millions of dollars every year to enlist super-lobbyists such as Haley Barbour (who was a Southern Company lobbyist before he became Mississippi’s governor from 2004 to 2012) to bend the ears of elected representatives and regulators from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Southern Company reportedly spent $13 million in 2013 lobbying federal and elected officials.4 Without cheap and reliable energy sources and unfettered access to water with minimal regulations, the utilities are apt to argue, their home states cannot lure industry and stimulate economic development.
This closeness among the regulators and the regulated community at the energy-water nexus carries significant risk for energy companies and communities. In early 2014, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory—a former Duke Energy executive of almost thirty years who also accepted more than $1.1 million in campaign contributions from the company—was implicated in the state’s failure to regulate Duke’s thirty coal ash storage ponds after the one pond at a retired steam station failed and sent almost 40,000 tons of ash into the Dan River. Coal ash is generated when coal is burned to boil water and generate steam for electrical production. Coal ash is highly toxic and contains heavy metals. Subsequent coal ash pond investigations at other Duke facilities in North Carolina revealed violations to the federal Clean Water Act as well as state regulations. Furthermore, a federal grand jury has since opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed Duke’s executives and McCrory’s agency staff. As one editorialist noted, Duke has not faced this much public or regulatory attention since the 1930s when populists and New Dealers targeted utility monopolies nationwide for their resistance to rural electrification. A full analysis of the coal ash situation in North Carolina is a long way off. What is evident now is how coal ash storage along major southern waterways illustrates the intertwined legacy of water and energy choices and the long-term economic and environmental consequences of those choices for communities tied to southern rivers. Furthermore, the relationship between the regulators and regulated communities needs additional scrutiny and oversight.5
In Georgia, water and energy relationships among decision makers are not secret. Two years after the Atlanta airport water and energy meeting in 2007, Governor Sonny Perdue appointed Georgia Power’s former CEO Michael Garrett to manage the state’s response to Judge Paul Magnuson’s decision in 2009 that Lake Lanier was not congressionally authorized as a water supply project (Perdue’s chief of staff at the time was also a former Georgia Power lobbyist).6 Southern and other investor-owned utilities clearly influence the flow, quality, and availability of water supplies. In Georgia, Southern Company’s water footprint includes fifteen fossil fuel and nuclear facilities plus nineteen hydro stations that withdraw water from eight major rivers. One estimate puts Georgia’s electrical plant water withdrawals at 3.3 billion gallons per day (Duke’s companywide withdrawals may reach 3.9 trillion gallons a year). Thermoelectric (coal and nuclear steam) power plants are the largest water users nationally and withdrew 200 billion gallons of water per day in 2005.7 While the bulk of the utilities’ water “withdrawals” are returned to waterways via once-through (open-loop) cooling systems, millions of gallons are also “consumed” and lost through the evaporative cooling processes (primarily in closed-loop systems). Given the energy sector’s water withdrawal and consumption rates, companies like Georgia Power and Duke Energy are in a position to help consumers and policy makers see the critical connection between water security and energy security.
