What to do?
Given all these issues and challenges with respect to
the planning and management of sustainable water resource
systems, it is appropriate to ask what can and should
be done. No single profession pretends to know enough
to answer that question. However, with inputs from a
multiplicity of professionals and the interested and affected
public, resource managers and decision makers can
identify more clearly just what may be done to achieve
higher levels of sustainability in specific situations.
Whatever is done to increase the degree of
sustainability of our water resources infrastructure will
almost certainly involve some costs or require some reduction
in the immediate benefits those of us living today
could receive. And that is the challenge: deciding what
should be done today given what is known as well as what
is not, and cannot, be known; determining how much cost
and sacrifice are warranted; and choosing who is going to
pay. These issues need to be debated, and this debate
should involve everyone having interests in the systems
and decisions under discussion.
This challenge of determining what to do and then
getting it done faces all who choose to assume some
responsibility for water resources planning and management.
The challenge is one of determining how water and
related environmental resources can be developed and
managed managed not only to meet current demands
most effectively and efficiently but also to meet the expected
future demands. But how can the demands of current
populations be satisfied without reducing the options
and abilities of future populations to further develop and
manage these resource to satisfy their own desires and
demands? If that question can be answered, the remaining
challenge is one of identifying and implementing programs
that satisfy those demands and desires.
Sustainability is an integrating process. It encompasses
technology, ecology, and the social and political
infrastructure of society. It is probably not a state that
may ever be reached completely, but it is one for which
we should continually strive. And while it may never be
possible to identify with certainty what is sustainable and
what is not, it is possible to develop some measures that
permit one to compare the performances of alternative
systems with respect to sustainability.