I was used to the constant commercials, ‘don’t use water.’ My yard was thorns. “The problem is water is very much out of sight out of mind,” he said.Īfter the talk, Cornellians for Israel co-president and ILR School student Reut Baer ’17 said, “I grew up in Israel until I was 11. In the U.S., Siegel said, 35 percent of water is lost every day due to broken pipes. Hailing Israeli use of drip irrigation, efficient desalination and grey-water recycling, Siegel said the global water crisis is “not a failure of water” but rather “a failure of management.” Pointing to Israel as the international model of water conservation and procurement, Siegel explained the importance of Israel’s water- and technology-revering culture.
“The good news is there is a solution because the problem functionally is not a shortage of water, it’s a shortage of imagination, ingenuity, creativity and good governance,” Siegel said. Compounding this problem, Siegel explained that changing rain patterns, growing populations and a burgeoning middle class all threaten to create “a water profile that goes off the charts, all at a time when we are running out of water.” He continued, “unlike oil, where there are substitutes, there are simply no substitutes for water.” Siegel identified hundreds of millions of potential water refugees in Africa, India and even the United States living on water systems at risk of going dry in the next handful of years. Marking his 198th talk on the water crisis, Siegel expressed his excitement coming back to lecture at Cornell, where he studied at the ILR School, to an audience of around 200 students, faculty and staff.
intelligence projection that “60 percent of the world’s landmass would face water scarcity by 2025,” Siegel ’74, J.D. Siegel, author of the best-seller “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World,” discussed spreading awareness of the global water problem before it becomes a humanitarian crisis Feb.
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