Alas, the Nature and Environment book group didn’t think much of this book. There’s a revised edition coming out soon (August 2018), but unless it’s completely rewritten and restructured, it’s going to have some of the same failings; its age was only part of the problem.
I learned a lot of interesting but somewhat disconnected things. No notes! No bibliography!
Like many books about water, there’s a lot of focus on waste. At the end of chapter 26 Pearce finally addresses what happens if everyone “saves” water: “…in many river basins, most of the ‘wasted’ water would actually have moved on through the water cycle, either returning to rivers, from where someone downstream would capture it, or percolating underground, from where the same farmer or his neighbor might later pump it back to the surface.” Nothing on fracking, unfortunately.
In this book I learned
- “Salt cedar, also known as tamarisk, is a nasty and extremely tough shrub, able to withstand fire and drought, flood and searing desert heat. A single plant can drink more than 265 gallons of water a day.”
- Treaties and laws can “allocate more water than actually exists”
- Green revolution crops need more water (kind of makes sense!)
- Mining fossil water described as “farming water” (see quote about Tirupur, below) – classic tragedy of the commons
- dairy “white revolution” in Gujarat: “two districts alone are exporting from the state 1.2 million acre-feet of virtual water a year in the form of milk”
- Libya’s “Great Manmade River”
- arsenic and fluoride (naturally occurring) can make groundwater poisonous
- dams are incredibly inefficient, turning fertile floodplains into dust bowls
- Naga fireballs in the Mekong
- Qanats and ab-anbars – amazing! I want to visit one!
- The history of the Salton Sea encapsulates many of the mistakes people make in trying to control water
- “[The Bon Om Touk] festival has taken place since the twelfth century, always at the full moon in late October or early November. It is a celebration of one extraordinary fact about the river on which it takes place. The Tonle Sap is one of the few rivers in the world that reverses its flow. It does it every year, right in front of the palace.” (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
- Sussex dew ponds: they use a ‘secret process’ to insulate the clay bottom. “The straw insulated the clay, keeping it colder than the soil beneath at night. The stones, which shed heat quickly at night, lowered the temperature further. Once a successful dew pond was created, it would, in effect, generate its own water from the air.”
- “On a cool, still night, the air can be so saturated with moisture that even modest air movements, such as sound waves, can condense the moisture and produce raindrops. In the mountains of Yunan in southern China, villagers have a tradition of yelling loudly in the hope that it will stimulate rain. The louder they shout, it is said, the more it rains.”
- Stenocara gracilipes: “In Namibia … a beetle in the desert [was discovered] that has evolved a bobbled upper surface to its body with a pattern that is supremely efficient at capturing moisture from passing fogs. The hexagonal pattern of tiny peaks and troughs appears to push tiny droplets together to form larger droplets, which then roll off the beetle’s back and into its mouth.”
- Raj-Samadhiyala, a village in Gujarat where water conservation is a top priority: “…On the paths there were thousands of fruit trees, where most villages are treeless. Under their shade were piles of mangoes and watermelons. And out among the small fields growing wheat and vegetables and groundnuts, there were the ponds—lots of them. … Nobody is allowed to take water directly from the ponds, and farmers are banned from growing the thirstiest crops, like sugarcane.”
Short quotes
- Tirupur: “These villagers in this toxic wilderness were buying their water, at the price of a rupee per pot, from the people who sucked dry the precious underground reserves of Mandaba. The same people who were keeping the dye factories in business, producing the effluent that poisoned their fields and wells for miles around, were making a further tidy profit out of the misery caused by their pollution. The tragedy of Tamil Nadu’s disappearing water supplies was complete.”
- “The Colorado is both legally and hydrologically one of the most regulated rivers in the world. But it is becoming clear that the legal and the hydrological no longer mesh.”
- “By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into the simple mechanics of a water pipe, engineers have often created danger where they promised safety and intensified the floods they intended to prevent.”
