According to a recent survey commissioned by City Hall, nothing matters more to us than traffic.
Yet according to Dr. David Schindler, an award winning scholar from the University of Alberta, the most important issue on our minds right now should be water.
That's right, water. The stuff you bathe in. The stuff that gushes out of your underground sprinkler system every night.
Even the Calgary Chamber of Commerce is thinking a lot about water these days.
Earlier this year, a series of recommendations regarding water management were brought forward by the Calgary Chamber and were endorsed by every Chamber in the province.
Last year, the Chamber submitted a brief to the Alberta Government's Water for Life roundtable suggesting that the issue of water management should be considered very carefully by all levels of government.
Yes indeed. The Chamber is very concerned about how we are going to manage our water supply in the coming years and how we are going to share the costs.
Maybe we should all be concerned.
Imagine a city of one million people with only one viable water source.
Imagine paying more for a glass of tap water at home tomorrow than you did for a cup of coffee at Starbucks this morning.
Can't do that? Can't wrap your mind around such an outrageous concept?
Then try imagining what life will be like just thirty years from now when the Bow River runs dry.
That's what Dr. Schindler is imagining.
According to Schindler's calculations, the glacier that feeds the Bow River is melting so fast that it will be gone by about 2033.
That's just a little more than 10,000 days from now.
By this time of year in 2033, says Schindler, the Bow River may be nothing more than a trickle.
"The Bow Glacier is receding rapidly," he told me recently. "Its effect is most pronounced in mid to late summer, once the annual snow pack has gone."
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"Eventually," he added, "there won't be enough ice to support current midsummer flows. I expect that low flows and poorer water quality will be the result."
The real threat comes from what Schindler calls a looming "triple whammy" -- a routine drought added to climate warming added to more people and livestock using Southern Alberta's limited water supplies than ever before.
So who is Dr. Schindler and why is he spouting off about water while everyone else is steaming about traffic?
Two years ago he won a gold medal for thinking about this stuff. It was the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.
It's a shiny gold medal that comes with a nice little cash bonus of one million dollars -- not exactly the kind of coinage paid to alarmists or environmental extremists.
No. I'm afraid Dr. Schindler is neither of these. He is a Government of Alberta Manning Prize Winner (1993).
He is an Alberta Science and Technology Award Winner for Outstanding Leadership in Alberta Science (1999).
He is a fellow of the Royal Societies of Canada and the United Kingdom.
He is a Distinguished Member of the International Water Academy.
And he is someone that all of us should probably be paying a lot more
attention to.
In early July as most Calgarians were donning cowboy boots and heading out for free pancakes and bad coffee, our beloved Bow River was placed on the National Endangered Rivers List.
There were nine other rivers ranked higher on the endangered list than the Bow, but that shouldn't make any of us feel any better.
The water that flows through our taps doesn't come from those rivers. The water we drink comes from either the Bow or the Elbow.
So does the water that is served in our restaurants, that pours from our carwashes, that makes the pillowcases smell so Downy fresh in the guest rooms of our best hotels.
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Water from the Bow River is the main ingredient in the beer we make.
It washes the floors in our hospitals, cools the steel in our factories and flushes the toilets in our office towers.
Water flows through every business in Calgary. It is a cost input into everything we produce and send to market.
So when the price of water goes up, the cost of everything goes up. And when the price of water goes up significantly, the price of everything goes up significantly.
Which is why the Chamber is thinking about what Schindler and other Alberta water experts are saying these days.
Imagine what the cost of doing business in the city of Calgary is going to be the day the Bow runs dry.
Imagine that day -- just 10,000 days from now -- when the only viable, year round water source in Calgary flows out of the mountains, down the Elbow River Valley, through the Weaselhead and into the Glenmore Reservoir.
"I've found that people express great surprise that there's a water problem looming," says Schindler. "As long as something dribbles from the tap when they turn it, they don't ask questions."
People face traffic everyday, says Schindler, so he is not surprised that traffic ranks so highly on their list of concerns. But "once nothing comes from the taps, or it tastes horrible, their priorities will change," he predicts.
One million people. One viable water source.
When that day comes, I imagine that traffic will be the least of our worries.
© Brent Johner. Originally published in the Calgary Herald, 2003. Reprint rights available.
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