In July, boaters on British Columbia’s Williston Reservoir started reporting a forested island drifting through open water. Full-grown trees, no obvious source. Initial reactions, including from the utility that manages the reservoir, were skeptical. In 2026, a forest that just shows up with almost no witnesses sounds like an AI-generated hoax before it sounds like a news story.

Then satellite imagery from July 21 confirmed it: a landmass roughly the size of two football fields, sitting in the middle of one of the largest reservoirs on the planet.

The likely explanation is almost more interesting than the mystery. Williston hit its highest water level in 14 years this year, forcing BC Hydro to open the dam’s spillways in June and July just to manage the surge. The utility’s theory: driftwood had been accumulating in a sheltered bay for years, decomposing enough for trees to actually take root in it. When the water rose high enough, the whole mass lifted free of the shoreline. Wind, not current, pushed it into open water from there.

By mid-August, it had vanished from satellite view entirely. For two weeks, the organization responsible for monitoring a reservoir the size of a small country had no idea where a floating forest had gone.

This week, satellite imagery found it again. Nineteen miles from where it started, parked at the mouth of a different river.

It’s not considered a threat to dam operations, but it is a genuine navigation hazard, and BC Hydro is still relying partly on public sightings to track it, because the reservoir is simply too large to patrol by boat.

None of this is actually unprecedented. Wisconsin has a floating peat bog that locals physically push away from a bridge every year. Researchers in Africa are studying similar floating islands on Lake Victoria and their impact on transportation and fisheries. What’s new isn’t the phenomenon; it’s the scale of this one and the fact that satellites let us watch it happen in near real time.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

Here’s the number that matters most for California: the Lower Basin states have to cut a combined 1.25 million acre-feet of water use per year in 2027 and 2028, about 17 percent of their total Compact apportionment. Arizona takes the deepest cut, both in volume and in percentage terms, giving up 760,000 acre-feet, or roughly 27 percent of its allocation. California is on the hook for 440,000 acre-feet, about 10 percent of its allocation, the smallest percentage hit of the three. Nevada, the smallest player on the river, gives up 50,000 acre-feet, around 16 to 17 percent of its allocation.

That California figure is worth sitting with for a second, because it isn’t really new. Back in December 2025, at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference, California’s own water leaders, led by JB Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, put a 440,000 acre-foot annual conservation commitment on the table voluntarily, as part of a “constructive” framework meant to demonstrate the state would lead rather than get dragged. Interior essentially took California at its word. Arizona, by contrast, is absorbing a cut well beyond anything it offered up front, and a materially larger share of its own supply, which tells you where the real friction in this negotiation lived.

Why this is a bridge and not a fix

The two-year operating rules sit inside a broader 10-year framework Interior released alongside them, one that gestures at up to 3.2 million acre-feet of Lower Basin reductions over the coming decade but leaves the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico) contributing only voluntarily. No mandatory cuts are expected upstream. That asymmetry, hard numbers for the Lower Basin and soft commitments for the Upper Basin, is exactly the fault line that kept a seven-state deal out of reach for three straight years, and nothing about the August decision resolves it. It just postpones the reckoning past the 2028 water year.

Lake Powell and Lake Mead are both sitting at record-low elevations heading into the new water year, which starts October 1. The margin for error here is not large.

What it actually means for growers and the irrigation business

This is the part I think gets lost in the political coverage. A locked-in reduction of this size doesn’t hit every part of California’s Colorado River footprint the same way, and it doesn’t automatically translate into a straightforward win for efficient-irrigation providers, even though that’s the intuitive story.

California’s Colorado River allocation is overwhelmingly agricultural, concentrated in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, where Imperial Irrigation District alone holds the single largest entitlement on the entire river. When districts like these have to find real, verifiable water savings, growers face a genuine fork: invest in efficiency to protect yield per acre-foot, or take land out of production altogether. Which way that goes tends to track crop value. Permanent and high-value crops- dates, citrus, table grapes- are the kind of asset growers fight to protect, and that’s where you’d expect to see continued appetite for drip conversion, fertigation upgrades, and soil-moisture-driven scheduling. Lower-value field crops are a different calculation; fallowing is often cheaper than retrofitting, and conserved water from fallowed acreage has increasingly become something districts can monetize directly rather than a byproduct of efficiency investment.

The acreage split in Imperial Valley makes that dynamic worth sizing up. Of the roughly 527,000 planted acres in 2024, about two-thirds, led by alfalfa, Bermuda grass, cotton, and wheat, were field crops, the category most exposed to fallowing rather than retrofit when water gets tight. Only about a third of planted acreage sits in the higher-value vegetable and melon crops where growers have the strongest incentive to protect yield with efficiency investment instead. If the bulk of the fallowing response concentrates on that two-thirds field-crop base, as it typically has in past conservation rounds, that’s a real headwind for irrigation equipment and parts demand in the near term. Fallowed acres need less hardware, not more, and vendors selling into the region should expect the near-term addressable opportunity to be narrower than the full planted-acreage figure suggests.

It’s also worth being precise about what fallowing actually pays for, because it isn’t a private water sale. Growers in the Imperial Valley don’t hold a freely tradable water right they can sell to another farmer or an outside buyer on their own; IID holds the district’s Colorado River entitlement, and a 2020 California appellate ruling confirmed growers have a right to water service, not ownership of the water itself. What growers can do is enroll in IID’s fallowing or on-farm efficiency programs, which pay a district-set incentive rate per acre-foot conserved, historically in the range of $175 to $285, with participation for a given field typically capped at three out of every five years. IID then aggregates that conserved water and transfers it under district-level agreements, historically to the San Diego County Water Authority, and more recently under federally funded conservation deals with the Bureau of Reclamation. In other words, the money runs grower to district to outside buyer, not grower to grower, which keeps the fallowing decision, and the resulting drop in on-farm irrigation demand, concentrated wherever the district’s incentive rate makes the math work for a given crop.

Municipal exposure is smaller but not zero. Southern California’s urban agencies draw Colorado River supply through the Metropolitan Water District’s blended portfolio, so a tighter agricultural allocation doesn’t hit MWD ratepayers directly, but it does keep pressure on the case for desalination, recycled water, and State Water Project investment as the region diversifies away from river dependence.

The bigger business variable is the uncertainty itself

If I had to pick the single most important thing for anyone making capital decisions in this space right now, it isn’t the 440,000 acre-foot number, or even the 10 percent figure behind it. It’s that this is a two-year plan sitting on top of an unresolved decade-long argument. Public agencies and large ag operations plan capex in longer cycles than two years, and a bridge deal, however welcome as short-term certainty, doesn’t give anyone confidence about what 2029 looks like, especially with regulators having reserved the option to push Lower Basin cuts as high as 3.2 million acre-feet a year after 2028. Expect continued hedging: efficiency investment where the crop economics clearly justify it, but slower commitment on the biggest, most capital-intensive projects until there’s a real seven-state agreement, or at least a credible signal of where one is heading.

That fight isn’t over. It’s just been rescheduled.

NQH2O: $535.91/acre-foot. The Nasdaq Veles California Water Index. The spot price of water entitlements traded on the CME, updated every Wednesday. The price has more than doubled during this summer.

I’ve been in the irrigation and green industry for over 25 years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this industry is small. Really small. You can pick up the phone, call almost any CEO in this space, and get a call back. So when I wanted to do a webinar on how to actually navigate the job market right now, whether you’re in irrigation, the broader green industry, or ag tech, there was really only one person to call.

Jon Mastel is the founder of AdvocateFirst Executive Search, and unlike most recruiters you’ll run into, he actually comes from our industry. He came up through distribution, worked at Rainbird, and has spent close to nine years since then building relationships across irrigation, contracting, manufacturing, and ag tech. When I say he’s connected, I mean it. Jon told me we’re basically down to one degree of separation from anybody in this business. Forget Kevin Bacon.

We had a great, honest conversation, and I want to share the parts I think matter most for anyone out there right now, whether you’re actively looking, quietly testing the waters, or just want to be smart about your career for whenever the time comes.

The market’s cooled off, but it hasn’t stopped

Jon was straight with me: he’s not seeing the volume of activity he’s seen in years past. But that doesn’t mean opportunity has dried up; it means more of it is happening quietly. A lot of what’s out there now gets negotiated directly between companies and recruiters instead of posted publicly.

Why? Consolidation, mostly. As companies merge and new construction slows in parts of the country, roles that existed six or seven years ago just aren’t there anymore. I asked him directly about manufacturers going consumer-direct, and he was careful with his answer. Retail divisions have always existed, but he’s not seeing the professional side of the business move that way in any public fashion.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: your recruiter works with you, not for you

This is the reframe I think everybody needs. Recruiters get paid by the employer, full stop. If someone offers to find you a job for a fee, that should raise an eyebrow.

But here’s the flip side. That doesn’t make a good recruiter less valuable to you. It just means you have to know how to work the relationship. Jon’s advice, and I agree with this completely, is be honest. Tell them why you’re really looking, what you want to make, what “better” actually means to you. The more transparent you are, the harder they can work for you. And for what it’s worth, everything stays confidential unless you make it public yourself.

About half the jobs out there never get posted anywhere

This number stopped me. Jon estimates more than half the roles he works on never show up on a job board. They’re negotiated relationships where a company trusts him to bring the right person instead of running a public search. If you’re only refreshing LinkedIn Jobs, you are missing a huge chunk of what’s actually available in this industry.

