The Social Infrastructure of Water

Quinn: [00:00:00] What have we learned from millennia of water insecurity, of climate changes and disasters, of building homes and farms, colonies and cities along freshwater ways and the ocean that we can apply today, when water is not in as many places as it was before, and also all over the place? That's today's big questions, plural, and my guest is Dr. Amber Wutich, and Dr. Wutich is an ASU President's Professor, Director of the Center for Global Health, and 2023 MacArthur Fellow. 
She's an expert on water insecurity, and Wutich directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross cultural study of water knowledge and management in over 20 countries.
Dr. Wutich’s two decades of community based field work explore how people respond individually and [00:01:00] collectively to extremely water scarce conditions. She leads the NSF Action for Water Equity, a participatory convergence study that develops collaborative water solutions with water insecure U.S. communities. Amber is an ethnographer. and methodologist, and she's authored over 150 peer reviewed publications. She's co-authored four books. She edits the journal Field Methods and directs the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program. Her teaching, as you can see by now, has been recognized with many awards, including the Carnegie Case Arizona Professor of the Year.
As maybe the most important thing that neither you or I can live without, water is both becoming more scarce, where it's needed the most in places like Central America, Northern India, Syria and other places, and more prevalent through sea level rise, flooding and storms where we're not ready for it, where we're not able to absorb it, where we don't have insurance.
Welcome to Important Not important. My name is Quinn [00:02:00] Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone, knowing everything we know, using what we know, building new tech together for more people.
Our mission is to understand and unfuck the future, and our goal is to help you answer the question, What can I do?
Dr. Wutich, Amber Wutich, thank you for hopping on the show today. Really appreciate it. Welcome. Welcome from I'm guessing pretty sunny Arizona. 
Amber Wutich: It is sunny. 
Quinn: It is sunny. All the water you could ask for. Well, we're excited to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. We're going to dig into it.
But Amber, we usually start with one question. It's a little tongue in cheek, but we've ended up with some fairly thoughtful responses along the way. What is it, 175 episodes? I don't know. I can't keep track of anything [00:03:00] anymore. And the question is, Amber, why are you vital to the survival of the species?
And I encourage you to be bold and honest about it. 
Amber Wutich: Yes, I've listened to your podcast and I know the first question and yet somehow I'm still unprepared. So I think that an important role that scholars have with regards to the survival of the species is to sort of labor in obscurity for many, many decades creating knowledge that hopefully never becomes useful.
And I see my role very much in this vein. That, you know, there may become a moment where humanity urgently needs this knowledge. And we are waiting in the wings to step in and provide it. And we've seen many people whose expertise has unfortunately become vital in the last 10 years, whether it's around viruses or disinformation or political instability.
And so my expertise [00:04:00] on water scarcity is something that I hope becomes less and less relevant rather than more and more relevant, but we don't seem to be moving in that direction. 
Quinn: Yeah, it sounds like you're getting a call from the president at some point, like one of those alien movies, right? You're the one who's like, no, you've got to listen to me for better or worse.
Amber Wutich: Well, gosh, I hope not. 
Quinn: Yeah, right. Oh boy. Well, thank you for that answer. It's profound and meaningful. So I was thinking about this conversation and the topic and it really made me think of this accidental, sort of, [00:05:00] path I've been on recently here. So I got into this all originally, I mean, we don't even need to get into that, but it's like, you know, grew up reading Wired magazine and watching Star Trek and all that stuff and the fancy new things.
But I've been pretty lucky to have some really fundamental conversations lately about the fundamentals, how and why we kind of got here. Cause it's obviously become clear that who we are doesn't change very much, as much as we have changed, used who we are to change the circumstances around us, right?
So, conversation with Riley Black about the last hours of the dinosaurs and the first hours without them, right into conversation with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve and how the female body drove evolution, all the way to Deb Chachra's book about infrastructure, which is like a long poem.
It's beautiful. And how we take so much of it for granted and we need more of it. But also where we're going with microplastics and things like that. And it [00:06:00] sounds kind of simplistic, but again, like having gotten into this for like the techie cool stuff, it's very clear to me now that the, as we call it, science for people who give a shit and everybody asking the question, what can I do is not about, fancy new tech.
I mean, that stuff is welcome, but it's really about how we have made the very basic necessities, air, water, food, shelter, etc., less healthy, less accessible, and more expensive, if not all three, and especially to certain long marginalized groups. So this morning I was thinking about how this show has turned out to be more about anthropology than I anticipated which is why I love your perspective on it.
Amber Wutich: It's very, very relevant. People don't really know this. 
Quinn: No, a hundred percent, but it's, as you mentioned in your first email to me, if anthropology is a study of how humans came to be, I guess, right, in our present condition, and we have severed all these [00:07:00] relationships with the ecosystems around it, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how water fits into anthropology for you.
What does our relationship about water tell us about human history and how we got here? And that was my goal is to start you off with a real softball question. So you're welcome. It's obviously a pretty important piece of the puzzle. 
Amber Wutich: One thing that I think is important and that is very different in how I think about water from other scholars and water people is that I think of it in the trajectory of human history. And so of course, water and climate are linked together. They can't be delinked. And so when we look at our human history, when we think about the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant human species previously in competition with other humans, like Neanderthals, it was at a time of major climate change and our brain evolved to survive during high climate variability, right? So this is this sort of watershed [00:08:00] moments in human history, and it comes about in a time of climate uncertainty, if you will. The next major watershed in human history, the creation of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, that enabled us to have wealth and social hierarchy, and settlements that are permanent.
It was a huge deal again came at a time of major climate shift and this time a shift to a warming climate, right? When I think about these major pivots in human history, they are times of climactic change or variability that enables some kind of major change. And that change typically comes with suffering and death.
But you know, the story we tell ourselves about what happened is a story of success for humanity. Right? This is a way that I look at the moment that we're in right now as well. It's a time of danger. There will be suffering. There's already death, but it is [00:09:00] possible that it could be one of these watershed shifts or moments in the history of humanity.
When we think about water, obviously water is the most limiting resource for human survival. We need food and air, but we can survive with pretty bad air for some time, and you can survive for about three weeks without food, but you only get a few days without water. Through human history what we've mainly done to survive and manage times of low water is exchange and migration.
So right now, with regard to using exchange to address water problems, we're killing it. We are using exchange a lot, but we are clamping down on migration. And so these are, you know, kind of, really important lessons that I think we need to look at from human history. But also we find that during times of drought, human societies tend to respond in [00:10:00] certain predictable ways and we don't seem to be doing that.
So one of the things I'm trying to do is to suggest some additional pathways that are more consistent with how humans have survived in the past. 
Quinn: You're going to get a call from the president, get on the plane and tell us what to do. I really appreciate that perspective. It's really, and correct me where I'm wrong, because again, I have three children.
That's my entire life. But it seems like it's very much when we look at these, oh, look at the incredible Roman aqueducts that are still standing. Or like Deb's book about the water infrastructure we've built more recently, sometimes late 19th or 20th century that survived this very temperate 20th century, even though it's leaking and it's now falling apart.
It's a lot of history was written by the victors, sort of thing, like you were saying, you know, it's the history of how we persevered and succeeded with water. But water scarcity has, like you were saying, through exchange and migration, has always been a thing. Even through our more [00:11:00] temperate century, but also obviously in these times of great change.
