Water Negotiator Aaron Wolf Spreads Liquid Hope

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“I was in Israel; I spent time traveling to Jordan and Egypt. I studied the Jewish Kabbalah and a bit on Sufism and Christian [mystical] traditions. I then spent a summer in Thailand learning from a Buddhist monk who conducts negotiations over timber issues. That’s where it really came together for me. I had a chance to look deeply at these models and think about how you can do conflict resolution better with these understandings.”

Among the tools Wolf has incorporated in his conflict-management training is an understanding of the hierarchy of human needs as articulated by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. “The idea is that there are four categories of needs—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—and they are best achieved in some kind of sequence,” Wolf says. “Maslow popularized this concept in the West, but it can be found in all spiritual traditions. My training workshops in conflict resolution are now structured to go through those different levels.”

The importance of doing so is illustrated in the ongoing Middle Eastern talks, which Wolf still helps facilitate from time to time. “When Israelis and Palestinians are talking to each other about water resources, Palestinians are talking about the need for water on a physical level,” he says. “In the Gaza Strip, people literally don’t have enough water for their basic human needs. Water is also an emotional issue for them; it’s a representation of the Israeli occupation. It’s controlled by somebody else.

“In Israel, nobody is dying of thirst. What’s more, they’re largely in control of their own aquatic destiny. With their physical and emotional needs met, they think of water in intellectual terms. How much do we use in agriculture as opposed to for residential use? How much do we desalinate, and at what price?

Wolf has tried to emphasize “that everybody’s basic human needs must be taken care of, and whatever emotional scars they have about the past need to be addressed. Then you can move it onto an intellectual level.”

Wolf starts negotiations by asking everyone to tell stories that describe their relationship to the source of water in question—what it means to them. “At the end of the introductions, instead of having established a hierarchy, the people notice their commonalities with the others in the room,” he says. He also stresses the need for adversaries to genuinely listen to one another. “Deep listening is in every spiritual tradition, but we in the West do it so badly,” he says. “I was told this joke: In America, what’s the opposite of speaking? Waiting to speak!”

Wolf can’t talk in specifics about the negotiations he has overseen in recent years; most are ongoing, and coming to terms on a water treaty can take 10, even 20 years. He expects he will be returning to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where he’s been working a lot recently. “There’s a lot of demand on resources in that area. You want to encourage development for poverty alleviation, but you don’t want to make the same mistakes we’ve made with some of our big dams,” he says.

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