LinkedIn matters more than you think, and most people are doing it wrong

Jon spends 95% of his day on LinkedIn. His advice here was some of the most tactical stuff we covered, and I think a lot of people in our industry are leaving opportunity on the table:

• Say what you actually do, in your headline. If you’re a VP of Sales but your headline says “Growth Strategy Leader,” you’re making yourself harder to find. Be direct.

• Fill out your About section, and don’t be shy about it. Accomplishments, certifications, direction, all of it.

• The “Open to Work” badge is not a red flag. Jon told me it actually gets his attention faster. If you’re currently employed and worried about your employer seeing it, LinkedIn has a setting that signals recruiters privately without the public badge.

• Recruiters are watching more than your profile. What you post, what you comment on, what companies you follow- it all builds a picture. Just be aware of it.

Talk money early, and be honest about it

This one I feel strongly about myself. As a hiring manager, I’ve always believed compensation should be on the table in the very first conversation. Are we even in the same ballpark? Jon agreed. He said any recruiter who knows the industry already knows the pay ranges, so inflating your number just wastes everyone’s time.

One thing that surprised me a little: Jon says money is rarely the real reason someone leaves a job. It’s almost always culture, being overlooked, or something not working in the environment. Compensation tends to be the symptom, not the disease.

The myths, busted

We went rapid-fire through some of the things I hear constantly from people in this industry, and Jon didn’t pull punches:

• “My recruiter works for me.” Nope, they work with you. Your sense of urgency and theirs aren’t always the same.

• “If I impress the recruiter, I’ll get a job.” Only if the job actually exists. Recruiters aren’t a job store.

• “Nobody hires in December, over the summer, in Q4.” All false. Jon said there’s hiring happening the day after Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas. If a role needs filling, it gets filled.

• “Recruiters ghost people because they don’t respect them.” Jon’s a Coast Guard veteran and takes this personally. He closes the loop on every conversation, even when the news isn’t good. No answer isn’t really an answer.

My takeaway

If I had to boil this whole conversation down to one thing, it’s this: transparency wins. Be honest with your recruiter about why you’re looking, what you want to earn, and what you’ve actually accomplished. Treat the relationship as something you build over time, not something you dust off only when you’re desperate for a change.

Jon put it best. The market right now rewards people who can “stand out and assimilate at the same time.” That’s not easy to do, but it’s good advice whether you’re actively job hunting today or just keeping your options warm for down the road.

Big thanks to Jon Mastel for his time and his candor. If you’re navigating the irrigation, green industry, or ag tech job market, find him on LinkedIn. He’s easy to spot.

Denver Water has handed out more than 150 warnings and 15 fines this season. Watering is now down to two days a week, with no watering allowed between 10 a.m. and mid-afternoon. Fourth offenders pay $1,000.

The trigger is snowpack. Colorado is sitting at roughly 58 percent of normal this year, with stream flows running 10 to 40 percent below average. After about 15 mild years in a row, this is the first real shortfall.

A utility with a real track record

Worth saying up front: Denver Water has earned its reputation as one of the more forward-thinking utilities in the industry. Their “drunk flowers” campaign, wilted plants stumbling around like they’ve had one too many, is still one of the sharper pieces of conservation marketing the water sector has produced. When Denver Water goes after residential water use, it’s usually paired with real public outreach, not just a fine schedule.

A fine is just a rate increase in disguise

Strip away the enforcement framing and the fine schedule, $250, then $500, then $1,000, is really a price signal, the same mechanism a rate increase uses, delivered a different way. Nothing moves water use like price. A standard rate increase means a public utilities commission hearing and months of process, and it raises the bill for people who are already conserving right along with the ones who aren’t. A conservation fine skips the hearing and only prices the actual overuse. That makes it a more targeted tool than a rate case, not a harsher one.

The math problem

Here’s the number that matters most. Agriculture uses roughly 90 percent of Colorado’s water. That leaves municipal and industrial use, including every home, business, and landscape in the state, at about 10 percent of the total. The 20 percent reduction target utilities are working toward applies to that whole municipal and industrial slice. Even hitting it fully would move total state water use by only about 2 percent. That’s the gap enforcement programs don’t touch.

1. 150+ warnings and 15 fines issued this season

2. Fine schedule: warning, then $250, $500, $1,000 on the fourth offense

3. Colorado snowpack at 58 percent of normal; stream flows down 10 to 40 percent

4. Urban water use reduction target: 20%, equal to about 2% of statewide use

5. Agriculture: roughly 90% of statewide water use

Why this matters to you

If you sell, install, or service irrigation in a market running enforcement programs like this, expect more of it as snowpack years get worse. Smart controllers and flow sensors are becoming the compliance tool of choice, and rebates are the fastest-growing line item in utility conservation budgets right now.

But don’t oversell the residential upside to municipal clients. A 20 percent urban reduction, even fully achieved, is only a 2 percent cut statewide. If a utility’s real target is meaningful water savings, that conversation has to go to agriculture eventually. Urban enforcement buys awareness. It doesn’t buy the number they actually need.

The Basics

Project Nexus is a $20 million pilot funded by the state of California. It covers stretches of canal owned by the Turlock Irrigation District. The partners are the California Department of Water Resources, TID, Solar AquaGrid, and UC Merced. UC Merced runs the research side.

The system generates 1.6 megawatts. That makes it only the second operating canal-based solar array in the United States, and one of a small handful worldwide.

The project tests multiple designs, not just one:

• A 115-foot wide-span array in Hickman, covering about 38,500 square feet

• Two 25-foot narrow-span arrays near TID’s Ceres Main Reservoir, adding another 40,500 square feet of coverage

• A vertical array mounted along the canal banks

• Long-duration iron-flow battery storage, tied into the system to test how storage performs alongside canal-based generation

• A prototype called Solar Waves, a retractable rail system built for narrow spans, still in field trials

Different canal widths need different engineering. Nexus was built to answer that question directly rather than assume one design fits every canal in the state.

Why a Canal and Not a Field

Three things happen when you put solar panels over moving water instead of open land.

Water evaporation drops. Shading the canal surface reduces the amount of water lost to the air. In a state that has spent the better part of two decades in and out of drought, evaporation losses on open canals are not trivial. UC Merced is measuring this directly at Nexus rather than relying on earlier modeling.

Land use goes down. The canal right-of-way already exists. It is already disturbed land, already owned by a water district, already off-limits to farming or development. Building solar there means one less field converted from agriculture, and one less new easement to negotiate.

The water can cool the panels. Solar panels lose efficiency as they heat up. Panels sitting a few feet above flowing water get a cooling benefit that ground-mounted arrays in open fields don’t. Whether that translates into a measurable output gain is one of the things this pilot is built to answer.

What UC Merced Is Actually Measuring

The research plan tracks:

• Water evaporation rates, compared to uncovered canal sections

• Water quality, including any effects on aquatic weed growth

• Canal maintenance requirements with panels installed overhead

• Electricity generation and system performance across the different array designs

• Battery storage performance under real operating conditions

A full report is expected later this year. That report, not the ribbon-cutting, is the moment that matters. Right now Nexus proves the engineering works. It does not yet prove the economics work at scale, and it does not yet quantify how much water California actually saves per mile of covered canal.

The Scale Question

California has roughly 4,000 miles of irrigation canals statewide. Project Nexus covers a few thousand feet of that. The gap between a successful pilot and a statewide build-out is where most infrastructure ideas go to die, usually on cost.

The state’s own framing ties Nexus to two long-term targets: 100 percent clean electricity by 2045, and conserving 500,000 acre-feet of water annually by 2040. Those are the numbers Nexus has to eventually move, not just gesture at.

Worth watching: a separate, self-funded canal-solar project is underway over the Santan Canal, along with a floating solar array on a reservoir, both expected online in early 2026. That is a second real-world data point outside the state-funded pilot, and it will be useful for comparison once both are far enough along to generate meaningful performance data.

Where This Fits

Solar-over-canal is not a new idea. Versions have run in India for over a decade. What makes Nexus notable is that it is happening in the state with the most complex water rights system in the country, tied to a district that has to keep water moving on a schedule regardless of what happens to the power grid.

If the UC Merced data holds up, the case for scaling this past a pilot gets a lot stronger. If maintenance costs or aquatic weed issues turn out to be bigger than modeled, that will show up in the report too.

Either way, the answer is coming from field data now, not a lab model. That is the actual news here.

“When we understand that each day isn’t one more day, but one less, we start giving more value to what truly matters.” - Marcus Aurelius

Puerto Rico is rationing water right now.

More than 180,000 customers on the island are going without running water for 48-hour stretches, on a rotating schedule, while officials wait for rain that isn’t coming. July was San Juan’s driest month in over 120 years. But drought is only half the story. An estimated 59% of all treated water on the island never reaches a resident. It leaks out of pipes that have been failing for decades. A 72-inch aqueduct line in Bayamón ruptured at three separate points and helped trigger the current crisis.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. Its residents are U.S. citizens. And for over a month this summer, some of them didn’t have water at all.

Most Americans would call that unthinkable. Water is supposed to just be there. Turn the handle, it comes out, forever, everywhere in this country.

It isn’t even true in this country.