And again, it seems ridiculous, but I think about Riley Black's book about, you know, how everything changed so quickly in those minutes and hours and days and weeks and centuries after the asteroid hit for the dinosaurs, which led right into Cat's book and how we got here and how water was such a piece of the puzzle.
But as you mentioned, at one time we were competing with other versions of humans, right? If we don't have water we die. It's pretty straightforward. I want to talk about the social infrastructure today, and also the harder infrastructure and how those kind of come together. So can you describe for us on the anthropology side, what sort of the pillars are of social infrastructure with regard to water.
Like, what should we really be thinking about as far as accessibility and inaccessibility? 
Amber Wutich: Yeah, and I'd love to tell this story, go back just a little bit in a way that will make, I think, the most sense to your listeners.[00:12:00] So, you know, around 150 years ago, years ago, we created centralized public water systems.
My colleagues sometimes call them Victoria era and Victorian era infrastructure that we're still living with and enjoying. And this created, you know, people who are, who like to read academic books, well know about John Snow and the cholera and, you know, that we discovered that we needed to have clean water to avoid these waterborne diseases.
And it was like, oh, lifespans increased, people survive amazing, amazing public health revolution. We've been living with that for, you know, since the mid 1800s and enjoying the benefits of clean water that is very life giving and life protecting. And as long as I've been working in water, the story has been like the centralized water system is the greatest thing ever.
And we're going to get it to everyone. Right. And we just need to hold on. We need to invest more. We need to keep building and we're going to figure it out. And I came into my [00:13:00] profession, you know, respecting my elders and really believing that this is where we were heading globally. And at some point I stopped believing that.
I stopped believing that because I'm an ethnographer and the way we work is living in communities as we study them and really coming to understand their truths and their ways of living. And that didn't seem to be the truth that the people I was living with in an informal settlement in Bolivia were experiencing.
They lived generations and nobody was bringing them water, even though they were in a city. I noticed that climate change was shifting water availability patterns and infrastructure was decaying and humans were moving around. And so even those pipes that were built were not lasting or functioning the way that they were meant to.
I started to think that, you know, maybe we need to be looking at this problem in a different way. It's important to keep trying to get everybody piped water because it is essential for human health and well [00:14:00] being. But we need to have some other approaches to address the fact that people who are not getting the service are really not getting it for decades and decades.
And also to acknowledge that things are changing for all of humanity because of climate change. And so the argument that I've made is everybody who is alive has figured out the water puzzle in some way because you can't survive more than a couple of days without it. And so let's look at what people are doing, see what works, and then expand on it.
Make it safer, make it more accessible, make it more affordable. And so what I found, working for decades and decades and working with a network of scholars around the world and people in communities around the world is that the more water insecure people are, the more they rely on something we call social infrastructure.
So, I'm particularly focused on social networks. So that would be, for example, in the US there's a whole, like, would you be able to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor? But in water insecure communities, it's way more [00:15:00] important to borrow a bucket of water than a cup of sugar. And so this is what we mean when we talk about social networks and water sharing, people relying on their neighbors to survive.
Another thing that is essential in water insecure communities is informal economies. So that is sort of off the grid markets, unregulated markets. What this often looks like could be anything ranging from a water vending truck that carries 10, 000 liters of water and delivers water door to door, to somebody with a pushcart selling bags of water.
But when people can't get water any other way, this tends to be a very common way that people get the water they need to survive. And then the third one is a little trickier to understand. It's cultural norms. And the kinds of cultural norms we've been looking at the most are something we call moral economies for water.
So this is the idea often manifesting around the world as water is life that people have [00:16:00] an obligation to their neighbors and their community to secure their neighbor's survival by ensuring they have enough water. But important parts of this are that you can't just believe water is life. You have to have economic behaviors that reinforce that.
When people violate that norm, that cultural norm, they have to be punished somehow. And so in many societies, that punishment looks like shunning or judging or gossiping, but also those kinds of techniques work with your neighbor along a flat power relationship, but with a power imbalance, we need other ways of enforcing that norm that water is life.
And that tends to look like protests and other mass political actions. So those three things to recap social networks, informal economies, and cultural norms come to the fore more and more, the more water insecure a community is. 
Quinn: That's all really helpful. Thank you for illustrating that. Because again, like it's so easy to [00:17:00] focus on the hard tech or the concrete, right? That delivers the water. But if there is a conflict of civilizations or even among peoples that have either been in the same place for a long time or not, or among you know, the same groups of people, it can make the whole thing much more, difficult, certainly, because there's often great misunderstandings.
My very first lesson in this, which was extremely surface level and just the smallest little microcosm, but turns out extends to the whole thing is I'm calling you from above a candy shop in colonial Williamsburg. So about four miles from Jamestown Island, where a bunch of colonists showed up and made a huge mistake of building a fort on this Jamestown Island.
And I did some archaeological work there and some anthropological work there when I was in high school, I knew a bunch of the founding archaeologists who worked with the indigenous populations here to really try to understand the story of what happened there. [00:18:00] And part of what had happened there is the indigenous people were open to the colonists if they're going to settle settling anywhere on Jamestown Island because they had been there for 10, 000 years and it realized there's no fresh water on the island and there's a little isthmus between them and they just kind of parked themselves there and they said well good luck because you can't grow anything and there's no water and so you had these starving seasons and you had the colonists start to drink brackish water out of the James River, which is not a great idea and again they just didn't ask the question and they didn't obviously try to participate in any meaningful way in these informal or formal situations of reciprocity.
But, you know, eventually some of that changed, obviously, and it became this much bigger thing and became the first permanent English settlement in the U.S. But that thing right there of the water of not understanding what you need, even though you needed the most, even though you just got off these boats for four months, and even though these people have been here for 10, 000 [00:19:00] years.
That was such an interesting lesson to me, very up front, especially coming from a place of such privilege in a part of the world where otherwise water is just not an issue, you know, as opposed to where you spent time where it's very clear, like you said, these people have not had water for a very long time, no one's bringing it to them and you've described that in your work as not having water is an ongoing disaster.
Can you talk about a little bit about what that means? 
Amber Wutich: Yeah one of the reasons that I was really interested in working on water and water scarcity is because I'm from Miami and grew up in hurricane culture. So, you know if you live, now in an expanding part of the United States, but certainly in those days in South Florida hurricanes were just a part of our lives.
We knew how to prepare for them. We had to work in community to do that. Those social networks were essential and ensuring that we had enough water if the water was off or unsafe was a part of that, right? And so that is kind of the [00:20:00] origin of my thinking about this. And at that time, there was a lot of scholarship about disasters and the social dimensions of disasters, but drought was less addressed.
And so you could start to theorize or think about how drought impacted humanity. And in archaeology, as you mentioned, there's a wonderful archaeology of drought. Less so at that time for contemporary societies. But what was emerging from scholarship in that time was the idea that most water insecurity that humans experience is not, doesn't have a natural origin.
The origin is the way the societies are organized, right? So it's the laws that we make about how water is distributed. It's the pricing that we assign that determines who can pay for water or afford it. It's the values we assign to water that determine what sorts of societal uses it gets. That's what determines by and large, which humans have water insecurity.
So to think of that as a [00:21:00] disaster was part of the sort of larger shift in like, what is a disaster, right? Because you can have a natural hazard. There could be a volcano, but unless you're living on the side of the volcano, it's not necessarily a disaster. Right. And so similarly with water, there was this important shift in our thinking from, okay, a drought is a bad thing, but how bad it is for humans is really determined about the way that we organize our society around this natural hazard.
