Water Always Wins

New York City famously bought 1,600 square miles of land in the Catskill Mountains for $ 1.5 billion in 1997 to protect and clean its water, rather than invest in an expensive new water treatment plant that it estimated would cost more than $ 6 billion plus $ 250 million a year for maintenance. It was cheaper to protect the forest. Often, conserving watersheds can be less expensive than destructive alternatives to supply water, such as desalination plants or new reservoirs formed behind dams.