The Disney contrast

Three weeks before Puerto Rico’s rationing began, four groundwater wells failed in Anaheim, California, and every bathroom at Disneyland went dark for two hours. Guests lined up for toilets instead of rides. It made headlines because it happened to Disney, but it happened because Disneyland has no water supply of its own. It never has. It runs on the same municipal grid as the strip mall down the street, and when four of the city’s wells went down, so did the Happiest Place on Earth.

Now go three thousand miles east. Walt Disney World has its own wells. Its own wastewater treatment plant. Its own reclaimed water system irrigating five golf courses and a tree farm. It’s a functioning independent utility because, in 1967, Florida handed Disney the legal powers of a county government to build one.

Why the difference? Disney learned its lesson in Anaheim first. Friction with a city government it didn’t control, and it made sure it never had to depend on someone else’s pipes again. Every park Disney has built since Florida, it’s built with that leverage. Every park it built before, including the original, it never got the chance.

Here’s the thing worth sitting with: Disney choosing to depend on someone else’s water grid was optional. Millions of people don’t have that choice.

On U.S. soil, right now

• Roughly 30% of households on the Navajo Nation have no tap or toilet at all — not intermittent service, none.

• Native American households are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing than the national average.

• The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the federal government isn’t obligated to secure water rights for the Navajo Nation, despite treaty language dating to 1868.

• In parts of Texas, families along the border pay hundreds of dollars a month for trucked water they can’t verify is safe.

• In Alabama’s Black Belt, soil conditions make septic systems unworkable, and raw sewage surfaces in yards.

• At least 2 million Americans live without a tap or a toilet at home. Some estimates put the real number as high as 9 to 10 million.

Worldwide, it’s not close to rare

2.1 billion people — 1 in 4 humans alive — lack managed drinking water at home safely. 3.4 billion lack safe sanitation.

There’s a technical term for water that runs less than 24 hours a day, or not every day of the week: intermittent water supply. At least 45 countries run systems built this way.

The part that should actually worry a wealthy country

Intermittent supply isn’t a poverty problem. It’s an infrastructure problem, and money doesn’t automatically fix it.

• Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries on Earth by GDP per capita. As of the most recent public data, Riyadh got piped water once every 2.5 days. Jeddah, once every 9. An entire private tanker industry exists to fill the gap. Trucks, apps, 1-hour emergency delivery, and it’s thriving today, not a relic of a past crisis.

• Kuwait has essentially zero natural renewable freshwater and survives almost entirely on desalination, despite topping global rankings for wealth per capita.

• Malta is the only EU country that shows up on global rankings for worst freshwater access.

• Barbados is the only country in the Americas on that same list.

• The Dominican Republic has decent water access on paper. 86% of the population has an improved source, but national continuity of supply sits at just 10%. Nine out of ten connections don’t run continuously, even when the pipe reaches the house.

No water system is designed to be intermittent. It becomes that way through decades of overexpansion, leakage, and infrastructure that never caught up to demand. The exact same failure mode, whether the country in question is broke or one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.

The line to leave you with

Disney spent sixty years and untold billions making sure it would never again depend on a pipe it didn’t own. Most of the world doesn’t get that option. Neither does Puerto Rico, as of this summer.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

— Richard h2otrends.com

That’s changing.

The recent cyberattacks on U.S. water systems made national news, and I’ve had more than one irrigation and water-management leader tell me, “That’s not us, that’s municipal water.” They’re right. Commercial irrigation is not a city treatment plant. But the operating issues underneath both are starting to look a lot more similar, and that should get your attention.

The Same Wires, the Same Risks

Think about what’s happened to a typical irrigation system over the last ten years. Controllers, sensors, pumps, valves, telemetry, weather stations, remote access, cloud dashboards, and reporting tools are all now part of the operating layer of water management. What used to be a box on a wall with a dial is now a node on a network.

That connectivity is a good thing. It’s how we cut labor, catch leaks before they become disasters, and prove water savings to a customer or a board. I’ve built my career on that promise.

But connectivity doesn’t just add capability. It adds exposure, and it changes the standard of responsibility that comes with selling and supporting these systems.

“Add Cybersecurity” Isn’t the Lesson

Here’s where I think a lot of irrigation and water-management companies are getting this wrong. The instinct is to treat this as a bolt-on: hire an IT consultant, publish a password policy, call it done.

That’s not the lesson. The real lesson is that connected water products now have to be designed, sold, installed, and supported as operational systems, not just as devices. A controller isn’t just a piece of hardware anymore. It’s part of an operating environment that someone, somewhere, is responsible for keeping trustworthy.

That has real implications for how our industry does business.

Secure configuration has to become part of the product experience. Right now, too much of this gets left to whoever installs the system, a contractor who’s paid to get the heads spraying on schedule, not to harden network settings. If the default configuration isn’t reasonably secure out of the box, we’re setting our customers up to fail, and eventually, one of them will.

Remote access is a controlled operating function, not a convenience feature. We sell remote access as a selling point: check your system from anywhere, adjust a zone from your phone. Fine. But every remote access point is also a door. Who has a key, how it’s issued, and how it’s revoked needs to be treated with the same seriousness as who has a key to the pump house.

Manufacturers and service providers need to train the people in the field better. The contractors who install and maintain these systems are the front line. Most of them came up learning irrigation, not IT. If we want secure systems in the ground, we have to give installers real training and documentation, not a PDF nobody reads.

Customers are going to start asking a different question. For years, the sales conversation was “how much water will this save me?” That question isn’t going away, but a second one is joining it: can this system be trusted, monitored, documented, and recovered if something goes wrong? I’d bet within a few years, that second question shows up in every RFP for a commercial or municipal irrigation contract.

Where the Industry Is Headed

The future of this industry was never just going to be smarter controllers and more efficient drip systems, even though those matter enormously and always will. The future is connected water management, and connected water management runs on trust: trust that the system does what it says, trust that it’s being watched, trust that if something breaks or gets breached, there’s a plan to recover.

The companies that understand this early, that build trust into the product instead of bolting it on after the fact, are going to have a real strategic advantage. The companies that keep treating connectivity as a feature on a spec sheet, instead of an operating responsibility they now own, are going to find themselves exposed. Maybe not this year. But soon.

I’ve watched this industry move from hand-turned valves to satellite-linked ET controllers over the course of my career. The technology curve has been the fun part. The trust curve is the part we need to get right next.

Thanks for reading Water Trends with Richard Restuccia. If this one got you thinking, forward it to someone on your ops or product team. This is a conversation worth having internally before a customer forces it.

“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.” - Martha Washington

This week’s Weird Week in Water, recorded with Chris Sabbarese, breaks down the coordinated cyberattack on more than 30 Minnesota water systems. Watch or listen to the full episode above, or read the recap below.

Late July. More than 30 municipal water systems across Minnesota got hit with what officials are calling a coordinated cyberattack. Plymouth, South St. Paul, Maple Plain, and Braham have all confirmed they were targeted. Within days, similar incidents turned up in at least six other states, Michigan among them.

That’s the headline. Here’s why it matters more than the ticker-tape treatment it got on the evening news.

What actually happened

Attackers got into internet-facing PLCs (programmable logic controllers) at water and wastewater facilities, the small industrial computers that run pumps, valves, and treatment processes. Once in, they reportedly changed IP addresses and passwords, locking operators out of their own systems and forcing several utilities into manual operation. Some communities issued boil water notices as a precaution.

Back in 2021, a plant operator in Oldsmar, Florida, watched his cursor move on its own as someone remotely tried to push sodium hydroxide levels to dangerous concentrations. In late 2023, an Iran-linked group called CyberAv3ngers broke into Unitronics PLCs at water utilities across the country, including the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. The exploit there wasn’t sophisticated. The devices were sitting on the open internet with the manufacturer’s default password: 1111.

Three different incidents, three different years, one common thread. Basic industrial controllers, reachable from anywhere, protected by weak or default credentials.

Why small utilities are the exposed ones

California alone has more than 450 separate water agencies. Multiply that across the country, and you get a system built almost entirely on small and mid-sized operators, not a handful of giants. A utility the size of San Diego’s has a cybersecurity team, incident response plans, and budget for it. A utility supplying 10,000 people usually doesn’t. It has people working hard to keep water flowing 24/7, and historically that hasn’t included a dedicated IT security function.

That mismatch is exactly what shows up in these attacks, and it echoes a pattern I’ve seen in agriculture too: during earlier waves of ransomware activity, attackers gravitated toward smaller agricultural operations precisely because they assumed less protection. Thinking you’re too small to be a target is what makes you a target.

What was actually at stake

The scariest scenario isn’t a shutdown. It’s contamination. If an attacker gets deep enough into a treatment process, the theoretical worst case includes cross-connecting raw sewage into a drinking water line. Even setting aside the acute public health risk, there’s a slower cost: trust. Once a community stops believing its water is safe, boiling water “just in case” for weeks, that confidence takes years to rebuild, regardless of whether real harm occurred.

Civilian water infrastructure carries a kind of protected status even in the context of armed conflict. Deliberately targeting it crosses a line that most nation-states, even hostile ones, have historically avoided. Seeing it happen anyway, however preliminary the attribution, is the part of this story that deserves more attention than it got.

Who’s actually in charge of fixing this

Nobody, structurally. There’s no single agency with operational authority over the country’s 150,000-plus public water systems. CISA and the EPA issue advisories. Responsibility for implementation sits with each individual utility. That’s the honest answer to “who’s in charge,” and it’s also the core vulnerability.

