Fresh Water for Arid Lands’ 
By Davip S. JENKINS 
Director, Office of Saline Water 
United States Department of the Interior 
[With 5 plates] 
From a status of barely casual interest, the increasing demand for 
fresh water and the associated search for supplementary sources have 
almost overnight come to preoccupy public interest and technical 
thinking everywhere. Population growth, coupled with a startling 
increase in unit water consumption, has imposed severe demands on 
water resources [1] ?, to the extent that even the most amply provided 
parts of the world have begun to feel alarm. Figure 1 shows the rise 
in water use in the United States since 1900. Elsewhere similar in- 
creases have occurred. There are indeed grounds for alarm, in view 
of our investment in water-resource projects and our dependence on 
them. For many years a considerable part of our construction ex- 
penditures has been devoted to building the project works, and simul- 
taneously questions of ownership and control of fresh-water sources 
have given rise to regional and international contentions. Even in 
many nonarid lands, our natural water supplies draw nearer to exhaus- 
tion and we look hopefully toward the possibilities of going to the 
oceans and to the brackish waters [2] about us for new supplies of 
fresh water. 
But in the arid regions, water is as gold. Men have long dreamed 
of finding living space for additional people in the great areas of 
desert and semiarid land in which the world abounds. But so long 
as water cannot be obtained except at remote locations and in small 
we shall be able to bring fresh water to them at low cost, they promise 
quantities, the lands outside of these oases must remain barren. When 
to become the productive base for a new growth of human activities. 
The purpose of this symposium is to appraise this problem and to 
pool our knowledge of its difficulties and prospects. The following 
general sketch of saline water conversion and its application to the 
needs of arid lands is necessarily based on the work with which I am 
1General paper on saline water conversion, for the UNESCO Symposium on Salinity 
Problems in Arid Lands, Tehran, Iran, Oct. 11-18, 1958, and published by permission of 
UNESCO. 
2 Numbers in brackets indicate references at end of text. 
285 
