You are driving down the California coast to Monterey, looking out over the blue Pacific, and your view is interrupted by tugboats pulling what appear to be huge plastic bags the size of football fields going south. The bags are filled with water from Northern California rivers that has been sold to thirsty Southern California and Arizona residents.

Does this sound far-fetched? No, and if it weren't for the objections of two different North Coast communities, plans for exactly such a scheme -- known as "water bagging" -- would be in place and the tugs would be passing the Golden Gate on a regular basis, raising the question of who owns the river water.

Proposals for water bagging populate only one of many fronts in a war that threatens to explode in the next decade. The war is over who owns the water, and it will determine who owns what is arguably California's and the Earth's most important resource.


All signs point to a growing water crisis that will only worsen in the coming decades. World population, now at 6 billion, is estimated to hit 9 billion by 2050. California will jump from today's 34 million to at least 50 million at the same time. The United Nations estimates that at our current usage rates, almost 3 billion people will face severe water shortages by 2025.

Around the world, water supplies are being siphoned up. Several major rivers, including the Colorado, which supplies much of California's water, the Yangtze, and the Nile barely reach their respective seas, if at all. Last year, then-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Whitman warned that water quality would be "the biggest environmental issue we face in the 21st century."

Of the world's water supply, only 1 percent is usable for domestic purposes, (i.e., household and agriculture). The rest is either salt water or locked up in ice caps. Ironically, the global warming trend will make things worse. Whether you blame humans or not, there is no doubt the planet is getting warmer, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As our atmosphere warms, ice and snow packs, crucial for the steady release of water into rivers and lakes, will shrink. More rain will wash directly into the sea and become salt water.

When some people see the words "water shortage," they think of a humanitarian crisis. Other people think "supply and demand" and want to figure out how to make a profit on the shortage. In the United States, 85 percent of water utilities are still public-owned, but that figure could change rapidly as multinational corporations such as France's Vivendi Universal and Germany's RWE swallow up smaller, locally run utilities around the world.

But should basic economic principles such as the law of supply and demand apply to water? Is water a basic right to which everyone, rich or poor, deserves access?

In South Africa, the post-apartheid constitution explicitly says so, clarifying a right that's already been put to the test by people whose supply was cut off when they could not afford to pay their water bills.

Here in California, we have come to expect clean, healthy water to be there when we turn our faucets. But water that falls from the sky or flows through rivers is not necessarily the same as clean, drinkable water. Pure water is usually a man-made product, not a gift from nature. The question is, how will we obtain clean drinking water for millions of people in California and the billions in the world?

At the heart of this question is the dispute of whether private, for- profit ownership of public water utilities is better than public ownership. Before we look at the arguments, first some facts.

Fact: Maintaining and upgrading water systems is expensive. The EPA estimates that $150 billion will be needed over the next 20 years to upgrade our nation's drinking water infrastructure and that in California, we will need $15 to $20 billion. State water experts think it will be much more, in the $30 to $40 billion range. Put that on top of our deficits, and it is a large slice of future state budgets.

Fact: With the current fiscal crisis and projected government deficits here in California for years to come, public funds for infrastructures such as water maintenance will be hard to come by and measured directly against other public funding needs. Proponents of privatization say the best source of funds is private capital, enticed by the prospect of profits. Not surprisingly, the Republican-led Congress is encouraging privatization by threatening to withhold federal funding from municipal water projects that don't at least consider privatization as an option.

Fact: Fifteen percent of the nation's water supply is in private hands, and the problems of private ownership of a public resource are mounting.

In 1998, the city of Atlanta signed a 20-year contract to outsource its water delivery and treatment system to United Water, now a subsidiary of the French conglomerate Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux. To win the contract, the company promised to reap savings for the city that never materialized. Complaints about the service -- suspiciously similar to complaints about public services that also enjoy monopoly control -- piled up. The city had to issue at least four "boil water" advisories to warn citizens against contaminants. Finally, the city of Atlanta negotiated a return of the system to public hands following the disastrous experiment with privatization.