The fix, per CISA’s guidance after both the 2023 Unitronics incidents and this latest round, isn’t complicated:

• Get PLCs and HMIs off the open internet entirely

• Route any remote access through a VPN or firewall gateway, not a direct connection

• Replace every default or shared password with something an attacker can’t guess

• Require multi-factor authentication on remote access

• Make sure staff can still run the plant manually if the network goes dark

None of that requires new technology. It requires utilities, especially the small ones without a dedicated security budget, treating password hygiene and network segmentation as operational necessities, not optional upgrades.

The bigger pattern

This is the third unusual water story we’ve covered in three weeks: a sinkhole swallowing infrastructure, Glen Canyon Dam’s cavitation problem threatening hydropower and water delivery to Southern California, and now a coordinated hack across seven states. I don’t think that’s a coincidence of the news cycle. Water systems, built for a century of quiet, incremental operation, are now facing physical, mechanical, and digital stress all at once, and most of them were never resourced for any one of those, let alone all three.

If you work in the water sector, in irrigation, in agtech, or anywhere near a controller that’s reachable from the internet, this is worth forwarding to whoever owns that password. It won’t cost anything to fix. It costs everything not to.

Catch the full conversation with Chris Sabbarese in this week’s Weird Week in Water episode above. New episodes every Friday, with the deep-dive newsletter every Tuesday on H2O Trends.

This already happened, in a milder form

In early 2023, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly admitted ChatGPT had “shortcomings around bias” after a wave of complaints, led largely by conservative users, that the tool consistently argued from a left-leaning position. That wasn’t one person’s opinion. It’s been tested repeatedly since. A Washington Post analysis published in 2026 found ChatGPT answered nearly every politically contested question it was given with only left-leaning arguments, almost never presenting a right-leaning position at all. A Stanford-affiliated study found OpenAI’s models were perceived as having the strongest left-leaning slant of any major system tested. Academic researchers found the same pattern and noted the model would sometimes decline to generate content presenting a conservative viewpoint at all.

Here’s the part that should worry you more than a CEO with an agenda: nobody has shown this happened because Altman, or anyone else at OpenAI, wrote a rule saying “argue for the left.” It’s a byproduct of what the model was trained on, who wrote the internal guidelines, and what looked “balanced” to the people building it. A deliberate directive would at least be a single decision, made by one identifiable person, that could be found and reversed. A tilt baked into the training pipeline is harder to locate and harder to fix, and it can exist even when nobody intended it.

Where Claude lands on this

Fair to turn the same scrutiny on the tool that helps to write this newsletter. In the same Washington Post testing, Claude gave a left-leaning answer 43% of the time and presented both sides the other 57%. None of its answers were right-leaning only. For comparison, ChatGPT was left-leaning 80% of the time, DeepSeek 70%, and Gemini offered both sides more than 90% of the time, the best score in the group. Gemini was the most balanced, Claude and Grok in the middle, and ChatGPT and DeepSeek the most skewed.

Two honesty checks on that number. Anthropic published its own internal evaluation putting its current model at 94% “even-handedness,” close to Gemini and Grok, ahead of GPT-5’s 89%. That’s the company grading itself, a data point, not proof. Anthropic also pushed back on the Post’s methodology, arguing a 30-word response cap doesn’t reflect real use. Fair critique of any capped-word test. Also exactly what any company would say about a study that didn’t flatter it. Both can be true.

Worth knowing too: a political commentator has publicly claimed he shifted Claude’s answers toward a hard-right framing simply by priming the conversation with slanted context first. Whether or not it worked exactly as claimed, it’s a reminder that “leans left less than ChatGPT” and “can’t be pushed off center by a determined user” are not the same claim.

Closer to home: turf

The Altman example is clean because it's already been measured and reported on. The water industry has its own quieter version. Turf.

If enough of a model’s training data comes from xeriscape advocacy, turf-removal rebates, and drought-shaming coverage, none of it fringe, most of it well-funded, the model can absorb “turf is the problem” as settled fact rather than one position in a real debate. Nobody has to write a rule saying turf is bad. The tilt shows up in what nobody thought to balance, because it didn’t read as controversial to the people building the system. The sources a model treats as authoritative- extension programs, utility conservation departments, conservation nonprofits- mostly share an institutional position already. Not a conspiracy. Just where the funded research concentrates. The effect wouldn’t show in one conversation. It would show as a slow shift in framing across millions: “water-intensive turf” instead of “turf, which uses more water than some alternatives.”

I tested it directly: is turf grass a legitimate landscape choice in a drought-prone region? Full disclosure, I could only test my own system, not ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok. The answer I got: yes, with conditions. Warm-season species use meaningfully less water than cool-season varieties. Right-sized, properly irrigated turf does things hardscape doesn’t: cooling, stormwater infiltration, usable space. The real case against turf isn’t “grass is bad,” it’s oversized or mismanaged turf being a poor use of a scarce resource. A balanced answer, not a lean toward removal. One test on one system proves less than a real study, but it’s a fair invitation: run the same prompt on whatever tool you use, and see what comes back.

So can a CEO actually shift what the masses think?

Yes, to a real degree. Not without limit, and not without risk to the company, but yes.

The people running an AI company control the written rules the model follows, what counts as a sensitive topic, and what “balanced” is defined to mean. A CEO doesn’t need to instruct the model to argue one side. Deciding what counts as neutral is itself the lever. They also control the human feedback loop that shapes a model after training, soft enough that an unstated institutional preference can nudge outputs over time with no single decision anyone could point to later. Nobody outside the company sees the full training data or internal instructions. Outside researchers test outputs and infer bias from patterns, the way the studies above did. Real oversight, of the symptom, not the cause. It can prove a lean exists. It usually can’t prove why.

Here’s what limits it. A shipped model is static, text in, text out, at scale. A CEO can’t adjust it conversation by conversation, only set the default everyone gets, which means a deliberate tilt is uniform and detectable by anyone testing systematically. That’s what happened to OpenAI. Competitors have every incentive to test rivals and publicize what they find, market pressure, not principle, and it works. Once caught, a company pays: bad press, regulatory attention, lost enterprise customers who don’t want to defend the choice internally. And a user willing to ask for the other side can usually surface a lean themselves, in one conversation, without waiting for a journalist.

The honest bottom line

Someone at the top of an AI company can shift a model’s default framing. Not paranoia, a documented lever with a documented example behind it. What stops it from becoming invisible, permanent control over how people think isn’t a promise from the company. It’s that the shift is uniform, testable, and gets caught by competitors, by researchers, by users who bother to check.

Not “it can’t happen.” It already has, measurably, to more than one company. What keeps it from being total is scrutiny, applied from outside, by people who don’t take the tool’s word for it. That goes for irrigation software as much as it goes for a chatbot. If your smart controller’s ET model only ever confirms your existing schedule, ask why.

“It’s the job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish. A year from now, you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb

Weird Week in Water: Infrastructure Edition

This week’s episode: a pipe that lost a race against its own replacement schedule, and a dam that might be cooking itself from the inside.

We get into two stories that sound like they shouldn’t be connected. A burst water main in West Hollywood and a physics problem threatening Glen Canyon Dam, but both come down to the same thing: infrastructure built for assumptions that stopped holding.

What we cover:

The West Hollywood water main wasn’t a surprise failure. The century-old 36-inch trunk line was already scheduled for replacement in 2031. It just didn’t wait. We talk through why this was a delivery failure and not a supply failure, and why that distinction should matter more to this industry than it does to the news cycle.

Then we get into cavitation at Glen Canyon Dam: tiny air bubbles imploding at over 10,000°F inside the dam’s outlet tubes as low water forces the Bureau of Reclamation to bypass the turbines. It’s the same failure mode that nearly took out the spillways in 1983. Back then it was too much water. Now it’s not enough. Same dam, opposite problem.

Chris and I dig into what each of these actually signals for people working in water and irrigation, not just the headline version.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

The question: if an AI supports your view on sustainability, is it because you’re right, or because it’s built to agree with you? And if it can be tuned to agree, what stops it from quietly shaping how you think?

Fair question. Worth answering in public, because AI is now writing irrigation schedules, drafting water budgets, and advising utility boards. If it has a lean, the industry should know.

Facts versus tradeoffs

Split this into two categories.

Some things are settled. Human-caused climate change. The mechanics of evapotranspiration. The fact that overwatering turf doesn’t make it healthier. An AI system that pretends these are open debates, just to make a user feel validated, has failed at its basic job. That’s not neutrality. That’s flattery dressed up as balance.

Other things are not settled. Should a district price water by tier or by budget-based allocation? Is centralized smart control worth the cost over distributed soil sensors? Should a utility fund turf replacement or graywater systems with the same dollar amount? These are tradeoffs. Reasonable people in this industry disagree, and for real reasons: local hydrology, rate structures, politics, and capital constraints.

A good AI tool treats these two categories differently. Settled science gets a straight answer. Contested tradeoffs get the actual range of expert opinion, not the tool’s personal favorite.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Ask an AI tool whether smart controllers reduce landscape water use, and a good answer is direct: yes, the field data is consistent on that, with a range depending on baseline scheduling quality. Ask the same tool whether a municipality should mandate smart controllers versus offering rebates, and a good answer stops being direct. Mandates get compliance faster but cost more in enforcement and pushback. Rebates get slower adoption but better buy-in and lower administrative overhead. Districts with tight staffing lean one way, districts with strong political capital lean the other. Neither is the “right” answer, and a tool that picks one and states it with the same confidence as the ET data has quietly swapped a policy opinion for a fact.