And so that was what I was interested in. It required a kind of a shift in our thinking and it was complicated and difficult, which is always a good question for academics. 
Quinn: Oh, always fun. So tell me a little bit about what you've learned about in these prior moments, eras, when the climate has shifted so much and how we relate it to water, how we associated ourselves with it and with each other to make sure we had it or didn't, like you said, because it is usually a man made problem in some way.
Tell me a little bit about, you [00:22:00] mentioned at the very top, we've often acted in certain ways before, and we're doing a little bit less of that now, which doesn't surprise me. Talk to me about the dichotomy between those. 
Amber Wutich: Yeah, so when drought hit a society in the archaeological record, we definitely see migration as a response.
So people have the option of moving to a place that has more water availability. We increasingly have laws that limit that kind of climate migration and climate refugee status. But moreover, we see decentralization of society. So when you have a lot of water, it is possible to make very large, complex settlements.
And then what we find is that when that water is no longer available, people tend to break off into smaller and smaller groups. So decentralization, and what is happening right now and a very common way of thinking in the sustainability movement is that if we can get more humans into bigger [00:23:00] cities and create a smaller ecological footprint, that is going to enable us to sustain our societies.
And I think the thinking behind that is very good, very interesting. It's the same kind of thinking around the water problem. So right now there is an idea that there are too many small water systems, and they should be consolidated into bigger and bigger water systems and then you get economies of scale, and it will be more affordable and things will work better. And this is good thinking, those things work very well. I think of it as being predicated on a bet that humanity has unchained itself from its history, and that is not the kind of bet that I would want to make.
So I offer as an alternative some other ways of thinking about how we might confront this issue if humans do end up needing to cope with the coming climate era in the way that we have in the past with more movement, more mobility, more decentralization and smaller [00:24:00] populations. I will also say that I don't think we get out of this without really, really good tech.
I know that sometimes social scientists feel like their contributions to solving problems are not respected enough and they're like stop thinking about the tech. No, we need that tech. We really need it because one of the things about water is that the more you degrade it the more difficult and expensive it is to get it to be usable, especially for human consumption.
And tech is the only way to do that, right? The more unavailable it becomes, the more tech you need to get it out of the ground or move it around. So that, you know, the tech is non negotiable. I work very closely with engineers because I think that we will have the best solutions when we integrate those engineered and social systems to address these coming concerns.
Quinn: There's so much to unpack there, right? Because look, this is what happens [00:25:00] when we're talking about the fundamental piece of the puzzle. Like, right. The one, like you said, there's a lot of people who unfortunately live with very bad air for a very long time.
And now we can measure both the quality of that air inside and outside and what it does to say you know, I just spent 15 years in LA, like what wildfire smoke we think does to a young person's brain as they try to learn. Not great. We know baseline, it's not great. But like you said, water, only so far.
We started by centralizing it, and then all of a sudden we're like, Oops, cholera. Turns out we need to wash our hands, not poop in our water, all this kind of stuff. Great, you learn about it. But that's what happens with centralization, right? That's why, like, Batman Begins, the plot of the bad guy in Batman Begins, is he poisons the centralized water system, right?
And it makes everybody go cuckoo. And you're like, well, that's kind of one of the trade offs, right? So you got to deal with it. It's why, you know, was it this week? I think the Biden administration went after China because they’re trying to hack into water infrastructure, right? Cause turns out we need to make it smarter.
So the tech is amazing. Desalination [00:26:00] works, it's amazing, requires so much power, is so expensive, but it works. So there's all these different questions, but I want to keep coming back to us. So, on the other hand, we've got America and Europe, for example, are not doing a good job of already dealing with the migration and immigration we're seeing.
And it is really the tip of the iceberg, right? Our border is chaos and no one has done really any of the things we need to do to help the folks who are basically subsistence farmers trying to come this way. Germany, you've seen the rise of Neo Nazis again, because they don't want any more folks coming in.
Meanwhile, the Rhine River itself is basically, you know, farmland at this point drying out. So, I worry about our ability to deal with, again, what has just sort of begun. And as much as I love all the hard tech and love these solutions, like again, [00:27:00] it's going to be really hard to implement them on a smaller, hard scale because of how expensive and how consuming they are and the way we seem to focus tech less on the people who need it the most.
And I wonder where you could give me some good news on that front. 
Amber Wutich: I have a lot of good news for you. 
Quinn: Where are you seeing, like, this work? Where are you seeing the decentralization in smaller groups and examples like that work? Like, we worked with GiveDirectly. Who just literally give people money and it's great.
And they've got a bunch of research behind it and it's amazing, but obviously we do have to build some decentralized water infrastructure for folks who just can't do it when you give them 20 bucks a day. So where is this working? Where has it been most effective? What can we learn from that on a larger scale?
Cause it's going to increasingly happen in more places. 
Amber Wutich: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of good news. And that's one of the reasons that I love being a professor is because kids these days are getting really scary messages about the future. And I think there's a whole industry that thrives on really just [00:28:00] scaring people.
I understand the motivations behind that, but I think we can do better. And there is a lot to be optimistic about. And certainly, and I'll get into the details, but as an anthropologist, and as someone who has studied human history, it's very difficult to look at the trajectory of our species and not feel some optimism about our current situation.
Quinn: We have seen some shit. Like, it has not been great in the past. Like, this, is not gonna be amazing, but like, it's been pretty touch and go at times. 
Amber Wutich: Very touch and go. Yes, we're nowhere near that right now. The stories we're telling ourselves about the nature of the difficulties we're facing are on some level doing as much harm as the difficulties themselves.
And I would really like to see us reframe. So that's part of the work I'm trying to do, right? Like it's, I'm not saying it's not difficult. It's difficult, but one of the things I'm really, and I'm going to get into the good news, but [00:29:00] meaning making is very important, right? Because as humans, there are things that make us value our lives, and we can't control how much time we get, but we have some control over how we make the meaning around the way we've used the time we have, and some of the things we need to do to better confront climate change impacts can also make our lives more meaningful, right?
So checking out of water management, checking out of interacting with our neighbors, checking out from shepherding our community and our environments. Those are all things that are just absolutely terrible for our human brains. Doing a little more of that can really make our lives more meaningful. Right.
So those are the kinds of shifts that probably need to happen for us to be able to manage more decentralized water systems anyway. So that's kind of like macro. On a small scale, one thing is that the good news is research seems to [00:30:00] show that humans are much more likely to cooperate around water than they are to fight over it.
And so that doesn't mean there aren't tensions and there aren't, you know, conflicts, but actual violent conflict over water is relatively rare, especially given the amount of power imbalances there are around water and the difficulties people face. So a couple of exceptions to this are humans have for a very long time used water as a weapon of war.
So the Batman scenario that you gave us is a thing that humans do a lot when they do bad stuff with water. Right? So that is one caveat. And then the other caveat is that when you let the water situation get too bad, it is very destabilizing for a society. And so people might not explicitly fight over water, but they might end up in a situation where everything is destabilized.
Like people are moving around and you have no crops. 
Quinn: The past 25 years in Haiti, right? I mean, it's just, completely..
Amber Wutich: You have Syria. There are certainly recent examples of this. [00:31:00] So with those two caveats, the weapon of war caveat and the destabilization caveat, mostly people solve water problems.