- “The Six-Day War was… the first modern water war. … Israel today uses far more water than falls on its territory, and it has been able to do so because of its occupation of the West Bank, which gives it control of the western aquifer, and the Golan Heights, which gives it control of the Jordan River.”
- Africa described as “a continent of haphazard boundaries largely created in the days of imperial rule and maintained because anything else would bring chaos”
- About the notion of sending waters from the north-flowing Ob and Yenisei to water cotton and maybe revive the Aral Sea: “you cannot keep a bad megaproject down”
- “Money thrown at problems often produces the wrong solution.”
- “Attempts to tame [the Rhine] began in earnest in the nineteenth century, with ‘rectification’ works undertaken by the German engineer Johanna Tulla. …Tulla forced the river into a single, well-defined, permanent channel. ‘As a rule,’ he declared, ‘no stream or river needs more than one bed.’ Nature never intended that this should be so, but Tulla’s maxim has become the rule that almost every river engineer follows.”
- “The good news is that we never destroy water. .. [S]omewhere, sometime, it will return, purged and fresh, in rain clouds over India or Africa or the rolling hills of Europe. … Water is the ultimate renewable resource.”
About dams
- “Water, as they say in the American West, flows uphill to money.”
- “If nothing else, dams have proved an exceptionally effective technology for turning the unruly flow of rivers into private or state property.”
- “On rivers like the Colorado, the Volta in West Africa, and the Nile, the big dams can hold two or three times the actual annual flow. And yet they remain an essentially experimental technology. Their hydrological, ecological, and social effects have been huge. But for many years their status as symbols of modernism insulated them from serious appraisal. … Only since the late 1990s have serious steps been taken internationally to establish whether their benefits outweigh the environmental, social, and economic costs.”
- There are few “untamed rivers” left, primarily in empty areas.
- Hydroelectric dam in the Amazon: “The rotting vegetation in the flooded forest is producing huge amounts of methane… The reservoir was created in the 1980s to provide pollution-free electricity for the capital of the Amazon, but by Fearnside’s calculations, it produces methane with eight times the greenhouse effect of a coal-fired power station with a similar generating capacity.”
- “Most dams are built with the promise that they will capture floodwaters from the rivers they barricade. But one of the secrets of dams is how often they make floods. This happens because of the contradictory hydrological requirements of the different uses to which dams are put.”
Water in China
- “Controlling [the Yellow River] floods has always been the single most important activity of Chinese governments. Many historians argue that it is the single most important reason for the creation and survival over the millennia of the vast Chinese state with its draconian powers. The Chinese sum up the relationship in a word: zhi, which means both ‘to regulate water’ and ‘to rule.’”
- “In ancient times, if the river shifted ground, the emperor was thought to have lost the mandate of heaven and could no longer rule.”
- Karl Wittfogel is quoted as calling it a “hydraulic civilization.”
- “The [Loess Plateau] is the source of 90 percent of the silt in the world’s siltiest river. Nowhere on earth loses as much to erosion. This is because the Loess Plateau is not a proper mountain range at all. There is no underlying geology. It is just a huge pile of loose sand, several hundred yards thick and covering an area five times the size of Louisiana.
The sand blew here from a distant desert thousands of years ago and has been left out in the rain ever since.” - “The Chinese, brought up on the wisdom of managing the Yellow River, sensibly have an idiom, ‘when the river runs clear.’ It means ‘never.’”
Longer quote
It is too easy to see communities that depend on natural wild resources and the vagaries of untamed rivers as somehow left behind by progress. The truth, quite often, is the opposite. It is they who have unlocked the truth about how to make the maximum use of natural resources. It is the urban sophisticates with their engineering degrees who haven’t got a clue. … When the rivers run dry, it does not need to be a disaster, provided societies can adapt to cope with it. And the traditional attributes of flexibility associated with communities living on wetlands serve remarkably well. One of the ironies is that we have grown disturbingly good at disrupting river flows while losing our capacity for coping with, let alone prospering from, the consequences.