The real risk isn’t lying. It’s agreeing.

Nobody worried about AI thinks the danger is a robot cackling and feeding you false data. The danger is quieter. Models get trained to be helpful and pleasant. Pleasant slides into agreeable. Agreeable slides into telling you what you already believe, back to you, with more confidence than you started with.

For a water manager, that’s a specific and practical risk. If you ask an AI to evaluate your drought response plan, and it just validates the plan you already wrote, you haven’t gotten a second opinion. You’ve gotten an echo with better grammar.

So what actually stops the drift

Ask an AI company what prevents this, and you’ll usually get a policy statement. Here’s the more mechanical answer, and where it falls short.

Training data sets the starting bias, and nobody fully audits it. A model learns from a huge slice of human writing. That writing already contains skew, on climate, on politics, on water policy, on everything. Filtering catches some of it. Nobody inspects all of it. So the model starts from an inherited lean, not a blank slate. That’s a real, unresolved limitation, not a talking point.

Human feedback is where agreeableness gets baked in, or trained out. After initial training, companies use human reviewers to rate responses and reinforce the ones people prefer. This step is exactly where sycophancy creeps in, because “the answer I wanted to hear” often scores higher than “the answer that challenged me.” A company serious about the problem has to grade responses specifically for pushing back when warranted, not just for being pleasant. Most of the industry is still weak here.

Written rules can instruct a model to separate settled fact from contested opinion, and to argue against the user on request. This helps. It is still a soft constraint. A determined user can sometimes talk a model out of it through persistence or reframing, much like a persuasive person can wear down a colleague. Rules reduce the problem. They don’t eliminate it.

External review and red-teaming catch some of the drift after the fact. Researchers test models for political lean and excessive agreement. Real, but it’s sampling, not full coverage. It catches patterns, not every instance, on every topic.

None of this replaces the user. This is the part companies underplay. The most reliable check isn’t inside the model. It’s a user who notices a tool that only ever validates them and treats that as a warning sign rather than a compliment. Mechanisms within the model reduce the likelihood of drift. They don’t guarantee it won’t happen to you, on your question, today.

What this means for water professionals using AI tools

A few practical habits, whether you’re using AI for controller programming, rate design, board reports, or content like this newsletter:

Ask it to argue the other side. If you propose a plan, ask the tool to build the strongest case against it. A tool that can’t or won’t do this is not giving you real analysis.

Watch for constant agreement. If every idea you bring gets validated, that’s not a sign you’re right every time. It’s a sign the tool isn’t doing its job.

Keep settled science and open debate separate in your own head. Don’t let a tool blur “the data says X” with “reasonable people could go either way.” Push it to tell you which one it’s giving you.

Cross-check anything that drives a budget or a board decision. No AI tool should be the only source behind a six-figure capital recommendation.

Next week: the harder version of this question. Can the person running an AI company actually shift how the public thinks, on purpose, and get away with it? Short answer: yes, more than most people assume, and less invisibly than the fear implies. Part 2 walks through the evidence, including a real case that has already occurred, and applies the same scrutiny to the tool that writes this newsletter.

Here’s why that date matters more than the last one.

The February deadline came and went

Seven states had until February 14 to agree on how to manage the river once the current guidelines expire at the end of this year. They didn’t. Negotiations have been running since 2022, and the states are still deadlocked on the same core question: who absorbs the cuts.

Nevada’s chief negotiator put it bluntly. Years of talks, almost no progress. Arizona has set aside $1 million for litigation, with a bill in the works to add another million. Colorado’s attorney general has told lawmakers he’s ready to go to court too.

Everyone says they’d rather negotiate than litigate. Nobody has moved.

Why October is different

Missing February had no built-in consequence. Missing October does. If the states don’t reach a deal, the Interior Secretary can impose the federal government’s own plan, cutting deliveries to the Lower Basin by up to 3 million acre-feet a year. That’s roughly 40 percent of what Arizona, California, and Nevada are currently entitled to under the compact.

The Bureau published five alternative management plans back in January. If negotiators can’t land on something themselves, one of those five gets imposed on them.

And this year isn’t giving anyone room to maneuver. Snowpack has been among the worst on record. The system, as one coalition of conservation groups put it, is operating with little margin for delay.

What happens if it goes to court

Nobody wins that scenario, and not because of rhetoric. A Supreme Court case over Colorado River allocation could take decades to resolve. States would operate under interim rules the whole time, leaving agricultural and municipal water users guessing year to year. The 1922 compact that divides the river was never built for this kind of dispute, and there’s no fast version of untangling it.

There’s a more hopeful version of this. The Bureau could choose to issue short-term rules rather than a permanent framework, giving the states more time to negotiate with outside help. Basin water managers have pointed to the Yakima River process in Washington state as a model. It took years, and nobody got everything they wanted, but it worked because every party got something.

Governors from both basins say they’re still talking. Utah’s Cox and Wyoming’s Gordon called a recent meeting encouraging. Arizona’s Hobbs said the same, while also accusing the Upper Basin of digging in. That’s the state of play: cautious optimism in public, litigation funds in the background.

Why this matters beyond the basin

If you sell, install, or manage irrigation anywhere in the Southwest, this isn’t a policy story. It’s a water allocation story, and it will show up in your customers’ budgets before it shows up in the news. Ag operations tied to Colorado River allocations are the most exposed. Landscape and turf are next, especially in municipalities that lean on Colorado River deliveries for a meaningful share of supply.

Ten weeks out, the states have two options left: agree on their own terms, or have terms handed to them. Watch what comes out of Washington between now and October. It’ll tell you more about water pricing and availability in the Southwest than anything else on the calendar this year.

NQH2O: $342.74/acre-foot. The Nasdaq Veles California Water Index. The spot price of water entitlements traded on the CME, updated every Wednesday.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler

This week Chris and I sat down to talk through three of the strangest water stories we found. From a data center developer suing an irrigation district for the very water it swore it would never need, to a mystery bacterium showing up in an AI data center's wastewater. Full breakdown in the video above.

This week’s stories:

• The reversal — An Imperial Valley data center developer sues its irrigation district for the very river water it spent months publicly pledging it wouldn’t need

• The mystery bug — Cheyenne shuts down its water reuse program after a rare, hospital-grade bacterium turns up in a Meta data center’s cooling discharge

• The unexpected splash — A woman gives birth in the bathroom at a North Carolina waterpark; the park reportedly claps

The district that depends on it, Pathfinder Irrigation District, told its customers this week it could run out of deliverable water by the first week of August. Not because of mismanagement. Because of a winter that simply didn’t deliver.

The number that tells the story

As of Thursday, Pathfinder Irrigation District had about 393,000 acre-feet of irrigation water remaining for the season. At the same point last year, the district had 676,900 acre-feet. That’s nearly half the cushion, in one year.

Source: Cowboy State Daily, July 9, 2026, citing Pathfinder Irrigation District and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The cause traces back to snowpack. George Finnegan, the North Platte water scheduler and a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, told Cowboy State Daily that peak snowpack in the upper North Platte Basin this past winter, which supplies roughly 75 percent of the river’s water, was the worst on record. Wyoming had its fifth-driest winter since statewide records began in 1895. About 45 percent of the state is currently in extreme drought.

Irrigation districts on this system normally start pulling water in April. This year, deliveries didn’t begin until June. There simply wasn’t enough runoff to justify starting earlier.

The part that doesn’t show up in the snowpack maps

Here’s the detail worth sitting with if you work in this industry. The shortage isn’t only about how much water fell as snow. It’s about how much of what did fall is disappearing before it reaches a farm.

Months of dry weather left canal banks and the surrounding soil parched. When water finally moves through the system, a meaningful share of it seeps straight into the ground before reaching the end users. “That hungry ground, it takes up the water,” Finnegan said. Irrigation districts across the basin are pushing more water through their canals than usual just to deliver the same amount downstream.

That’s a physical, structural problem, not a rainfall problem, and it’s compounding on top of the drought rather than being caused by it. Every irrigation professional reading this has seen some version of this at smaller scale: infrastructure built for a wetter era loses efficiency exactly when efficiency matters most.

Bad luck stacked on bad luck

A June 8 storm caused seven canal breaches in the Pathfinder system, five of them major. Repair crews and equipment that should have been prepping canals ahead of the season got diverted to emergency fixes instead. On June 15, the district went as far as renting a water truck to help with canal repairs.

The Bureau of Reclamation has started sending Pathfinder and other North Platte districts weekly allocation letters, something that only happens in low-water years. Last year also triggered those letters, but districts still had carryover storage from wetter years to lean on. Finnegan’s assessment: “We’ve been kind of living off of that storage.” This year, that cushion is largely gone.

An annual “silt run,” a scheduled high-flow release designed to scour sediment through the system and reduce canal seepage, was set for this past Saturday. District officials were clear it will help, but won’t solve the underlying shortfall. They’ve also said they don’t favor borrowing water for the season, since borrowed water carries a high cost per acre-foot and has to be repaid before next year’s irrigation season even starts. That’s a district choosing not to mortgage next year to patch this one.

For now, the message to irrigators is blunt: conserve every drop, or the water could be gone in a few weeks.