They cooperate, they work together, they figure it out. And so I have a lot of optimism around humans capacity to be like, oh, this water thing is important. We've got to figure this out, right? I live in the Colorado River Basin, which is a very powerful example of many, many competing uses and conflicts over water that people continually, peacefully trying to work it out, right?
So that's one thing that I have optimism about. Another thing I have optimism about is that people all over the world have figured out how to survive without centralized, government-based water systems. So we can do this, right? We have examples where people have gotten the social networks and the informal economies, and the cultural norms to work in tandem and work reasonably well.
One of the things that when I work with brilliant [00:32:00] engineers who are inventing things like nanotechnology enabled water treatment systems. They typically, you know, like all inventors, they invent amazing things and they deploy it through the market, right? But the thing about the market, which works very well for many things, is it does not work super well for poor people.
And so the poorer you are and the more you need the tech, the less you can afford it, right? And so we need either markets that work differently, you know, informal economies are an example of that, or we need other kinds of social infrastructure to supplement the market and to get it to work.
So one example of a colleague of mine, Patrick Thompson at Oxford has worked together with communities in Kenya because a very classic problem in water is that you put in like a sand pipe, it gets water, but then it breaks down for some reason. And people might not know how to fix it there, right?
Because it's a small community. So there've been many efforts to capacitate communities to fix their water infrastructure, but you know, they hit their limits. And so [00:33:00] what they set up was a business, they have sensors in the water tech. It alerts the business, they have a pay system set up so that these people come out from outside of the community, immediately fix it and it works, right?
So this is just like a modification of a very long standing problem in water infrastructure and how markets work for poor communities that's working really well. Right. So there are little stories like this all over the world. And part of what I find very inspiring about the moment we're in right now is that because of the exchange of information, because of collaborations between scholars and communities all over the world, these stories are bubbling up much faster than they ever did before.
So we're able to learn from each other much more quickly and much better. So those are some, I think, bright spots. 
Quinn: I love that because it anticipates that something is going to break, that something is going to go wrong. So why not set up effectively a service business to go along with it? 
And I think a lot [00:34:00] about, I've spent the past couple of years and I recently had the new CEO on to talk about Paul Farmer's work in Haiti and the Partner In Health work there and in many other places now, which is this, we could learn a lot from on the health front, on the water front, et cetera, et cetera, about the proactive approach of community health, right?
Not just you know, specialized healthcare, but day to day wellness, vaccines, all of these different things to treat people, to build a better baseline first, so that we are ready when, you know, new wastewater monitoring tech shows that there's cholera or there's norovirus or there's COVID or whatever it might be, right?
So that we are ready for those things because it does happen because we do have those issues. Or in the US we've still got so many lead pipes. And so the administration's like, we're going to throw all this money at it. We're going to try to fix it. But It is going to take a minute. It is a lot.
You talked a little bit about frameworks you use to consider, I guess, [00:35:00] more modular, adaptive water infrastructure, but you also talked a little bit about the micro level metrics that we need when we're trying to consider I guess an opportunity. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's metrics are something that the climate movement in general is running into with carbon removal and all kinds of things like that, which is the whole if we can't even agree on how to measure things, how are we going to verify them and then build on them and then build these markets that you're talking about on them?
So can you talk a little bit about that in the context of water insecurity and making it more secure. 
Amber Wutich: Wow. I can't believe you asked me that because I am a giant nerd and I love talking about measuring things and almost no one ever wants to talk about that. 
Quinn: Let's do this. I'm in. 
Amber Wutich: You really threw me off there. Yeah. So, as you alluded and people never want to talk about, we really focus on improving the things that we're measuring, right? And those measurements are sort of a collective agreement about what [00:36:00] matters to us. And in some cases, it's probably very important to measure the things that, you know, like public health measurements about emerging diseases.
This is super important and a very good measure. But in other cases, you know, the measures that we're tracking are a real rough proxy for the things we care about and just maybe not very good. So like GDP is a perfectly good measure, but it probably doesn't actually tell us as much as we'd like it to about the things that matter to us about people's economic well being, are they thriving in their lives?
Or is that limited by their earnings. Similarly, with water, we have these really gross scale measurements that people tend to use. And like you asked the question about disasters, they tend to focus on the physical availability of water, which is an important thing. Like, are we overdrafting groundwater?
Yes. It's very important to track that, but that doesn't really tell us very much about how well humans are doing. In the last [00:37:00] 10 years, there's been a fluorescence of efforts of people trying to get measures that tell us more about how humans are doing. And again, those public health measures with disease outbreaks have been a good one.
But by the time you get to a cholera outbreak, you're in really bad shape. We would like to catch this well before the cholera outbreak. One really good example for people that are in centralized water systems with utilities is shutoffs. So people's water gets shut off because they can't afford the bills.
And now they're in a situation that's as if they had no pipes, right? So we can track shutoffs very easily. Another measure that my colleague Katie Meehan at University College London created deals with plumbing poverty. And you can just use census data to see if people have pipes and toilets. It's a very simple measure that lets us, you know, that has revealed the extent to which so many people, even in the U.S. don't have this basic water infrastructure. And Dig [00:38:00] Deep is an example of an organization that's doing really great work around this in the U.S. So we all have probably seen monitoring of food insecurity as an early indicator of famine and conflicts and also the USDA monitors food insecurity in the U.S. to see are food stamps working or do we need to do more? My group has created a similar measure, the Water Insecurity Experiences Scale that is similar to the kind of measure that we use to study food insecurity in households to understand water insecurity. So are people worrying all the time about water?
Did they run out of water? Did they not have enough to drink? Did they not have enough for medicine? Did they not have enough to wash hands? Those kinds of indicators. 
Quinn: I'm really excited to dig into measurement because I could feel like I could do this all day for, for a couple of reasons. One is because, you know, we don't just do water here, just like we don't do climate.
We also do public health and it's all related and food and medicine and all that shit. And we have so many measurement things that have worked for us over so long that we've [00:39:00] discovered that are great. We have so many things that are I guess you could say that they're nascent, but only because we've had, just haven't adopted them as much as we could like indoor air quality standards and things like that, or units to actually fix that, like Merv 13 and making that, you know, a baseline for schools and offices, all that different shit.
But I'm curious about when you look at these, because like you said, it's not just about how expensive diapers are, it's not just expensive, it's not about, do we have this formula crisis, it's about what is it doing to people and to families and how do we really measure that? And I wonder, what does that do to a family to constantly face an ongoing water crisis, whether that is the threat of a utility shutting down your water, which just feels incredibly punitive, or it being turned [00:40:00] off all the time, or knowing that your kids, like in Chicago, are just straight up drinking from lead pipes.
So we've taken all these measurements, but like, what does that do to families? Because like you said, what we choose to measure is usually a reflection of who gets to choose what the measurement is. And that says just as much about us, like GDP or AI ethics and things like that. But I wonder how you dial it down to that specific thing of what does that do to people?
What does that do to families in the U.S. or anywhere else? Once you've really established what these frameworks are? 
Amber Wutich: Yeah. Well, when I was working in Bolivia, it was right after something called the Water War. So this was 20 years ago, there was an idea that if we marketized all the water resources, that markets would solve the problems that we had.
And that idea has not been borne out. And one of the reasons why was because poor people can't afford water. And when those utilities were put under [00:41:00] privatized or market based management, people couldn't afford their water bills and, and they protested. And that's what happens in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I was working very intensively.
