When the Rivers Run Dry July 3, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Environment, General, water , trackbackWith changing weather patterns leading to extreme weather reports hitting the headlines with ever greater frequency, it seems there is either too much water, as in the destructive floods across the midlands of England and the North of Ireland earlier this month, or not enough, as in the catastrophic impact of the Australian drought. Water management will be increasingly important, especially for the water demanding cities, and Dublin is no exception- I will shortly post a story on proposals to divert the Shannon to supply the growing capital. As the following book review shows, similar schemes have already had devastating consequences for river systems all over the world.
Book Review
Fred Pearce: When the Rivers Run Dry- What happens when our water runs out?
Eden Projects Books 2006
368pp
We are not used to thinking too much about water conservation in this part of the world. In Britain and Ireland, we are more likely to be complaining about the rain than to be expressing any serious concern about shortages. Droughts are something that happens in Africa and places like that, right?
From the outset of this superb survey and analyses of the state of the world’s most critical resource, Fred Pearce makes us think again. In many parts of the world- the “developed” and industrialised parts as much as the Majority South- rivers are running dry, underground aquifers are being pumped way beyond their natural replenishment rate, and marshlands are being drained.
Environmental journalist, researcher, broadcaster and author of 15 previous books, Pearce takes us from rivers like the Kennet in Wiltshire, along the Mekong in Cambodia, the Colorado in the South West USA, the Amazon and the Ganges, bringing his journalistic and investigative skills to bear on this fascinating, crucial but tragic story.
Astonishingly, Britain has less fresh water available per head of population than Afghanistan; the South East of England has less than Ethiopia. Until now, this has not been too much of a problem because there has been no need to irrigate crops. But climate change bringing increasing droughts, bad management, development and new housing without adequate provision for water needs, and the pumping of water from the hills into towns with burgeoning populations, are all factors contributing to increasing water stress with little evidence of any long-term solution. The situation just seems set to get worse- much worse- as dozens of rivers –such as the Kennet in Wiltshire- dry up for much of the year as they are effectively drained to supply the needs of towns. Little thought is put into water conservation, and crises management just compounds the problem by lowering the water tables still further in an attempt to re-fill the rivers during dry spells.
With increasing environmental awareness, not to mention water bills, it is becoming more common to put a brick in the lavatory cistern, take showers rather than baths, and think about installing rain-water harvesting systems and use other strategies to conserve water. However, we might be surprised to hear that most of our water use is not in daily domestic habits, but in the embodied water used to produce our food and grow our clothes: -it takes between 2,000 and 5,000 litres to grow a kilo of rice- more than the average householder would use in a week; -1000 litres are needed to grow a kilo of wheat. -11,000 litres to grow the feed for a cow to produce a quarter-pound hamburger; -2,000-4,000 litres for that cow to fill its udders with a litre of milk; -every teaspoonful of sugar takes 50 cups of water to grow it, while 140litres would be required to grow the coffee you sweeten it with; And it is not only food- it takes a staggering 25 bath-tubs full of water to produce enough cotton for a T-shirt.
“The water ‘footprint’ of western countries on the rest of the world deserves to become a serious issue. Whenever you buy a T-shirt made of Pakistani cotton, eat Thai rice or drink coffee from Central America, you are influencing the hydrology of these regions- taking a share of the River Indus, the Mekong or the Costa Rican rains. You may be helping the rivers run dry.”
One of the biggest villains in this story is the role mega-dams have played in environmental destruction around the world. In the chapter “Wonders of the World” we are introduced to Daniel Beard, “the recently retired Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the US agency that has built large dams on more rivers than any other body anywhere in the world” who is now campaigning against dams. Beard tells us that “’apart from global warming, there has been no more drastic human alteration of the landscape than the damming, regulation and diversion of the world’s rivers…[but now] we’ve started tearing down dams…the time when large dam projects are a realistic answer to solving water problems is behind us.”