Why this matters past Wyoming

This isn’t an isolated basin problem. Nebraska’s Platte River districts are dealing with their own version of the same year. Lake McConaughy, the state’s largest storage reservoir, entered the season at roughly 51 percent capacity, about 30 points below typical levels. Producers across the Panhandle are already having conversations about switching to lower-water crops like sorghum and millet in place of corn and sugar beets, and reviewing crop insurance and prevented-planting options before the water runs out on them instead of the other way around.

None of this is happening because anyone did anything wrong. It’s what a below-average snowpack year does when it lands on top of infrastructure that was already carrying more seepage loss than anyone wants to admit. That combination, aging delivery systems plus a thinner margin for error, is exactly the argument for the precision monitoring and efficiency investment this industry has been making for the last decade. The districts that can measure seepage, target repairs, and account for every acre-foot in near real time are the ones with the best shot at stretching what’s left of this year’s water. The ones still managing by rule of thumb are the ones most exposed.

Pathfinder’s situation is a preview, not an outlier. Watch this basin through August.

NQH2O: $297.97/acre-foot. The Nasdaq Veles California Water Index — the spot price of water entitlements traded on the CME, updated every Wednesday.

For years, the irrigation sale was a hardware sale. A smart controller. A drip retrofit. Better nozzles. The pitch was the product, and the product was the point.

That pitch is no longer enough.

Customers don’t want to hear that a controller can save water. They want to know why they should believe it. Then they want someone to prove it.

That shift changes what we’re actually selling.

Buy-In Isn’t the Finish Line

Every sales process in this industry still starts the same way. Get the customer to agree that water-efficient technology can save them money. That part hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is what happens next. Buy-in used to be enough to write the order. Now it’s just the opening move. The customer wants a number, and they want that number defended before they sign anything.

The 25-50% Problem

Walk into most sales conversations in this industry, and you’ll still hear some version of “we typically save customers 25 to 50 percent.”

That range isn’t a lie. It’s an industry average, pulled from studies and case histories that have nothing to do with the property sitting in front of you. It’s not wrong. It’s just not proof.

Customers are starting to notice the difference. They don’t want a range borrowed from somewhere else. They want a number built from their own site.

Contractors who keep leading with the range are going to keep losing deals to the ones who show up with a bill and a calculation instead.

The Water Bill Is the Baseline

The most useful document in this entire process isn’t a spec sheet. It’s the water bill.

Pull twelve months of billing history, and you have a real, defensible baseline. Not an estimate. Not an industry average. What this property has actually been paying, month by month, through every season.

This is the number against which the rest of the pitch is measured.

ET Data Sets the Target

Apply evapotranspiration data to the property, and a second number appears: what they should have been paying if irrigation matched actual plant water needs instead of habit, guesswork, or a controller running on a fixed schedule from 2009.

Now there are two numbers on the table. What they paid. What they should have paid. The gap between them isn’t a sales estimate. It’s math, built from their own data and public weather data. That’s a very different conversation than “trust me, this saves water.”

The Presentation Sells the Delta

Everything after that is packaging. Put together hardware and software recommendations sized to close the gap between those two numbers. Price the system. Then let the delta do the selling.

If the annual savings the ET data says are available exceed the cost of the system, the payment structures itself. The proposal isn’t asking the customer to spend money. It’s asking them to redirect money they’re already spending on waste to equipment that prevents it.

Documentation Doesn’t End at the Sale

This is where the industry is genuinely changing. Proof used to stop at the proposal. Now it has to continue after installation, because customers need it for three different reasons that didn’t used to overlap:

• Verification. Did the savings materialize as the ET model predicted?

• Compliance. Ordinances like California’s AB 1572 don’t just ask customers to reduce water use. Increasingly, they ask for documentation that they did.

• Renewal. The next expansion, the next site, the next budget cycle all get easier to fund when the last project has a paper trail behind it.

Written case studies still matter here, but they’re no longer sufficient on their own. Video walkthroughs and webinars are doing more of this work now, because a customer explaining their own results on camera is harder to dismiss than a PDF with a logo on it. The format is shifting because the audience’s skepticism is shifting.

The Controller Keeps Score

Every piece of evidence discussed so far centers on the sale. The bill sets the baseline. The ET data sets the target. The case study and the webinar happen after the fact, built by someone, presented to someone.

A flow sensor changes that. Attach one to the system and the controller stops being just a scheduling device. It becomes a reporting tool that runs on its own, week over week, season over season, year over year, without anyone pulling records or building a deck.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. Self-certifying compliance with a law like AB 1572 tells a board or regulator that the water was turned off. It says nothing about whether consumption actually dropped and stayed down. A flow sensor does. It’s the difference between a one-time statement and a running record.

Now imagine that record landing directly in front of the property owner or manager, automatically, without a contractor or a consultant standing between the data and the decision-maker. No annual audit. No waiting on a report someone has to remember to send. Just a dashboard or an email that shows, on its own schedule, whether the system is still doing what it was sold to do.

That’s not a sales tool anymore. That’s a retention tool, a renewal tool, and an early-warning system for a broken head or a runaway zone, all built into the same proof the customer already asked for at the start.

What This Means for the Sale

The controller, the drip line, the telemetry hardware — none of that disappeared as the product. But it stopped being the deliverable that closes the deal.

The deliverable that closes the deal now is the number. Water bill data in. ET data applied. Delta calculated. Proposal sized to the gap. And after the install, a record that shows the gap actually closed.

Hardware still matters. But it’s no longer what’s being sold. Proof is.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

NQH2O: $274.96/acre-foot. The Nasdaq Veles California Water Index — the spot price of water entitlements traded on the CME, updated every Wednesday.

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The contractor gets the call.

Not the water agency. Not the manufacturer. Not the app. The person with a truck and a license who shows up twice a month already has the relationship, the access, and the credibility. The industry keeps building programs and products as if the end user will figure it out. They won’t. The contractor is the last mile, and almost nobody is equipping them to do the job.

The Accidental Advisor

Nobody put this in the job description. Irrigation contractors signed up to install heads, troubleshoot valves, and keep turf alive. But the job has quietly expanded. Customers are getting letters from water agencies. Municipal restrictions are tightening. Rebate programs are multiplying. And somewhere between the second and third service call, the contractor became the most trusted voice in the room on all of it.

That’s not a complaint. That’s an opportunity. But only if the industry treats it like one.

Right now, most contractors are navigating this role without support. They’re answering compliance questions they weren’t trained to answer, quoting water savings they can’t document, and steering customers through rebate programs they barely understand themselves. They’re doing their best. Their best would be a lot better with better tools.

What’s Actually Broken

Three things keep coming up when you talk to contractors in the field.

The first is confidence. Contractors can tell a customer a smart controller will save water. What they can’t do is say how much, show a number that holds up, or explain what that means against a water bill. The ROI conversation stalls because there’s nothing to hand the customer. No calculator. No benchmark. No before-and-after framework that a non-technical homeowner can follow. So contractors avoid the conversation. They install the product and move on.

The second is documentation. Agencies are increasingly asking for performance records. HOAs want compliance reports. Commercial customers want to show their sustainability commitments on paper. Contractors don’t have a system for this. Most are running scheduling software and invoicing tools that don’t talk to each other, let alone generate anything a water district would recognize. The data exists in the controller. Nobody has made it easy to get out.

The third is the rebate maze. California alone has hundreds of active rebate programs across municipal water agencies, regional authorities, and state programs. They have different eligibility rules, product lists, documentation requirements, and submission timelines. Contractors who try to stay current burn time they don’t have. Most have learned a handful of programs in their area and quietly ignore the rest. Customers leave money on the table. Manufacturers lose sales that rebates would have funded.

None of these are contractor failures. They’re system failures. The industry built the products. It did not build the support structure around them.

The Dependency Problem

Here is what makes this hard. Contractors are independent operators. They are busy, skeptical of overhead, and allergic to anything that looks like more administrative work. Any program that requires a two-day certification, a proprietary portal, or a curriculum that takes three hours to complete will reach ten percent of the market if it’s lucky.

Manufacturers keep designing contractor programs for the ideal contractor. The ideal contractor has time to train, is eager to learn new software, and follows up on leads. That contractor exists. There are not enough of them to move the market.

The real contractor is running four crews, quoting jobs on a phone between stops, and making purchasing decisions based on what worked last week. Reaching that contractor means fitting into their existing workflow. Not the workflow manufacturers wish they had.

This is not a criticism. It is a design constraint. Programs that ignore it fail quietly. Products that respect it scale.

What Manufacturers Could Actually Do

This is the part of the conversation that usually stays theoretical. It does not have to.

Retrofit kits with documentation built in. Not a product and a separate instruction sheet. A kit in which the paperwork, the rebate eligibility checklist, and the customer-facing one-pager are included in what is handed over at the job site. The contractor does not have to assemble this from three different sources. It comes in the box.

ROI calculators that work on a phone in the field. Not a web portal that requires a login. A simple tool where the contractor enters the site size, the current controller type, and the local water rate, and gets a number they can show the customer before the conversation ends. One screen. One output. Something the customer can photograph and keep.

Regional rebate summaries updated quarterly. One page per service area. What programs are active, what they cover, what the documentation requirements are, and who to call. Distributed through the distributor network, not through a manufacturer website that contractors may or may not visit. Put it where the contractor already goes.

Training that fits in thirty minutes. Not a certification program. A video series. Ten episodes, three minutes each. Specific scenarios. How to talk about water savings. How to handle the compliance question. How to walk a customer through a rebate application. Contractors will watch three minutes between jobs. They will not clear a morning for a webinar.