So I went to live and work there for two years just after the Water War and in addition to doing participant observation and living in the community and direct observation and measuring everybody's water usage, I did really extensive interviews with people in the community about how having this water insecurity affected their lives.
And in the water literature at that time, you know, there's a long standing understanding that water impacts women and girls very negatively, right? And so there's literature about women and girls having to carry water and injuring them physically, skeletal impacts, violence and sexual assaults on the way to pick up the water.
So this association between women and water was very well known. But what I did was I interviewed male and female household heads and in sitting down with men and [00:42:00] I asked them, you know, how does this impact you? Men in this Bolivian community talked to me a lot about their feelings in a way that was very surprising to me and not at all predicted by the literature and their anguish and their unhappiness at having their children suffering and not being able to secure the well being of their families.
And the kinds of things that they were telling me were just like the kinds of indicators you would find on a basic mental health assessment for anxiety and depression. And I was really surprised by this. Working with the community, I created a scale to study emotional distress over water insecurity in the households, and people were scoring very, very high, like up to 90 percent of people were having constant worry and fear.
And what ends up happening, just as we would see with other kinds of poverty, water poverty as well, is that when you are in this constant state of anxiety and alertness and fear, and the threat [00:43:00] is intermittent and unpredictable. People develop anxiety, they develop depression, they develop PTSD, and then that mental ill health has its own set of consequences because it makes it harder to cope and harder to earn an income, right?
And so we see the global burden of mental ill health as very, very high right now. It's largely unaddressed. Most countries do not have enough caregivers to address it. So this is sort of like, in addition to waterborne disease that we've always been tracking and we always knew was there, we're finding that this, link between water insecurity and mental health is really wearing on households.
And of course, you know, the longstanding issues around conflict and injury and danger are as well a part of this dynamic. 
Quinn: So let's dial this down because I love that you've built this scale. And on the one hand, it reminds me of the chart in the doctor's office with the happy faces to the sad face to the pain scale.
And it turns out we know like so little about pain and how [00:44:00] subjective it is and all these different things. On the other, I wonder, and maybe I should have done this from the very beginning, but now that we're talking about analysis and numbers and things like this, you know, when we work with GiveDirectly, we there's such an established number globally about what extreme poverty is and what poverty is like, you know, it's less, I think it's like $2.40 a day or something like that.
Right. Because we have to have some sort of, we have to have a unit of analysis that we've semi-agreed on, but we've also have to have some comparability. Because as much as, you know, food might cost here in one place and water might cost this in other places, to me, the most lowest common denominator for comparability is what does a human require that would jive with that scale of depression and anxiety and intermittent.
How much is required to not be I guess to be the baseline, what is the $2.40 a day or whatever it might be of water, no matter where you [00:45:00] live, whether your pipes are getting shut off in America, or you just haven't had it or it's intermittently unavailable. What do we have there? Like, what is that number so that we can build all these complex other things on top of it?
Does that make any sense? How much water do we need? 
Amber Wutich: The answer is 50 liters per person per day. And for listeners who don't live in liters, that's five buckets. It's five buckets of water per person per day. But as you know, as your question intimated, this depends a lot on the tech we have in our house and how we have things work in our house.
So, among the water experts that I work with who are wonderful people and are working so hard to solve this problem in a variety of ways, they're anguished when they bring up that we've got this drinking water in our toilets and, you know, they're just like, we've got to do something about that, right?
So it's like if your toilet requires drinking water to function and you do need a toilet because sanitation is [00:46:00] very important. You're kind of, you're, you know, we've got a thing we call path dependency. We created certain technologies and infrastructure. We're kind of stuck on that path and it's very expensive to get off the path.
Right. And so this is the problem that we're having, for example, in the United States, like, yeah, you could do it with 50 liters of water per person per day, but you can't do it the way we're doing it right now. 
Quinn: How much, how does that 50 liters break down sort of universally as far as need? Is that all consumption?
Is some of that cooking? Is some of that bathing? 
Amber Wutich: It's cooking, but it's not growing food. It's not agriculture, right? It's not your home garden or whatever. It's the inside and of course, a typical American household, if you just gave them five buckets per person per day, they'd be hurting in a serious way right now because we're not accustomed to living, but we can, right?
This is where being a cultural anthropologist make things really interesting, right? Because we have certain ways of grooming and presenting socially. And if you're not able to adhere to [00:47:00] those, there are economic consequences. And so other societies have different ways of, maybe not washing their hair every day and having a hairdo that looks even better when you don't wash it as frequently, right?
That's not the spot that we're in right now and but you know all of that the culture of what a beautiful hairdo looks like that makes someone want to hire you in a job interview, that's that social infrastructure. We can change that. 
Quinn: Is that easier to change than the hard infrastructure, than the decentralized desalination, whatever it might be?
Amber Wutich: So the trick to changing human culture is prestige. Humans are prestige builders, and when something becomes prestigious, all the humans want it. And that's one of the issues with the sustainability movement is, in my view, it has not aligned itself sufficiently with prestige, such that people are just sort of [00:48:00] like having a self sustaining movement toward those behaviors and objects.
Quinn: Can you give me examples of where you would like to see that be more adopted and successful to become more of the social norm? 
Amber Wutich: Like what kinds of technologies or what would it look like for? 
Quinn: In your mind, if you were emperor of the sustainability movement for a day, how would you slot prestige in there?
So it was a whole of movement approach, I guess. 
Amber Wutich: Yeah. So there are lots of different ways of thinking about social marketing and getting people to do stuff, right. But a lot of the social marketing that we see around sustainability is trying to pull on humans inherent desire for pro-sociality or for helping each other, which is totally a thing that humans have.
But it's usually not activated in the way that people are trying to activate it. Right? So example, in an acute disaster, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, humans will rush in and try to help each other, right? Because it's [00:49:00] acute, but humans are less pro-socially motivated to do something really annoying that doesn't have a visible impact on a day to day basis. But people will do something annoying like wearing heels or shaving their legs on a day-to-day basis because it aligns with prestige. Even if it's outside of their rational self-interest. Right? And so this is, this is the nuance that is kind of bugging me because it's like you can definitely get people to do stuff that is outside of their rational self interest.
Quinn: Yeah. Why else would you ever do it? 
Amber Wutich: Right. Why else would you ever do it? But it's because of the prestige. It's not because of the prosociality. 
Quinn: Right. We will very quickly normalize a hundred thousand deaths to a virus every year because we're just like, well, that just is what it is now.
And we like to go to bars and that's great. However.. 
Amber Wutich: Yes. And you know, like also the human capacity for normalization and denial is a very powerful tool for survival, right? It's like, I don't want to denigrate any of these. [00:50:00] sort of like inherent coping and psychological strategies that we have, right?
But it's like, we need to be a little bit smarter about understanding, you know, we've learned a lot since, when have we known that climate change is happening for like 40 or 50 years, right? So we've learned a lot about human psychology in that time. And it's like, you're not gonna get, people are going to normalize stuff and they're going to deny it.
And we need to, to be a little smarter and trickier, like stop acting surprised. 
Quinn: Yeah, yeah, we are who we are. That makes a lot of sense. So when you get approached to think with all of your experience, both in academia and all these international partners, but also your first person experience with hard infrastructure, with surprising levels of you know, revelation from men and boys in Bolivia about their feelings, which is another entire conversation that we you know, both we have to have and society has to have about men talking about their feelings, much less their weaknesses and how they don't bring in water for the family, whatever it might be. That's [00:51:00] amazing. With all of that, when you get approached to consider your perspective on a new project or problem or whatever it might be.
