The water crisis: “Let them drink wine.”

That was the title of a long article I wrote for the April 1983 issue of Progressive Architecture magazine—32 years ago, I called upon architects to pay much greater attention to (fresh) water, even then clearly seen as a dwindling resource. The article outlined ways that architects could help. It isn’t that I was particularly prescient; P/A had wonderful editors, always ready with terrific story ideas. And—having come of age during the 1973 oil embargo—I was just one among many young architects who wanted to reverse our wasteful, destructive ways with natural resources.

“You can go three weeks without food,” I wrote then. “Without water, you’ve got just three days.” Apparently, we wanted a bit of drama in a story that was essentially about low-volume flush toilets, grey water drainage systems and water-conserving landscape designs.

The drama about water is certainly still with us, maybe now more than ever. Given the latest news, it is not difficult to imagine a day—which might not be far off—when at least some Californians (not to mention Brazilians) turn on their household taps to find that nothing comes out, or that they can’t drink what does. An ever-larger segment of the globe’s population, including many of its poorest, cannot rely on regular supplies of potable water.

It’s sad to say that, on the whole, we haven’t done very well to reverse the trends that have led to our present-day water problems, even if some steps have been taken (lots of those low-volume flush toilets are in use today, for instance, and now we have many waterless ones).

To be fair, only some of today’s challenges stem from wasteful development and building practices, or from plumbing systems that remain stuck, so to speak, in the age of Thomas Crapper. There’s also the inexorable saltwater encroachment on fresh water systems, plus almost boundless irrigation for agriculture and for livestock feed, along with profligate industrial use and unchecked car washing—and so on, and so on.

But architectural design and urban planning practices do have a central place in grappling with this pressing resource crisis, and especially in the developed world. We also have the bully pulpit—now devoted mainly to seeking carbon neutrality—which we need to direct at coping with and attenuating our growing water crisis.

These two issues are not unconnected, of course, but people tend to understand water more readily, to experience its shortages more directly, and to get more exercised about it—perhaps because it is a vital resource (that’s the drama part).

Ironic, isn’t it? “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” That might make a good title for a magazine article.