None of this is expensive relative to the sales it would unlock. The barrier is not budget. It is organizational will to treat contractor enablement as a product category, not a marketing afterthought.

The Upside Nobody’s Talking About

Here is what changes when a contractor can actually do this job.

The contractor who documents savings becomes indispensable. The contractor who navigates rebates gets referrals. The contractor who explains compliance earns a managed account instead of a service call. The relationship changes from transactional to advisory. Customers stop shopping on price because they are no longer buying a service. They are buying someone who knows what they are doing in a regulatory environment that keeps getting more complicated.

That is a stickier customer. That is a higher-margin business. And for the manufacturer who helped the contractor get there, it is a distribution channel that competitors cannot easily replicate. The contractor is now selling your ecosystem, not just your product.

The water industry has spent twenty years trying to figure out how to reach the end user. Sustainability campaigns. Consumer rebates. Smart home integrations. Some of it has worked. Most of it has underperformed because it skipped a step.

The contractor is the step.

This Has Been Done Before

This is not a theoretical framework. In an earlier chapter of my career, I built exactly this kind of program. Contractor training, field tools, rebate navigation support, ROI documentation at a national landscape company that was trying to turn water management from a compliance burden into a competitive advantage. It worked. Branches who went through the program sold more, retained customers longer, and became the go-to advisor in their markets. The manufacturers who supported it gained distribution loyalty that price alone never would have bought. The blueprint exists. It has been tested at scale. The industry just needs more companies willing to pick it up.

The Contractor in the Driveway

Every sophisticated water-management program eventually runs into the same problem. The technology is ready. The policy is in place. The economics make sense. And somewhere between the agency announcement and the customer’s irrigation clock, nothing happens.

The contractor is standing in the driveway. They have the customer’s attention, the system access, and the trust built over years of showing up. What they often lack is the training, tools, or support to close the gap between what the industry has built and what customers actually adopt.

That is a fixable problem. The industry just has to decide it is worth fixing.

Eat Less. Drink More... Water.

Every doctor prescribing a GLP-1 drug delivers the same instruction: when your appetite drops, protect your protein intake. Eat less overall, but make what you eat count. Protein first. Every meal. Every day.

This is not a wellness preference. It is a clinical directive baked into GLP-1 treatment protocols.

And it is reshaping what Americans buy, what food manufacturers produce, and what farmers are asked to grow.

The Protein Boom Is Real

Consumer demand for protein is up 10 percentage points in a single year. At the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference in February, Kerry Group stopped calling protein a trend. They called it a design requirement.

Retail meat sales hit a record $104.6 billion in 2024. The global protein powder market is projected to grow from $28.8 billion to nearly $60 billion by 2035. Protein bars, ready-to-drink shakes, and high-protein reformulations across every grocery category.

GLP-1 adoption did not create the protein trend. But it turbocharged it and gave it a medical mandate.

And the market behind these drugs is not slowing down. Morgan Stanley projects global GLP-1 revenues will hit $190 billion by 2035 — more than double 2025 levels. That means tens of millions more patients receiving the same instruction: protein first.

Protein Is Thirsty

Here is what the food industry coverage is missing.

Animal protein production is among the most water-intensive activities in agriculture. The water embedded in a pound of beef, chicken, or pork is not visible at the grocery store. But it is very visible to anyone managing irrigation systems, monitoring aquifers, or working in water supply.

The “protein first” shift is not neutral from a water standpoint. Calories per person may be dropping. But the water-intensive portion of the American diet is holding, or growing.

Feed grains to support livestock. Alfalfa. Soy. The crops that end up as protein on 30 million medically directed plates all carry a water price tag.

What the Irrigation Industry Should Be Watching

The demand signal reshaping what gets planted in the Central Valley, the Midwest, and the High Plains aquifer region is no longer coming only from population growth or export markets. Part of it is now coming from a prescription pad.

GLP-1 users are eating less. But they are eating more deliberately. Research published this year found that GLP-1 adoption is linked to a greater willingness to pay for animal protein and reduced price sensitivity when purchasing meat. These are not people cutting back on steak. They are people eating less pasta and more chicken breast, fewer chips, and more Greek yogurt.

The water footprint per calorie consumed may actually be rising rather than falling.

A Shift Nobody in Water Is Talking About

The irrigation industry is good at talking about efficiency at the field level. Drip systems. Soil moisture sensors. ET-based scheduling. All of it matters.

But the demand signal reshaping which crops get planted, how many acres go into production, and how much pressure lands on western water systems is now being partly driven by a drug most water professionals have never thought about professionally.

Thirty million Americans following “protein first” instructions is an agricultural water story. It just hasn’t been framed that way yet.

It should be.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

The number is real. It’s also the wrong number to be arguing about.

Here’s what’s actually going on.

Withdrawals vs. Consumptive Use

There are two ways to measure water use. Withdrawals count every gallon taken from a river, lake, or aquifer, regardless of what happens to it next. Consumptive use counts only the water that doesn’t come back. Water that evaporates, gets absorbed by crops, or leaves the watershed for good.

These are not the same thing. Not even close.

Thermoelectric power plants are the clearest example. They withdraw enormous volumes of water as coolant. In 2015, that was 133 billion gallons per day, roughly 41% of all U.S. water withdrawals. But most of it goes right back into the waterway. The consumptive share is tiny. Only about 3% of thermoelectric withdrawals are actually consumed.

Agriculture works the other way. Of the roughly 118 billion gallons per day withdrawn for irrigation in 2015, about 62% was consumed. Evapotranspired by crops, lost to the atmosphere, gone from the water cycle.

So when someone says agriculture uses 80% of America’s water, they’re typically measuring consumptive use. And that number is legitimate. This isn’t a myth to dismiss.

But here’s where it gets important.

The Number That Actually Matters

Irrigation accounts for roughly 47% of the nation’s total freshwater withdrawals. Not 80%. The 80% figure refers to consumptive use, but most water policy conversations use “use” to mean withdrawals, then quietly cite consumptive use data when it fits the argument.

The framing is inconsistent. And inconsistent framing produces bad policy.

Here is my take. Agriculture’s consumptive share is high because it has to be. When a plant transpires water, that water fed people. That is fundamentally different from a power plant drawing water for cooling, using 3% of it, and returning 97% downstream.

The honest conversation is not whether agriculture uses a lot of water. It does. The honest conversation is: compared to what alternative? You cannot grow food without consuming water. You can, however, choose how efficiently you consume it. And here is where modern agriculture, precision drip irrigation, soil moisture sensing, and ET-based scheduling have made extraordinary progress that the 80% narrative completely ignores.

What the Stat Gets Wrong About the Opportunity

The 80% framing pushes policy toward taking water away from agriculture. The consumptive-use lens pushes policy toward reducing the amount of water used per bushel, per acre, or per unit of food produced.

Those are very different interventions with very different outcomes.

Brant Peterson in Kansas runs twice the sorghum acreage on the same water it used to take for corn. Warren Ag Services in California’s Central Valley cut water use 45 to 57% over three consecutive seasons using real-time soil moisture data. These aren’t outliers. They’re what happens when farmers have the tools and the economic incentive to use water efficiently.

The 80% stat treats agriculture as the problem. The real story is that agriculture is the place where water efficiency gains are largest, most achievable, and most consequential. Conflating withdrawals with consumptive use obscures that.

Ask the Right Question

Next time someone cites the 80% number in a policy debate, ask them: which 80%? Withdrawals? Consumptive use? And what portion of that is already being reduced by the farmers who actually understand the cost of water?

The answer will tell you a lot about whether they understand the problem they’re trying to solve.

Agriculture is not the villain in America’s water story. It is the sector where the story gets written one acre-inch at a time. The framing we use determines whether we get the ending right.

Learning to tell the difference could save your garden this summer.

Why Too Much Water Is Actually Suffocation

Plants need two things from soil: water and oxygen. Healthy soil has air pockets that deliver oxygen directly to the roots. When you overwater, those air pockets fill with water and stay filled. Your plant’s roots literally suffocate due to a condition called waterlogging. The plant wilts not because it’s thirsty, but because it can’t breathe.

This is why overwatering can be so hard to diagnose. The plant looks thirsty. You water more. It gets worse. Sound familiar?

Six Signs You’re Overwatering

• Yellowing leaves: especially on lower or older growth. This is the classic tell.

• Mushy or brown leaf tips: the edges look burned, but the soil is wet.

• Wilting despite wet soil: this is the single biggest diagnostic clue. Stick your finger two inches down. If the soil is damp and the plant is still drooping, you’re overwatering.

• Mold or algae on the soil surface: consistently wet soil is a welcome mat for fungus.

• Root rot: if you pull a struggling plant and the roots are brown, slimy, or fall apart, overwatering is almost certainly the cause.

• Stunted growth or no new leaves: roots that can’t breathe can’t grow, and neither can the plant above.

Six Signs You’re Underwatering

• Dry, crispy leaf edges: browning that starts at the tips and moves inward.

• Wilting in dry soil: push your finger two inches into the ground. Bone dry? The plant is thirsty.

• Leaves curling inward: the plant is conserving moisture by reducing its exposed surface area.

• Soil pulling away from the pot edges: severely dry soil contracts and separates.

• Dull or faded leaf color: healthy leaves should be vibrant. Water-stressed plants lose their color.