To the company’s credit, Georgia Power has begun—after more than a century in the generation business—to systematically analyze water usage. In 2011, the company opened the Water Research Center at its thirty-plus-year-old Plant Bowen on the banks of the Etowah River. What the center will produce for public consumption is unknown at this juncture. Bowen is considered the second-largest generation facility in North America, is one of the top producers of carbon dioxide, and is home to the largest smokestack scrubbers in the world (Bowen was also the site of a coal ash spill in 2002). Now, Bowen engineers and technicians will conduct water withdrawal, consumption, and return rate experiments—and hopefully begin producing full water budgets for all of the company’s generation facilities. According to plant manager Tim Banks, “Water is vital for the prosperity of Georgia, and our company wants to continue to contribute to that effort.”8
Energy companies and major industries across the U.S. South have influenced regional rivers for far longer than any federal or state agency. Georgia Power and its larger corporate utility family depend on fifteen rivers, including the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Chattahoochee, Flint, Apalachicola, Altamaha, and Savannah. The company’s vision to stand as “A Citizen Wherever We Serve”—an old motto since 1927—and deliver useful, relevant, and timely research findings pertaining to water usage and quality could help improve public awareness and better inform future energy choices.9 These private interests continue to play a critical role in shaping the region’s water and energy policy, and they will also influence how people interact with and think about southern rivers, electricity, and community health. Energy companies keep the lights on and smartphones powered up so consumers can go about their lives. However, if energy utilities cannot lead the way into a new energy regime that includes less-water-intensive solar and wind sources that can arrest our changing climate, utilities stand to lose more ground before public utility commissions and environmental, conservative, and consumer advocate coalitions.10
But who else uses southern water and energy? Following national trends, energy utilities and the agricultural sector share the top two slots as the largest water users. Nationally, all types of agricultural irrigation-water withdrawals amounted to 128 billion gallons per day in 2005, second only to the energy sector.11 In the Southeast and after the 1950s drought, many people in the agricultural community assumed that enhanced water supply technologies, such as massive Corps reservoirs or USDA-funded farm ponds, would save them in the future. Some farmers adopted irrigation technology in Georgia and Florida after the 1950s drought, but many continued to think irrigated farming was not an economically viable prospect. For example, one agricultural researcher concluded that Florida citrus irrigation was not profitable for growers unless they used irrigation technology systematically and followed proscribed watering schedules. Additionally, portable pipes, pump guns, and groundwater pumps were expensive and labor-intensive to operate and refuel. But by the mid-1960s, irrigation had changed. Florida growers experimented with systematic irrigation systems and were rewarded with improved yields that justified the expense. Furthermore, Florida growers adapted efficiency-minded microsprinkler irrigation systems pioneered in South Africa in the 1970s. Microsprinkler irrigation spread quickly in Florida when growers learned that the systems served dual purposes: Scheduled watering improved yields and provided fruit with frost protection. With these revelations, well-capitalized growers and farmers tapped surface and groundwater supplies to expand irrigated farming throughout the Southeast.12
In Georgia, farmers primarily irrigated tobacco and peanuts in the 1950s before increasingly watering cotton, peanuts, and corn. Over time, the geography of irrigation farming spread from southwestern Georgia eastward across the Coastal Plain. By the early 1960s, more than 6,400 Georgia farmers irrigated 110,000 acres of tobacco, corn and other vegetables, orchards, hay, and pastures. This was a significant, fivefold increase; farmers had irrigated approximately 20,000 acres only a decade earlier. To water these expanded crops, landowners relied on streams and groundwater wells, but 66 percent of irrigation water came from farm ponds.13 As for the technology, in the 1960s, tobacco farmers who irrigated used labor-intensive portable pipe sections and petroleum-fueled pump systems. Soon thereafter in 1967, at least one well-capitalized farmer installed the state’s first center-pivot system, a technology imported from the arid Great Plains. Farmers deployed more cable-tow and center-pivot systems, though center-pivot systems carried a hefty price tag of $78,000 to $80,000. Regardless of the system, the number of farmers using irrigation technologies increased by 12 percent after 1970.
Farmers irrigated approximately 975,000 acres of cotton, peanuts, soybeans, pecans, peaches, and sod farms in 1980. To power these systems, most farmers initially relied on diesel- and gasoline-powered pumps before turning to electric systems. According to agricultural research professionals, Georgia had “the fastest rate” of growth in irrigation in the Southeast in the 1980s. Many factors contributed to farmers’ shift to irrigation, including increased corn prices, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and center-pivot irrigation technology. Drought in the 1980s, however, was once again paramount among the factors that induced growers to invest in irrigation technology.14 According to a 2008 survey, growers irrigated about 1.5 million acres in Georgia. Eighty-one percent of that acreage was watered by more than 16,000 center pivots, and corn, cotton, and peanuts constituted 67 percent of all irrigated crops.15 Energy generation and agriculture production require a tremendous amount of water, but they are not alone.
Nationally, municipal drinking water systems demanded 44 billion gallons of daily water withdrawals in 2005.16 The Southeast faces a series of energy, agricultural, and population challenges, and the region’s water future is tied to Georgia. Atlanta, the South Carolina upstate, Charlotte, and Houston—the Sun Belt’s economic powerhouses—have been locked in a regional economic civil war for some time over aquariums, halls of fame, major athletic events, auto plants, national political conventions, and corporate headquarters. When the Great Recession hit, a number observers suggested that Atlanta’s competitors had seized the upper hand.17 The Great Recession did indeed hit metro Atlanta particularly hard in one of the state’s foremost commercial sectors: real estate. This major economic blow—and a lack of new utility ratepayers—has in turn rippled into turbulent energy markets shaken by the plummeting cost of natural gas, by conservative activist support for solar generation, and by the flagging nuclear renaissance.18 But the fate of these two industries ultimately remains linked to another historically contentious issue: water.
