The Striker Report

In January of 1990, the Turkish government ordered its engineers to stop the flow of the ancient river Euphrates for one whole month, thus denying precious water to neighboring Syria and Iraq.

This feat was possible thanks to a decades-long project of dams, sluices and hydroelectric power plants collectively known as the Southeastern Anatolia Project, which is said to have doubled Turkey's arable farmland.

The alleged reason for the 1990 interruption was to fill a reservoir, but skeptics claimed it was in fact in reprisal for Syrian support of Kurdish separatists.

Said then President Suleyman Demirel : "Neither Syria nor Iraq can lay claim to Turkey's rivers, any more than Ankara could claim their oil. The water resources are Turkey's, the oil resources are theirs. We don't say we share the oil resources, and they cannot say they share our water resources."

As denizens of the Middle East and other water-poor regions well know, water, energy and politics have long been inextricably linked.

The 1967 "Six Day" war between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria was triggered in part by a water dispute over use of the Jordan River, a conflict which continues today.

An Ethiopian proposal to dam the Nile River in the late 1970s prompted Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to observe: "The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water."

But water wrangling is by no means limited to Africa or the Middle East.

In the drought-plagued American West, water disputes between municipalities have grown. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, "unless highly efficient water usage practices can be developed and maintained in the West, it will not be possible to provide the water needed to sustain western ecosystems as well as economic and population growth."

One of the biggest sources of water drawdown in the U.S. is electricity production, which requires 190 billion gallons of water per day, and accounts for nearly 40% of all freshwater withdrawals in the nation according to Sandia Laboratories.

In 2001 the National Energy Policy task force warned that America's growing population and economy will require 393,000 megawatts of new generating capacity by the year 2020. Such a rate of growth would require 1,300 to 1,900 new power plants, or more than one built each week, with attendant strain on an already stressed water supply.

The good news is that water conservation and recycling point in the direction of at least a partial solution. Already a "greywater revolution" has quietly begun to transform the way some businesses and households manage their water use. According to a 2003 study, 'greywater' or non-septic water currently makes up 75% of total wastewater flow to domestic sewers. Harnessing and re-using that water could be an important step toward effective conservation.

As Marcello Manca, a Vice President at Underwriters Laboratory puts it, "Zero-water, low-water, water efficient, grey-water - it's all coming. Water and water scarcity is so important to the health and well-being of all species."

London's famed "Millennium Dome" project is one of the largest recent examples of internal water reclamation; the project's "Watercycle" system was designed to supply up to 500 cubic meters per day of reclaimed water for toilet flushing, meeting 55% of the total water demand for the Dome.

In the United States, local environmental regulations (or lack thereof) have traditionally hampered the use of greywater for irrigation. Both California and Arizona have recently taken steps to ease the regulatory burden on households and businesses attempting to employ greywater systems. Using bio-degradable soaps for washing in conjunction with state approved systems can help make recycled water environmentally sound.

Americans are used to wasting water. One flush of the toilet uses more water than the average person in a developing country has access to all day. While greywater recycling is only one piece of the water conservation puzzle, it may be an increasingly vital one as agriculture, industry and population growth continue to place increasing demands on the world's water supplies.

Policy analysts often say that the wars of the new millennium will be fought over water. But it need not be so, provided that policy makers take water conservation seriously.

As the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security states it, "the energy security of the United States is closely linked to the state of its water resources." In this crucial effort America must lead.