One Salty Business: The Convergence of Environmental Concerns and Human Rights in the 1960s

Depletion of natural resources around the world, and water resources in particular, drew sustained global attention for the first time in the 1950s and eventually culminated in the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and the 1977 United Nations Water Conference. Throughout the 1960s, government officials, industry representatives, and intergovernmental executives in the United States believed that the advances made through the desalination programs could benefit those around the world. Those efforts catapulted a new way of thinking about the distribution and access of water resources—not only in a domestic sphere, but also globally. Desalination offered the potential to substantially reduce water woes caused by droughts and stimulate economies at the same time.

In this way, the idea of desalination can be used as a prism through which to interpret how both environmental and human rights concerns already were increasingly under consideration during the 1960s. The idea of desalination was not new, but both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson recognized its increasing relevance as water resources became more and more strained in the United States as well as other arid regions across the globe. On the surface, it is a concept that can be understood by anyone—using science to turn sea water into water one can drink. Perhaps that is why Kennedy and Johnson has an easy time selling it to a nation in crisis and why it keeps popping up wherever climate change threatens fresh water sources.