What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti

Jay Famiglietti calls groundwater something no one sees and almost no one measures. That line fits a show built on conversations about the less visible parts of water: aquifers, aging infrastructure, river history, wastewater and the financing that keeps systems running. Famiglietti is Global Futures Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, and he interviews guests instead of lecturing. The American episodes carry real urgency. In the groundwater conversation, the crisis is described as here and now, with most US water infrastructure past its design life, and an 'all hands on deck moment' is invoked during a discussion of the federal role. There is also a pointed critique of academic research as too incremental, along with a call to redirect it toward solving real problems. Arizona gets its own close look. With water availability across the American Southwest shrinking, a guest makes the case for the no-action alternative: use existing systems, add digital intelligence and change how they operate before building anything new. The same conversation turns to money, comparing the Central Arizona Project to a family mortgage and naming public-private partnerships and long-term investors, such as a teachers' pension plan, as ways to pay for the next major project. History comes in through the Colorado River. In John Fleck on the Inconvenient Science of the Colorado River, the subject is how people pick the science that suits their values, and how warnings went unheeded in the 1920s, when the river still reached the ocean, 40 million people did not yet depend on it and projected shortfalls seemed distant. Erica Gies makes a different argument, against single-focus flood control that answers every threat with a wall or a levee while ignoring floodplains, soil, microbes and beavers. Her conversation includes a treated creek that produced more water than a nearby untreated one, and Famiglietti's memory of building check dams as an 11-year-old Boy Scout. The show also looks beyond the US. The Endhó Dam episode centres on a reservoir in Hidalgo State, built in 1951 for irrigation, that now receives Mexico City's wastewater. Guests Raquel and Diego describe polluted springs and underground sources, heavy metals and people driving long distances for clean water, and Famiglietti connects this to the idea of water poverty he heard from Gary White, co-founder of water.org. On the global end is a season-two finale with Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, with his book The Ages of Globalization on the agenda. Famiglietti is earnest but not stiff. He jokes about his age and ends one episode by saying he is getting thirsty just talking about it. His sign-offs ask people to share episodes and spread the word about conservation. The host says episodes need not be heard in order, so the Endhó Dam or Colorado River conversations both make a good first pick, depending on whether a listener wants firsthand testimony or history.