What measurements sort of do you bring to the table that are your toolkit? What are the frameworks you bring in? I know you, I believe some of that was justice, economic feasibility. I don't know how macro that is versus micro as talked about with intermittent shutoffs. Governance is a big question in a lot of places, even in the US where we've got, you know, private water versus public water, things like that.
What is your sort of toolkit that you bring and say like, okay, these are the considerations I find most helpful and most useful for us to improve this situation. 
Amber Wutich: Okay. Yeah. What a great and interesting question. So to begin with I really only work with populations who are at least partially off the grid.
Quinn: Off the water grid or electric grid? 
Amber Wutich: Sorry, off the water grid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People for whom that [00:52:00] their situation is already not working. So when we develop what you alluded to, these MAD water solutions, so modular adaptive, decentralized water engineered and social infrastructures, we're thinking about those people who may be on the grid, but the grid's not working for them.
They could be having shutoffs, they could be having intermittency, or they could be totally off the grid. And the reason I want to say that is because I work very closely with water managers and people who work in water governance, and they are working as frantically in the direction of fixing these pipe water problems as I am on developing, you know, MAD water solutions.
And I think all of our efforts together, you know, if dialed up to max could solve this problem. And so I really want to honor what they're doing and not encourage people to pull out of functional piped water systems that they're already on. You know, like I live in Tempe in Metro Phoenix and my water system is fabulous.
Would I ever want to pull my kids off that centralized water [00:53:00] system? No, I also get my children vaccinated because I believe in public health. Right. And water systems are a very important part of the public health advantages we've been living. So, I work with people who are already, best case scenario on hybrid water systems.
And I'm somewhat cautious about saying that people should hybridize more of their water systems, right? Because you mentioned the lead pipes in the U S and we have this excellent movement now to address the lead pipes. But there are also movements to address contaminants of emerging concern.
So this is something that we had, we've not had as, you know, you have to be like kind of a water wonk person to be thinking and caring about this. But it's a problem, right? We're inventing all these chemicals and they have impacts on human health and we're not tracking them and we're not addressing them, but the water managers, they're on it.
They're doing their best. You know, and with everything in public health, it's like there's a cost and there's a benefit and you have to balance it and they're all over that. So I'm not trying to [00:54:00] trip them up. I'm trying to work on a separate problem that is, you know, interlaced with their problem, which is for some people who are on water systems, it's not happening.
And for some people, they're totally off it. So that's step one. Step two is I take a community based participatory approach. And so that means, you know, we start by listening to communities because what I believe is a problem based on reading the literature could be their biggest problem or perhaps not.
You know, it's very, very humbling to get a PhD and study something for a decade and then go out to a community and people are like, Oh yeah, actually this huge problem is something you've never heard of. So, always to me, the first step is, you know, and if you want to be scholarly about it, we call this an inductive approach, right?
Like just listening to people and finding out what's important to them. And from there, I'm taking a framework to work with them to understand if that's what we're doing or to address the problems that they're having. Right. We always, you know, like any kind of intervention, [00:55:00] you want to do a pretest and a post test and you want to track if things get better.
And for me, I like to do a 360, right? Like, I’m what we call a four fields anthropologist. So that's language, culture, biology, and archaeology. I want to look at all that, right? Not just, you know, how is this impacting the way that you make meaning in your life? How is it impacting your health? How does it impact the story of the history of your community?
Those are all things that are important in my view to track. Typically with interventions, you only know what's improved if you look at it. Right? So if you're tracking a health outcome and health outcomes improved, you're like this intervention is awesome, but now quite often the intervention sucks because it makes people's lives bad and they have to carry the water further or it costs more or it's harder to get.
And if you're not tracking that, you don't know. Right. And this is why a lot of the water interventions fail because they're not tracking the part that makes it suck. And so I have a huge, and this is why I'm like super excited about measurement. Cause [00:56:00] like, if nobody knows how to track this thing, but people are telling you it's important, you need to figure out a way to measure it.
Invent it. Yeah. So, so that's it. 
Quinn: What is the measurement that is most often missed? What do you keep running into as sort of an obstacle that is at least semi universal? Where you go like, we've gotta figure this fucking thing out. Like, this is, why hasn't someone figured out a standard for this?
Amber Wutich: So, the Household Water Insecurity Network that is a global network that I help run with Wendy Jefferson at Texas A&M and Justin Soler at University of Miami. Our job is to kind of do that. We're like, what are we not measuring and let's figure out a way and let's deploy it globally and let's go with this.
Right. So, right now the thing that we're, so the first thing we were working on was a global measure for household water insecurity. We worked on measuring the mental health impacts. All of that is kind of like, you know, almost settled science. It's like we got that. Right now what we're working on is measuring water insecurity in high income [00:57:00] economies because, so that would be like the US or the UK, you know, for many, many years, the story we told ourselves about what, and this is why I say the story we tell ourselves is a big, important part of what's happening, right?
There's reality and then there's a story we tell ourselves about reality and it's a kind of a toss up, which one's more important. The story we were telling ourselves was like, it's all good in high income economies. We've got it figured out. And I think, you know, we, Flint was a watershed moment for people in the U.S. That was like, wow, we don't have it figured out. Right. And so now we have a little bit of a, more of a discourse around like, geez, what's going on. And so we need better measures that are grounded in the realities of people living in very wealthy societies in which many, most people have good centralized water systems, but not everybody.
A lot of people don't. And so when I mentioned shutoffs, you know, shutoffs are really important part of the story in the U.S. And the measures we have have not necessarily taken [00:58:00] that into account. 
Quinn: How deep do you go on the second and third order effects, or I guess you know, building on the first principles of water measurement, which is going, is this person in the U.S. getting 50, 55 liters? Yes or no? If they are, is it clean? If it's not, this and that, like, because you can go down the list, and we saw this during COVID when there were so many mandates against shutoffs. 
Amber Wutich: Awesome. Should have kept those.
Quinn: Yeah, super great. But also like a lot of these water utilities, we're out of money.
And part of that is because we don't fund states. And part of that is because the states are not allowed to go into debt, like the federal budget deficit. So how far do you go down the rabbit hole when you're going like, okay, it's a bigger problem. Here's what I can control. And here's what I cannot, because I don't want to keep you all day.
And we're starting to work towards a part where we try to ask this question of you and your work, but it's the question that everyone asks me, so that's why I'm asking [00:59:00] you. It's why this show exists, which is, what can I do here? Because it's really easy to feel beyond your means, beyond your power, if not impotent, when someone's like, well, the jet stream's slowing down, so fuck it.
You know? Or to say like, well, states can't run deficits in a lot of cases, so water, this and that. Chinese hackers. Okay, what, how far down the rabbit hole do you go when you got to go, stop? This is what I can control in this community that is mostly off the grid in one way or another. Like, where is that most practical?
And then let's segue into how people can support that in some way, whether they have water or not. 
Amber Wutich: Yeah, so I do think the trick to not having despair is, as you said, to really focus on a thing that you can do that gives you joy and that you feel good at and just kind of keep hammering at that thing while keeping an awareness of like, is this thing I'm hammering at, am I hammering at it the right way? Is there a different way that's better to hammer at [01:00:00] it? But to stay in that space. Right. And like, that's the work that you're doing with this podcast. It's work you're called to do. It's work you're able to do well. It's like, you don't have to do all the work. You just have to do your thing.
