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32 The College of New Jersey Magazine When it comes to water, history professor Matthew Bender takes a global view. As a scholar and president of the International Water History Association, his primary interest is in understanding humankind's relationship with water — what Bender calls "the most vital resource for human development." Bender has focused much of his research in Africa, studying the man- agement of water in remote communi- ties, such as on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and the connection between water and the 800,000 people living on the slopes of the world's tallest free- standing mountain. It's the subject of his 2019 book, Water Brings No Harm: Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro, for which he conducted about 100 interviews with local people. He says the problems related to wa- ter scarcity in one part of the globe are often replicated in other corners. "Part of the job of a good African historian," he says, "is to convince people that the problems in Africa are not exclusive to Africa." As he scans the global waterscape, from the American Southwest to sub-Saharan Africa, Bender cites gloomy forecasts that, as early as 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will lack access to clean water at least one month a year. "My interest is in understanding the development of that problem over time," he says. "How is it that the one thing that everybody needs to live could be in such chronic short supply?" The cause of the current and pending shortage, Bender says, is multipronged: climate change, surely, but also urbanization and rising rates of consumption. In the United States, fast-growing cities in arid locations, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, illustrate the problem. Much of their water is piped in from great distances, and climate change only exacerbates the problem, which tends to make wet places wetter and dry places drier. He notes, for example, that a sus- tained lack of snowfall in the higher elevations of the American West and Southwest has lowered reservoirs to dangerous levels. "There are environ- mental limitations that are hard to do anything about," Bender says. One solution: "The built landscape of the city could be rethought in a way that recognizes the acute scarcity of the resource," says Bender. He points out that golf courses and swimming pools, ubiquitous features of the region, are "huge consumers" of water. Reducing their numbers would help, as would replacing lawns with hardscaping. "People tried to have their cake and eat it too with regard to development in these places," he says. "And it just may not work anymore." From Bender's view, the world- wide water crisis has typically been considered more of a problem in underdeveloped countries. No longer. "It's becoming a problem that will be everybody's problem," Bender says. These are their stories. Dive in. Matthew Bender, history professor H 2 O's cautious historian

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