The planet is a long way from dying of thirst. "It's inevitable that we'll solve our water problems," says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan environmental think tank. "The trick is how much pain we can avoid on that path to where we want to be."
As Gleick sees it, we've got two ways to go forward. Hard-path solutions focus almost exclusively on ways to develop new supplies of water, such as supersize dams, aqueducts, and pipelines that deliver water over huge distances. Gleick leans toward the soft path: a comprehensive approach that includes conservation and efficiency, community-scale infrastructure, protection of aquatic ecosystems, management at the level of watersheds instead of political boundaries, and smart economics.