Right. And so similarly for me, it's like, I understand how humans construct cultures and social networks very well. And I understand how that works in a situation where people are off the grid and society's not working for them. So that's kind of where I'm staying at. Right. And I have these amazing colleagues who their whole thing is addressing the kind of stuff you're talking about.
Like the debt that states are carrying, our municipal utilities, funding models going to work 30 years out. Like, wow, that's really important work. That's not the work I’m called to.
It's not my favorite. I don't do it as well as they do it. Like I can uplift and honor the work that they're doing because it's very important, even though it's not my work, right? And so that's [01:01:00] kind of the headspace that I'm in. And so, you know, there's like that thing, it doesn't have to be or, like both things can be true and it can be true that we need to fix utilities, we need to better fund centralized water systems, it can also be true that we need to address the problems of people who aren't benefiting from those systems.
So that's kind of my headspace. And then pivoting into the second question about, you know, what kinds of headspaces would I recommend to other people? I do think, I think the most important part about being a human is that meaning making part, right? You know, what is the meaning of your life?
What are you dedicating your life to? That gives it value and makes the time you're spending here in community and in society something that you can be proud of and happy about at the end of your life. Right. With regard to the problems that we're talking about, that's the most important thing, like just knowing oneself and embracing what's important to you and having an impact.
And, you know, that's also a way to like address [01:02:00] the prestige and pro-sociality problem, right? Like do something that has value to society, but also has value to you and that you feel good about. But with regard to water, I think that there's good evidence that the social infrastructure that we talked about is not where it needs to be.
I'm a Gen Xer, and there was that book Bowling Alone back in the day. Like, I'm increasingly aware that younger people than me do not have these cultural touch, you know, reference points. But we have known for almost as long as we've known about climate change, about this epidemic of isolation and this epidemic of isolation is a very serious problem and it's getting worse and worse with social media and other dynamics that are happening in our society right now.
And we see the mental health impacts of this. It's bad news, right? The kinds of things that people need to survive in severely unpredictable climate situations are also the things that we need to address in this epidemic of [01:03:00] isolation, right? We need social networks, we need informal economies, and we need cultural norms that uplift us.
And those are things that, you know, like if we're all honest with ourselves in the way that we're living today, like when I think about myself scrolling on social media on my phone, like no I don't think I actually am living in a way that is consistent with living a life of meaning. 
I'm not enacting the life of meaning when I'm scrolling on my phone.
I'm just going to put it out there. So, you know, being a little more and you know, I'm a person, this is going to make sense, but I'm a person who hates exercising. Like, wow, I hate exercising a lot. And it's like, I got to do that at least 20 minutes a day or else I'm going to die. So I'm just going to do it.
Right. I think that at first, before it starts to feel meaningful, like those practices of building social networks and engaging in meaningful, informal economic behaviors, and like starting to construct cultural norms that are meaningful and not just like, [01:04:00] you know, doom scrolling on your phone. It doesn't, it feels like exercising.
It's like, I don't like it. It's not fun. I'm tired. But in time it starts to take on a life of its own that's meaningful. And it is a better way of living. It's how humans need to live to survive. So that's what I think humans, like it's actually not that hard, right? Like talk to your neighbor, join a club, hang out.
You know, make a cake for somebody on their birthday, like that kind of stuff. Those are the first steps we can have toward constructing a society that is going to be more resilient to climate change. And we know that because we've got decades of literature on how people survive disasters and people who've got all that stuff.
They're the ones who do well. 
Quinn: I love it. That's amazing. Print it on a T-shirt. So last couple of things here real quick. One, I'm going to ask you offline later, unless you have them on the top of your head now, any really reputable organizations people can support whether it's again on the hard tech or the social sciences side around water, [01:05:00] on water.
You know, in that area, places you just love doing the work and that's volunteer, donate, whatever it might be policy, whatever you know, how much ever you want to tread on that. But then the other thing is, I'm going to, real quick, throw away the last questions I usually ask people, because I've had this thought for a while and iit's both, I won't, I'm not going to say like incomprehensible, maybe impractical, but went to a liberal arts school and it's great, and I'm so thankful for it, because I failed every version of chemistry that you can fail, but I learned to ask questions, and I think that's great, and it makes you take a bunch of different things and see how they kind of add together, and you have to do a lot of writing and thinking and all of that, but I've always had this idea as I've started to work on things like climate, which is everything, right?
Or food, which is everything, or water, which touches everything. Like you said, from toilets and sanitation to cooking food or just drinking it. That it would be really great if in some ways, and I know some places do this, [01:06:00] we could reform some liberal arts educations around a specific problem slash opportunity.
And I'm curious with this idea that I believe I have heard you mention called socio-hydrology. What are four, because you're in academia as well and you're a parent, four high school classes everybody should have to take in socio-hydrology?
Amber Wutich: Okay, so let me just give you like, okay, four high school classes. So, socio-hydrology is basically an area of scholarship that looks at, you know, how basin scale dynamics are affected by society, right? And then there's another thing called the hydro social cycle that would also be important, which is looking at, like, how the water cycle, the hydrological cycle is affected by humans and human systems and human meaning.
So I would say, you know, [01:07:00] you want socio-hydrology, but you also want to go below the basin scale. So, hydro social cycle.
Four classes in high school. I think there are anthropology classes in high school. Yeah, so that's a great one. My 14 year old freshman in high school is taking AP Geography.
Phenomenal. Everybody should take Geography. I do think Basic Environmental Science is quite important. 
Quinn: Are there any you need to invent that aren't out there, or that you've heard of being taught somewhere? 
Amber Wutich: Yes, this is the first one. It's like, ooooh. Hmmmm. 
Quinn: It's how do we get, you know, we have this whole higher institution, or higher education issue, which is that it's just profoundly unaffordable and unavailable and all these different things, which is why I kind of shifted it from like, oh, what would 201 in college be to high school, so that at least we can send more people out into the world with a basic understanding of both water, but how we affect water and water affects us and the systems around it. So [01:08:00] I'm curious what that fourth class is for you. 
Amber Wutich: So yeah, we'll say sociology slash anthropology, because not everybody has that. Geography is absolutely essential. That would be like my number one.
And a basic environmental science, that's important, right? For the last one, I really think any good history course, if you pay attention, it tells us this story of how humans live under climate change, right? So I remember when I was in high school back in the day and I took AP European history and you went so deep into European history and you can get this story out of European history, right?
So I think, you know, one of the things that my friends who are archeologists, who think on, you know, 10, 000 or even 40, 000 year scales, they're like, nobody thinks about time. You know, and I find that to be true as well. Like when I talk with my awesome water people, you know, they're thinking on a scale of the lifetime of a water system.
And, you know, maybe it's existed 30 years or 50 years, or maybe it could exist 150, like those [01:09:00] great Victorian water systems, but they're not thinking on scale. And so many human problems emerge on scale and they have to be solved at scale. And so I think something that helps people think with greater time depth is a really powerful thing.
So history, but then the other thing when you're like, oh, you didn't invent a class, it's logic. Logic is very important. Yeah. They don't teach logic much anymore. And I'm a big fan of logic because it helps you eliminate bad ideas, but if you're not trained in logic, then it gets to be harder to eliminate those bad ideas that make sense because it's not easy to see that they don't make sense.