Fact: Our water systems are in dire need of repair and upgrading, as our population swells.

San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy system, which draws water from a reservoir within Yosemite National Park, will get a $1.6 billion upgrade over the next decade or so, financed with public money approved by San Francisco voters, even though they knew their water bills would triple by 2015. But there's a catch: The state is overseeing the enormous project because San Francisco has a bad habit of frittering away bond money. If a state audit shows similar practices on this project, one scenario brought up by Sacramento lawmakers has the state seizing control of Hetch Hetchy.

The arguments against privatization are documented, yet people continue to push privatization in the name of profit. Under private control, water companies are subject to constant shareholder pressure for profits, not public service. A study by U.S. News and World Report showed that most customers of private water companies pay higher rates -- sometimes twice as high as the national average.

These comparisons are starting to register with elected public officials, and despite the difficult economic climate for local governments, several municipalities are working to reclaim their water utilities from private hands.

In the Bay Area, the small San Mateo County coastal towns of Montara and Moss Beach had to look into eminent domain seizures of their water supply, owned by American Water Works, a subsidiary of German utility giant RWE. Impetus for the civic seizure came from Montara's water rates, which are triple what people in neighboring Half Moon Bay and Pacifica pay.

American Water Works wanted to raise rates further to satisfy its shareholders and German parent corporation -- but through a court-supervised settlement, the Montara Sanitary District was able to purchase the system, although at a very steep price. The dilapidated water delivery system serving about 1,650 connections went for a whopping $11.1 million. Similar grumblings about private ownership are being heard in other Northern California communities, including Monterey.

Internationally, the rallying cry for such citizen revolts is "Cochabamba, " the name of the Bolivian town where deadly riots forced the government to cancel a 40-year contract with a subsidiary of San Francisco giant Bechtel Corp. Soon after signing the contract, the water company jacked up rates enormously, to levels that represented a significant percentage of people's monthly wages. The locals revolted.

Such contracts, in which governments cede control to private corporations, are often the result of pressure from international financial institutions. International loans to cash-strapped countries come with conditions: Privatize state assets or no loan. With the ratification of regional and global trade pacts, asset seizures like the canceled contract in Cochabamba can end up in court. Bechtel and its partners are now suing Bolivia for multimillions of dollars in lost future profits -- the sum the company estimated it would have made had it kept the contract for a few years. It's somewhat as if Enron had sued the state of California.

In our own backyard, the lush coastal rivers of Northern California, Ric Davidge, an Alaskan businessman and former Reagan-era Department of Interior official, has twice tried unsuccessfully to bag water from our rivers and tug it to Southern California.

In recent years, Mendocino County citizen groups denied his play for water from the Albion and Gualala rivers. He then changed his company name and went one county north. He proposed bagging Mad River water that was diverted through pipelines to pulp mills near Eureka, but which the mills don't need a lot of. The local water district shelved the proposal indefinitely for further investigation, apparently because Davidge's Aqueous Corp., has foreign backing, which could trigger international jurisdiction of a potential legal dispute involving the Mad River in Humboldt County.

Even without international complications, ceding local control of local water is dangerous. A Eureka Times-Standard editorial noted that the Trinity River has been, and will be, tapped by the rest of California for homes and cities for years to come. When the river's fishery declined, a plan to restore higher flows was put in place and a lawsuit resulted, spawning problems for all North Coast rivers.

To Californians, who owns the water is nothing new. Just ask the people of the Owens Valley, or the once-plentiful Los Angeles orange growers. Or rent the classic film "Chinatown," which depicts the chicanery of Los Angeles civic leaders nearly a century ago to divert water to L.A. and create a megalopolis.

Water wars have always been waged behind the scenes, played out in boardrooms, legislatures and council meetings. Citizens typically become aware of the struggles when the water bills shoot through the roof, when the water service taken for granted is contaminated or interrupted, or when environmental damage becomes too dire to ignore.

We need to understand who owns the water, who is profiting from it, and whether that ownership is good for the people who rely on the water supply every day.

If you liked the energy crisis of a few years ago, you will love the coming water crisis in California.