• Slow recovery after watering: a thirsty plant should perk up within an hour of a good drink. If it doesn’t, check the roots.

Trust Your Instincts

As a water manager, you will develop a feel for this over time. Think about it this way: if you’ve gone many days without watering and your plants look great, then they start to wilt the next day, that’s underwatering. If you’ve been watering every day and they start to wilt, you already know intuitively what the problem is.

When people ask me about yellowing leaves, I always ask them the same question: what do you think? Too much water or too little? Almost every time, they already have a sense of the answer. And they are usually right. You know your garden better than any tool does.

The Simplest Diagnostic Tool You Already Have

Your finger. Push it two inches into the soil near the root zone. If it’s still moist and the plant is showing distress, you’re likely overwatering. If it’s dry, water immediately.

Most gardeners are shocked to discover how often they’re overwatering. We tend to equate care with water. That’s a hard habit to break.

Going Deeper: The Irrometer Tensiometer

For those who want to take the guesswork out entirely, I use an Irrometer tensiometer in my own garden. It’s the same technology commercial growers use to measure soil moisture tension how hard the plant’s roots have to work to pull water from the soil. The gauge reads in centibars: 10–30 cb is the sweet spot for most vegetables and ornamentals (that’s “field capacity” soil that’s moist but has full air pockets). Below 10 cb you’re overwatering. Above 50–60 cb for most crops, you’re underwatering.

It has completely changed how I water my tomatoes. Instead of guessing, I check the gauge each morning and water only when the reading climbs toward 30–35 cb. The plants are healthier, more productive, and I’m using meaningfully less water.

Think of It Like Hunger

Here’s the framework that makes this click for most people. Think about how you feel when you’re hungry. Not just peckish, genuinely hungry, approaching hangry. Your performance suffers. Your mood suffers. Now imagine if someone could measure your hunger in real time and feed you just as you started to get hungry, every single time. You’d be a different person.

That’s what your plants want. We want to water them to field capacity, monitor moisture drawdown, and give them the right amount just as they get thirsty again. Not drenched. Not parched. Just right. This keeps plants thriving and keeps water where it belongs.

It’s Bigger Than Your Garden

Overwatering isn’t just bad for your plants. Stressed, waterlogged roots are more susceptible to pests and disease. In the vegetable garden, overwatering suppresses the yield you work all season for, a harvest that underperforms because the roots were never healthy. And at a broader level, excessive irrigation contributes to groundwater contamination, increases energy use for pumping systems, and wastes a resource that California and much of the American West simply cannot afford to squander.

The same principle that saves your roses applies on an agricultural scale. The stakes are just a lot higher than a dead rosebush.

"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic." — Peter Drucker

A note before we dive in: This interview was recorded about five years ago, when I sat down with Charles to mark the ten-year anniversary of The Big Thirst. I’m sharing it now because the conversation is as relevant today as the day we recorded it, maybe more so. The full webinar is embedded above if you’d prefer to watch. Otherwise, read on.

If you work in water, you probably owe Charles Fishman a thank you.

His 2011 book The Big Thirst did something that almost no one in our industry had managed to do before: it made ordinary people care about water. Not in a hand-wringing, gloom-and-doom way, but in a way that made them lean in, ask questions, and actually think about what comes out of the tap. Today, over 125 colleges assign it as required reading for incoming freshmen. Think about that, a water book that professors reach for when they want to set the stage for an entire academic year.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Charles to mark the book’s ten-year anniversary. We talked about what he got right, what’s changed, and why he believes the decade ahead will be the most consequential period for water management in human history.

Spoiler: he’s optimistic. And after an hour with him, so am I.

It Started With a Bottle of Fiji Water

Charles didn’t set out to write a water book. He stumbled into it the way the best journalism often starts, with a simple question that wouldn’t let go.

Checking into a Miami hotel with his wife, he spotted a half-liter of Fiji water on the nightstand with a $7 charge attached. His wife had the cap off before the door closed. Charles thought: Does this water actually come from Fiji?

It did. And here’s the kicker: at the time, nearly 60% of Fijians didn’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. You could walk into any CVS in America and buy water from a country whose own people couldn’t drink it.

That story led to a month in Australia, a month in Las Vegas, a month in India, and eventually to one of the most important water books ever written.

The lesson from Fiji itself? Not what you’d expect. In the U.S., Fiji water is a $7 indulgence. In Fiji, the bottling plant employs 400 people and generates revenue equal to that of the entire national sugar industry. “It’s a ridiculous product on the shelf of Walgreens in America,” Charles told me. “In Fiji, it’s a work of genius.”

Context matters in water. Always.

What He Got Right

Ten years on, how does The Big Thirst hold up?

Remarkably well, and not by accident.

Charles spent time in places actively wrestling with water problems: Las Vegas during its conservation push, Australia mid-drought, and India, where cities of millions were operating on two-hour daily water windows. He also spent 10 days embedded in Galveston, Texas, after Hurricane Ike flooded the entire water system with 8 feet of water.

Sound familiar? As we recorded this conversation, Texas was again in crisis, this time with utilities across the state losing power mid-storm and water systems going offline across major metro areas. The questions Galveston faced in 2008 — where do you find replacement pumps? Why is the electrical control room forty feet from the ocean at sea level? — are the same questions being asked today.

“The problems I wrote about weren’t new, and they aren’t going away. What’s going to happen is they’re going to become much more widespread.” — Charles Fishman

He also made a deliberate editorial choice that looks prescient now: the phrase “climate change” doesn’t appear anywhere in The Big Thirst. That was intentional. “I didn’t want the book to become something people dismissed or adopted based on their politics. I wanted people to take water seriously.” He acknowledges you couldn’t write the book that way today, but the effect was that the book reached audiences that a more politically coded framing never would have.

The Next Ten Years

Here’s where the conversation got genuinely exciting.

Charles believes we’re entering a period of unprecedented water innovation, not because the problems are getting easier, but because the urgency is finally matching the scale of what’s needed.

A few things he’s watching:

Data and AI are underutilized in water, and that’s about to change. “Water folks don’t historically rely much on big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive algorithms,” he said. “But we should, and they could tell us a lot.” The gap between what’s technically possible and what’s actually deployed in water management is enormous. That gap is closing.

Every climate impact is a water impact. Almost without exception. Wildfires, flooding, drought, sea-level rise, and intensifying hurricanes are all water stories. That means the urgency driving climate investment is also driving water investment, whether the industry recognizes it or not.

Pricing is the most underused tool we have. Water is too cheap. Not as a social good, access to basic water should be protected, but above that baseline, we consistently underprice water in ways that starve infrastructure investment and mask real scarcity. “Most municipal water systems are cross-subsidized. They don’t bring in anywhere near the revenue they need to keep the water flowing.”

But his most interesting point on pricing wasn’t about price at all. It was about awareness. He’d require every water bill in America to prominently display how much water you used per day in gallons, not cubic feet, alongside how your household compares to your neighbors. Every utility already has that data. They’re already printing the bills. They’re just not using them as the behavior-change tool they could be.

“If you tell people how much they’re using, that immediately changes their understanding of water.” — Charles Fishman

We see this in energy. People in my neighborhood are literally calling each other to compare how much they saved on high-use-rate days. The savings are tiny. The behavior change is real.

A Warning About Water Security

One section of our conversation I don’t want to gloss over: cyberattacks on water systems.

Charles flagged the 2021 Oldsmar, Florida, incident as a watershed moment (pun intended). A hacker remotely accessed the small city’s water control system and changed the sodium hydroxide concentration from 100 parts per million to 11,000. The operator caught it in real time and reversed it. Nobody was harmed.

But that’s not the point.

“International hackers don’t care about Oldsmar, Florida. They were practicing, testing their ability to break in and take control of a water system. Now imagine it was Orlando or Nashville or Tulsa.” — Charles Fishman

Most water utilities in the U.S. run on one of just three or four IT systems. They are, in Charles’s words, “very poorly protected and very hackable.” The Oldsmar incident was a warning shot. Whether we’ve heeded it is another question.

Your Role in This

Someone in our live audience asked Charles about the role of irrigation contractors, landscapers, builders, and city planners. His answer is worth reading in full if you’re in the industry.

The short version: you are designing systems that will still be operating in 2045. Whatever you install today will shape water use for decades. That’s not a burden — it’s an opportunity.

“You’re not designing something for the next nine months. You’re setting the water use pattern not for today, but for 2035 and 2045.” — Charles Fishman

He also made a point about credibility. When a neighbor suggests a rain barrel, it’s easy to dismiss. When a licensed contractor or landscape architect explains why a rainwater harvesting system makes sense and can point to a building down the street that’s been running one for three years, people listen differently. We have professional authority that advocates don’t. We should use it.

One More Thing

Charles recently wrote One Giant Leap, which tells the story of the Apollo program from the perspective of the engineers, scientists, and factory workers on the ground, not the astronauts. It’s the story of how ordinary people accomplished something literally impossible in eight years, in the middle of one of the most divided periods in American history.

His point: we already know how to solve water problems. We have the technology. We have the engineering. What we need is the clarity to see the problems honestly and the will to act.

“Do not bring wishful thinking to your management of water. Bring clear-eyed realism.” — Charles Fishman

That’s as good a mission statement for this newsletter as anything I’ve written.

Charles Fishman’s books — The Big Thirst, One Giant Leap, and others — are available wherever books are sold. If you haven’t read The Big Thirst, consider this your assignment.