If Georgia’s political and economic leadership cannot resolve or head off three simmering cross-border conflicts, then the state’s water-rich regions and immediate neighbors will feel the repercussions. In the first conflict and at the time of this analysis, Georgia’s leadership sees no advantage to a tristate resolution with Alabama and Florida over allocation of the ACF river basin. In late summer 2013, Florida filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court against Georgia seeking equitable allocation of water in the ACF. In late 2014 the Court accepted the case. Florida’s governor claimed he wanted more water for the panhandle to support future growth and to protect the state’s declining commercial oyster industry.19 Long-term water supply planning everywhere remains a guess at best without an ACF water-sharing compact or a similar agreement for the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa basin, where a second conflict with Alabama may lie in wait. In a third possible conflict, groundwater withdrawals from the Floridan Aquifer underlying the Southeastern Coastal Plain have compromised one of the Atlantic coast’s primary shared drinking-water sources. Savannah, Ga., and South Carolina communities tap the Floridan, but the region’s collective municipal and industrial groundwater pumping has allowed salt water to contaminate and compromise many municipal wells in Hilton Head, S.C. While the two states have been studying the movement of salt water for decades, in the spring of 2013, the director of South Carolina’s state environmental agency threatened to sue Georgia unless the states can reach an agreement to protect and share groundwater more equitably.20
Politicians, agency staff, private sector consultants, and water professionals have proposed a number of solutions to resolve these conflicts. Many of the solutions, however, may only produce more problems. For example, any proposed interbasin transfer will continue to threaten interstate and intrastate regional relations. One of the most talked-about interbasin transfers involves moving Tennessee River water to serve metro Atlanta customers. Aside from the costs associated with construction (estimated in 2009 at more than $2 billion) and operations including the energy to move millions of gallons of water ($98 million annual operating costs), this proposal is complicated by a nineteenth-century surveyor’s mismarking of the Tennessee-Georgia border that may only be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.21 Another option, a 2012 state agency initiative to operate a complex aquifer storage and recovery project in the Flint River basin’s agricultural region, exacerbated intrastate urban-rural relations. The agency initiative proposed a water exchange as a long-term benefit for metro Atlanta 200 miles away. This was followed in 2013 by a legislative sidecar that initially threatened property rights with a proposal that would have altered the state’s centuries-old riparian water rights tradition.22 Transferring water from the Savannah, Tennessee, or Coosa River basins into the Chattahoochee to serve metro Atlanta and privatizing surface water in south Georgia may solve some of the state’s short-term difficulties and benefit a few landowners and corporate interests. But taken together, these choices will manufacture more fundamental problems inside and outside the state.
In 2011 the chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce stated that Georgia “grew along ridgelines and railways, not riverbasins.”23 If you look closely at a relief map of Georgia—one that depicts elevation via contour lines—you can read the state’s historic development in the landscape. Many roads, railways, and towns in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont are indeed perched on a high point, bluff, or ridgeline above broad yet shallow valleys. Among the many reasons for this human geography: Freshwater springs can gush from high points; ridges do not flood; ridges lifted Georgians above miasmatic or malarial wetlands; and based on personal experience, ridge walking conserves energy otherwise lost traversing valleys. Georgia’s ridgeline civilization, however, could never have existed without river basins, and Georgians should not forget the fall-line and downstream urban areas that preceded ridgeline cities like Atlanta.