So I just think anybody could pick up, you know, a book that's like logic puzzles and work on logic. My kids love those Knights and Knaves puzzles from back in the day, 
Quinn: Writing it down. [01:10:00] Knight's and knaves?
Amber Wutich: Knight's and knaves. There's a knight that always tells the truth and there's a knave that always lies and some scenario happens and you have to kind of like reason out what are the possible, what happens.
So anyway we don't get logic, but I think we should. 
Quinn: That's a good one. I like that. I love it. 
Amber Wutich: Yeah, I was on, I did a talk with Bill Nye last week. 
Quinn: Oh, nice. Used to be my neighbor. 
Amber Wutich: And they him asked the same thing. And he was also like, logic. And I was like, yes, logic! But he's like, but they don't call it logic anymore.
They call it critical thinking. I was like, okay. I really meant logic. 
Quinn: I can see the Venn diagram, for sure. And I mean, by all means, like, more critical thinking. Like, Jesus. So important. But, but, like, but also, logic. Fascinating. Is there and you don't have to answer right now, but like, is, besides Knights and Knaves, like, any books you would recommend or anything like that to kickstart our logic class?
Amber Wutich: Yeah. So what I [01:11:00] always tell my students you know, my freshman loves Barnes and Noble because they have the biggest collection of Dungeons and Dragons gear. And there's always a section in Barnes and Noble that just has logic books. 
Quinn: We're going to do this part separate because my son is 11 and can't stop thinking about it.
Continue. 
Amber Wutich: It's amazing. I never did it when I was that age, but you know, storytelling, writing, acting, so fun. Incredible. So while you're hanging out at Barnes and Noble to get your D&D gear, you can wander over to the logic books, the puzzle section, and they always have some, right? It's like five bucks.
You can do that. But I also think, just practicing, like, what is the logical possibility and what is not? I bet they also have some of these on like a Coursera or whatever. I bet they have that. Mm hmm. 
Quinn: Yeah. I like our new curriculum. I'm excited about it. 
Amber Wutich: Thank you for letting me have the logic class, even though it doesn't exist.
Quinn: But it matters. It's, you might have to invent it. I mean, I'm sure one of these ridiculous colleges has it, [01:12:00] or just like math or whatever it is, but it's like for our purposes, what are the basic fundamentals? Like, so that people step out and they understand fire better or water better or food better without getting too nitty gritty, but going like this is one of our six big things and we really need everybody to at least do the one on ones of these things, if not sort of major in water, you know, or major in electricity, power generation, whatever, you know, whatever it might be.
And you can do that, but like you said you got to take history, U. S. history to understand transmission and why it's a shit show in the U.S., you know, versus other places. All these different things. But I'm excited about it. It's going to be great.
We'll just start a little for profit university and everybody will be so excited. 
Amber Wutich: That's so funny. Yeah. And I was in Barnes and Noble last weekend and I was like checking out the magazines, like what do people like reading? How interesting. And there's like a Prepper Monthly. Right. Yeah, there is.
And it's like, it teaches you how to make your go bag and all of that. And it's [01:13:00] like, okay, I get that this is the headspace that people that feels, it feels good to people. They want to be prepared, but it just, it turns out that, you know, yeah, what's in your go bag as well. It's totally like I'm from Miami in hurricane season.
I get it. Yeah, totally. But you know, there are all these other pieces to how humans survive that are not going to be covered in prepping. And that's with all due respect. Yeah. And those are the parts that you get with history, right? And you get with geography. And it turns out that those kind of intangible pieces are so essential, we survive together. You know, we don't survive alone with our go bag for probably more than a week, actually. 
Quinn: No, and also there's movies about that, and they're very dark. Like, nobody wins in the ones where they're all alone. It's not great. It's not great. 
Amber Wutich: I remember reading the Hunger Games and I'm like, oh, this is very [01:14:00] plausible.
Wow. I don't feel great about this. 
Quinn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Take me to Dungeons and Dragons. This has been fantastic. Do you have any, I always have these other questions I ask, but I've taken just a profound amount of your time here. Do you have any other books you love, want to recommend? We have a whole list up on Bookshop we send people. 
Amber Wutich: I'm going to tell you something very controversial, which is that, you know, obviously I think it's clear that I spend a lot of my work time sort of thinking about really dark things. And my books are all, you know, fantasy. 
Quinn: All of my, I wasn't kidding about dragons. I'm not kidding.
Amber Wutich: Zombie Apocalypse is not for me, you know, so they're, they're gonna, if I were to recommend books, they would be happy and uplifting books. 
Quinn: Yeah, I mean, Zombie Apocalypse is like the day job. I don't need that when I get in bed at night.
Amber Wutich: That's what I'm saying. I have this dear friend who's an archaeologist, Kelly Knudsen, she studies trophy heads.
So, like, when people will cut off someone's head and hold it as a trophy, which I find to be very dark. She [01:15:00] loves a zombie apocalypse novel, and I'm just like, Kelly, I don't know. 
Quinn: It's like church and state, you know, work and home, like, and by the way, there's plenty of my work reading that's inspiring and proactive and like you're saying, you know, it's positive and all these wonderful things.
But truly, like, I told this story on the show recently, but my wife is so wonderful and she left a copy, I think it was, Time magazines, like hundred climate people in business or something and she left it in the house and I was like, it doesn't come inside. I don't want it, like if it's not dragons or spaceships 10, 000 years in the future, like it's not coming home.
Like it's No, no, no, no, 
Amber Wutich: Absolutely. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Anyway, organizations I could recommend. So, an organization that I worked with in my dissertation in Bolivia and is doing amazing work now, 25 years later, they've expanded into the U.S. to work on U.S. water system problems is Water for [01:16:00] People.
Okay. And another one is Dig Deep, which is a more recent organization that's focused on water issues in the U.S. And what I love about both of these organizations is that, you know, they get the importance of the interface between, you know, centralized, pipe government run water systems, systems for people who are semi or fully off the grid and the social infrastructure, right?
They've got it all. So those are two organizations that I would definitely highly recommend, but there is another organization that I will love to draw your listeners attention to, the National Science Foundation, which is funded by U.S. taxpayers, is funding all of this research and it's funding all of the advances around climate change in addition to the agency work that's happening right in USDA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And I think, you know, listeners should be so proud about [01:17:00] our investment in basic science and the incredible advances in knowledge and technology that it's enabling.
And so I think it's like you're already supporting, you know, one of the most important organizations for addressing these issues. And everybody should feel really, really good about that. And also shout out to the National Institutes of Health, which, you know, funds the health related research that works in tandem with the National Science Foundation's work.
Quinn: I love that. Of all of the many, many incredible scientists I've gotten to know on the show and also offline conversations, it's amazing how often, and it's makes sense, people just say basic science, NSF, like, it's just like, where would we be if we weren't doing that?
Amber Wutich:  I mean, it truly makes our science in the US you know, globally leading.
It's just something that we should be so proud of. 
Quinn: I love it. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. I'm so glad that you got an hour and 15 minutes, [01:18:00] my God, without wonderful children asking for snacks which at some point it's just, it's like, we have no more snacks. I don't know what to tell you.
Amber Wutich: So many Goldfish. 
Quinn: You've eaten all of the Goldfish. There's no pretzels left in the house. 
Where can our listeners follow your work? Is it a website? Newsletter? What is social networks anymore? I have no idea. LinkedIn? 
Amber Wutich: Yeah, I am on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Blue Sky. Any of those work.
Quinn: Awesome. Rock and roll.