By interfering with water flows on such a scale, dams it seems have often failed to live up to expectations and caused serious environmental destruction, as well as destruction to local livelihoods and economies.
“Once,” writes Pierce, “the world’s river teemed with fish. Then, during the twentieth century, most of the rivers were barricaded with dams and their wild flows tamed. Almost everywhere this has caused a drastic decline in fisheries.”
Since the first “superdam” was completed in 1935 - the 220-metre wide Burec’s Hoover dam that spanned the Boulder Canyon on the river Colorado- dams quickly become a powerful symbol of modernism. Russia, Egypt, Japan, China and India followed America’s lead until by the 1990s already nearly all the world’s major river systems had dams built on them. Between them, around a fifth of the global total of electricity is being generated by hydro power. Most big dams have other functions, irrigation and domestic supply to cities.
Nowadays however the wisdom of building these vast structures is coming seriously into question. The benefits usually turn out to be short-term, and the rich gain far more than the poor. Indeed, large numbers of people-at least 80million world-wide- have been forced to move from their homes to escape the areas the dams flood. More than this, however, the electricity provided by the dams is often less than anticipated, and dams around the world are suffering other problems as well, including silting of the reservoirs, the production of methane from rotting vegetation that accumulates behind dams in the tropics and rainforest areas- which contributes an astonishing 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, evaporation, and in some regions potential threats of total failure with catastrophic effects due to deterioration of the dams or even terrorist attack.
As a result of ill-advised damming projects, the diversion of a river’s waters for urban development, golf-courses and agriculture, many of the world’s great rivers are failing to reach the sea for part or all of the year. “The Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in China, the Indus in Pakistan, the Colorado and the Rio Grande in the USA- all were reported to be trickling into the sand, sometimes hundreds of miles from the sea… Some kind of cataclysm was striking the world’s rivers.” He goes on: “The wells have been drying up too. Half a century of pumping on the high planes of the USA has removed water that will take two thousand years to replace. In India, farmers whose fathers lifted water from wells with a bucket now sink boreholes more than a kilometre into the rocks- and still they find no water.”
Perhaps the most disturbing and tragic water story of all is the fate of the Aral Sea which lies between the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Once the fourth-largest inland body of water, over the last 40 years most of it has turned into a “huge, uncharted desert” due to the diversion of nearly all the water from the two main rivers that feed it to irrigate vast cotton fields that were planted in the desert. This, says Pierce, was “one of the greatest ever assaults on major rivers” and has poisoned the land and destroyed a people. On his journey through the landscape he finds “mismanagement of water on an almost unimaginable scale…More disturbing still, I found in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody seems to have the vision or the will to rethink how this land and its rivers might serve the people here better.”
In the latter chapters Pierce indicates where such a vision might come from to resurrect the failing world’s river systems. There is a new wisdom slowly emerging that promotes working with nature rather than against it. Rather than resorting to massive engineering projects to manage floods and irrigation, more local and appropriate methods are being resurrected, with a greater understanding of the crucial role forests and wetlands play. A return to traditional methods of rainwater harvesting is seen as the only hope for many farmers in water-stressed areas of the world. One researcher in the Negev desert in Israel, after archaeological excavations uncovered ancient hillside water channels showing how careful rainwater collection could make a huge difference, is quoted a saying, “We have tried to grow the crops mentioned in the Bible, and most of them will grow here in the desert if we harvest the rain”.
The book concludes with a look at “Water Ethics” showing that solutions are there, their implementation can lead to dramatic positive results- as in the Negev desert- but that the global water situation remains critical. Civilisations in the past- such as the Mayan civilisation – seem to have been propelled into collapse due to intensive water use and local climate change.
Fred Pierce has given us a brilliant tour of the world’s rivers that reads as both an adventure story and powerful testimony to the human impact on the water cycle we depend on. This is one of the best and most important environmental books to come out in the recent years.
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