Southern Water, Southern Power illustrates why human manipulation and use of river basins was critical for the region’s modernization between the New South and Sun Belt eras. Fertile river basins pleased corn, tobacco, and cotton farmers, or their grazing livestock, as well as fishermen. People also dredged, diked, and blasted rivers to control flooding, improve navigation, and facilitate the transport of timber from inland sources to coastal markets. Urban boosters, corporations, politicians, and fall-line citizens in Augusta, Milledgeville, Macon, Albany, Columbus, and Rome all depended on the Savannah, Oconee, Ocmulgee, Flint, Chattahoochee, and Coosa Rivers to grow and prosper. Life changed during the famous New South period (1890–1930). Georgians depended increasingly on railroads, but the ridgeline occupants never hid their affection for river basins. For example, recall a Georgia Power Company predecessor that built six hydroelectric dams in the upper reaches of the Savannah River basin. From these northeast Georgia facilities—built between 1910 and 1927 and still operating today—the company channeled electricity ninety miles south over high-tension transmission lines to Atlanta. Georgia Power also built new coal plants, including Plant Atkinson (1930), on the Chattahoochee to power Atlanta by an organic and mineral energy mix. All of these energy-generation facilities—the renewable and the fossil fuel systems—depended on water, and all were interconnected via transmission lines. These “networks of power,” to borrow historian of technology Thomas Hughes’s phrase, furnished Atlanta’s busy bees with electricity and what were considered modern conveniences in the 1920s: Street lights and electric fans gained popularity, but electric streetcars and factories captured the lion’s share from this versatile hydraulic waterscape.24
The Southeast’s hydraulic waterscape and environmental history provide a perspective for future decisions. Nearly all of the region’s cities, regardless of their geography or size, have depended on river basins and shared water supplies for a long time. Federal agencies may control the Chattahoochee River’s floodgates at Buford Dam and other facilities, but ridgeline corporations—including those that participated in the 2009 Georgia Water Contingency Task Force—all have a vested interest in making sure there is enough clean water in the ACF river basin, the Savannah River, and other valleys across the Southeast. If history is a guide, these corporations are not mere players on the ridgelines; they transformed the energy of many rivers in many states into a variety of agricultural products, industrial hard goods, and services in the past, and they are as focused today on securing clean water for tomorrow. Finally, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been mired in tristate water skirmishes for more than two decades. If Georgia’s leadership continues to avoid a resolution with Alabama and Florida, other regions might begin to look more appealing for investors.
By running away from a tristate compact for decades, Georgia’s leadership has pulled the state and region into a trap. There is an old western adage that water flows uphill to money, that is, from the Colorado River to California’s irrigated fields and municipal water pipes. Georgians and their neighbors learned their own version of this maxim when they figured out how to turn water into electricity at hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power plants and then transmit energy to an urban-industrial Piedmont built atop a withering cotton South. In recent years, all Georgians and their regional neighbors have been learning how water itself might flow from distant river basins to money via interbasin transfers, an interconnected neo–Super Power network of water distribution lines, or other water exchanges. Solutions to the regional water puzzle lie in Georgia and involve a complex combination of policy, infrastructure, and individual behavioral modifications that will also be required of everyone everywhere to meet U.S. water demands in the twenty-first century.25
Georgia policy makers, for example, have built an impressive framework over the last decade to improve water supply management now and into the future. The state could serve as an example if other regions could find value in Georgia’s policy instruments such as statewide water planning and water conservation through legislation. However, observers must recognize that with limited enforcement and anemic funding mechanisms in place, Georgia is a poor example and is not preparing its citizens or regional water planning councils to follow through and implement lasting solutions. Among federal water quality tools at their disposal, natural resource agencies must enforce Clean Water Act permit requirements and fine offenders. Strong clean water policies protect and improve water quality, and strict enforcement will ultimately result in less costly treatment—and lower drinking-water utility bills for consumers—while benefiting communities’ long-term economic and environmental health. Federal engagement in water supply management is also critical. Times have changed at federal sites such as Georgia’s Lake Lanier and Buford Dam, and federal water managers must clearly redefine authorized uses for these water projects. And since there is no such thing as a free lunch, federal reallocation for municipal water supply must require existing and future permitted users to alter behavior. For example, communities that derive water from federal water projects must demonstrate an aggressive reduction in consumption and water loss as a condition for access. Finally, water is a numbers game: State and federal regulators calibrate water withdrawal and pollutant discharge permits to river flows. But a critical sticking point has existed for a half-century. In the United States, the nation’s groundwater and surface water supplies and use have never been fully and systematically quantified because reporting is spotty, states do not have adequate in-stream flow standards, and communities and commercial entities do not always know how much water they actually consume. Honest and transparent water budgeting across all economic sectors—municipal and private water and energy utilities and agricultural and industrial interests—is incredibly difficult but is imperative for future policy decisions.
