As a child growing up in Southern Ontario, Chris Wood was constantly exposed to water. In his bedroom at night, he could hear the sound of a nearby waterfall, called Webster’s Falls.

“My father was a geographer, and he was forever explaining how the landscape got the way it was, and how it affected people,” Wood says in conversation at the Georgia Straight’s offices. “I learned quite early how the big canyon that led up to this really modest little waterfall had happened because it was cut when the glaciers were melting.”

Wood, now 55, discovered an appreciation for the physical impact of climate change decades before global warming leapt into public consciousness. Later, as a journalist for Maclean’s, he wrote about climate and the environment. In his arresting new book, Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America (Raincoast Books, $23.95), the Cowichan Valley resident relies on extensive research into climate change to create a riveting picture of what’s in store for North America over the next 25 years.

He says that he decided to focus on water while flying into Vancouver a few years ago.
Normally, in the early part of the year, the North Shore mountains would be covered in snow. “This particular March, they weren’t,” he recalls. “They were brown. I could see it from the airplane—there was no snow.”

He already knew that global warming would result in more precipitation coming in the form of rain rather than snow. For hundreds of millions of people who rely on river systems in southern China, northern India, and the southwestern United States, he writes, the loss of slow-melting mountain snowcaps could sharply reduce water supplies for drinking and irrigation.

This combination of more rapidly melting snow in the mountains and heavier rainfalls was a major factor behind last year’s flood scare along the Fraser River. In conversation, Wood also highlights a process called evapotranspiration, which steals water out of the ground, plants, and reservoirs during prolonged dry spells. Then there are the extreme storms, such as the one that devastated Stanley Park in December 2006.

Dry Spring starts with a paradoxical tale of a 2006 drought in Tofino, in one of the wettest zones in North America. Later, Wood takes readers to the continent’s greatest watersheds, including the Great Lakes and the Colorado River, and shows how decisions to divert water in the 19th and 20th centuries improved the lives of millions of Canadians and Americans, but also irreparably damaged the Colorado River Delta in the Gulf of California.

Wood also relies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report to suggest that storm tracks are shifting northward over North America, a trend that will result in far more precipitation in Canada and far less rainfall in already-parched areas of the United States. “Canada, already the most water-rich country per capita in the world, is going to get richer in the 21st century, perhaps as much as 40% richer (wetter) by mid-century,” Wood writes. “The United States’ most booming regions, already on water overdraft, may lose nearly a third of the water they enjoy today.”

Many experts have told him that water must be managed on a watershed basis (in the region drained by a single river). Many rivers in North America cross national boundaries, which is why he promotes working with Americans on shared watersheds.

Wood emphasizes that talking with Americans about water will not increase the likelihood of anyone building a pipeline from Las Vegas to Lake Athabasca and sucking the lakebed dry, or bringing tankers full of fresh Canadian water to California. He insists there are far cheaper ways for the Americans to slake their thirst—including building desalination plants. He also says he has not found a single American state that has identified Canada as a source of future water supplies.

“This fear that you can’t talk about markets and you can’t talk to Americans stands in the way of the two things we absolutely have to do,” Wood says, adding that he advocates finding ways to create market mechanisms to use water more efficiently, and being innovative in doing more with less.

After Wood published an article about water in a 2005 issue of The Walrus, Elizabeth May, the future leader of the Green party, attacked his analysis in a letter to the editor. Citing Environment Canada’s assertion that “the most significant impact of a twofold increase in atmospheric carbon would be loss of water in both quantity and quality,” May wrote: “The fact that climate change will result in persistent droughts on our prairies and reduced water levels in the Great Lakes is a good argument against engineering water transfers south of the border.”

By contrast, Wood reports in Dry Spring that engineered water transfers are already occurring along the Alberta-Montana border, with Canadians charging a fee for chlorinating and delivering the water. “If Americans or others do arrive at Canada’s door with chequebooks and empty billycans, we shouldn’t send them away,” Wood argues in the book. “Not because they might be armed and desperate. But because the water that used to fall on other lands now falls on ours; because we can spare a little in ways that won’t harm our environment (and that certainly make more ecological sense than pumping it into the ground to push out oil); and yes, because we can make money doing so.”