Nationwide our transportation and water infrastructure—our roads, bridges, dams, and pipes—is crumbling. New technologies, such as new reservoirs or extensive pipeline networks to move water, can provide short-term solutions for the region’s water supply deficiencies. Flood control solutions such as floodplain zoning, improved municipal sewage and stormwater management, and “green infrastructure” that better manages water where it initially falls will also help. These adaptations will manage risks but could also manufacture future risks and create new environments that will require additional hands-on attention. Building new working reservoirs to increase water supplies or piping water to consumers far from original sources can also create a false sense of security and assumptions about future availability. Like levees and flood control measures, water supply technologies can benefit specific constituencies and shift risk without eliminating hazards or fully identifying root problems.
Communities everywhere would be best off maintaining and repairing existing infrastructure to maximize existing supply and delivery systems. Repairs should supersede new construction where practical. But why the rush to create new supplies? A public water utility manager has a tough job: delivering inexpensive cheap water to customers’ homes and businesses today while preparing for tomorrow. Clean water is expensive to make and deliver, but managers are expected to keep water bills low. However, developing a new water supply, such as a reservoir, is not as easy as it sounds. As a colleague once said, “Building a new reservoir is like opening a new bank account. Without an influx of rain or cash, the reservoir and account will be empty.” So what can communities in drought-prone regions do before investing in a reservoir? In terms of municipal water supply, there is a “hidden reservoir” filling underground because of broken water mains, leaky pipes, and faulty water meters.26 If communities can identify and fix those problems first, then they might be able to avoid costly alternatives that may not have been justified in the first place or could become prohibitively expensive for local tax- and ratepayers in the long run. There are also many reuse options—so-called gray and purple water systems—that utilize treated water for specific applications such as irrigation and energy generation, thus freeing up costly treated water for human use. Water suppliers utilizing these first-level and low-hanging-fruit options have grown supply in tandem with population growth.
Last but not least, individual behavior matters. Just as individuals make history, they also make critical decisions about energy and water on a daily basis. Water problems and solutions are local, but that does not mean that nonlocal ideas and proposals will not work. At a minimum, all decisions must be informed decisions: Citizens must have a basic understanding of where their drinking water comes from and where it goes for treatment, the energy costs of delivery and treatment, and why what happens on the land or what is discharged into streams affects water quality, the cost of water treatment, and economic health. Furthermore, since climate change will present another suite of challenges, our energy and water behaviors matter. According to the National Climate Assessment, southeastern communities face the threat of sea level rise, excessive heat events, and continued water stress. Choosing less-water-intensive energy systems, such as solar or wind generation, can reduce water stress and help arrest climate change.27 With this knowledge, there is a good chance individuals will adopt smart energy and water behaviors.
If these policy, infrastructure, and individual steps were implemented to their full potential in Georgia, then some might foresee a symbolic end of Georgia’s reign as Empire State of the South. However, given the boosters’ historical record of selling the South, modern Sun Belt cooperation on energy and water issues throughout the ACF, Savannah, and other multistate river basins will be just as good for business as competition. Southern water has been harnessed to generate energy and spectacular growth for a long time. Sun Belt citizens benefited from the steep curve and are increasingly aware that conflict over water and unilateral attempts to control water and energy are not good for their communities, state, or region. Informed Sun Belt citizens are engaged with these issues and eager to cooperate if the goal is equitable water and energy policy for all.
When it comes to conflict over water, the American South is not exceptional. Historic water problems, such as flooding and droughts, are the products of material environmental conditions. Low-pressure tropical storms and heavy rain at any time can produce record rainfalls and flooding, and high-pressure systems can generate record heat waves and droughts. As environmental factors, these climatic events became problems for people after rivers flooded built and domesticated environments, when urban and industrial centers faced electrical shortages, and more recently, when municipal or poorly designed stormwater systems failed or water supplies nearly ran dry. Energy and water choices played a major part in the American South’s history, and if that is a guide, water and energy choices will continue to affect one another well into the future. When considered this way, the humid Southeast, the arid West, and the other parts of the country wrestling with their own water problems and weather whiplash do not look so different. In this context, the American South has much to share with and learn from other regions grappling with what are clearly national problems.