Manufacturers, likewise, responded impressively to the water pollution regulations. Chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, primary metals and petroleum producers, automakers, pulp and paper mills, textile firms, food processors, canners, brewers, and other large water users increased recycling and adopted water-saving processes. In just the fifteen years from 1985 to 2000, American industry's total withdrawals were trimmed by a quarter. PreWorld War II American steel mills that needed 60 to 100 tons of water for every steel ton produced were superseded by modern mills using only six tons by the turn of the twenty-first century. Similarly, water-intensive semiconductor silicon wafer makers reduced their intake of ultrapure freshwater by three-quarters between 1997 and 2003, and recycled much of the discharge for use in irrigation. In the decade from 1995, Dow Chemical cut its water usage per ton produced by over a third. Europe's Nestle nearly doubled its food production while consuming 29 percent less water from 1997 to 2006. In a scheme reminiscent of New York City's landmark ecosystem services plan, bottled water company Perrier Vittel invested in reforesting some heavily farmed watersheds, and paid farmers to adopt more modern methods, in order to protect the quality of its mineral water sources.
For years water had scarcely commanded a line item in corporate budgets or more than cursory attention from top planning executives. In the age of scarcity, more and more water-conscious companies were treating water as a key strategic economic input, like oil, with clearly reported accounting and future target goals. The most forward-looking and global-minded analyzed water risks facing their key suppliers around the world, and helping insulate the vulnerable by helping them adopt conservation and ecologically sustainable practices. Unilever's technical and economic support, for example, enabled its Brazilian tomato farmers to adopt drip irrigation that trimmed water use by 30 percent and reduced water-contaminating pesticide and fungicide runoff. Brewer Anheuser-Busch became acutely aware of the importance of its water supply chain when it was whipsawed by a drought in America's Pacific Northwest. Water shortages for crops pushed up the price of a key beer-making ingredient, barley, while diminished dam flows elevated hydroelectric prices and with it the cost of producing aluminum beer cans. Environmentalists, too, have been getting on board with collaborative efforts: for instance, the Nature Conservancy has been developing a plan to award good standing certificates to companies who use water efficiently.
Improved industrial water productivity not only enhances competitiveness directly. It also creates economic benefits by freeing water and lowering its cost for other productive uses. Yet the potential scale of its benefit pales next to the boon that can accrue from water productivity breakthroughs in the least efficient, most subsidized, and heaviest polluting sector of society-agriculture. That is because agriculture is still by far the greatest user of freshwater, often consuming over three-quarters of usage. As much as half of all irrigation water is simply lost due to inefficient flood techniques without ever reaching the crop's roots. Cutting irrigation consumption by one-quarter roughly doubled the water availability for all other productive activities in the region, including industry, power generation, urban use, or recharging groundwater and wetlands. Moreover, proven technologies to multiply agricultural productivity already existed. Microirrigation systems, such as drip and microsprinklers, and laser levels of fields to cause water to distribute more uniformly, were widely successful in reducing water consumption by 30 to 70 percent and increasing yields by 20 to 90 percent in venues around the world, including Israel, India, Jordan, Spain, and America. In the long run these and other methods are necessary elements to meeting the growing challenge of global food shortages. The problem, at bottom, is political-how to promote rapid adoption and how to level the subsidized playing field so that the most efficient farmers reap a proportionate bounty of the market profits they deserve.
American irrigation agribusinesses-led by those in water-poor California-have slowly been making investments to migrate from flooding fields to sprinklers and microirrigation systems. Yet still mostly protected from the discipline of full-market costs by price supports, tariffs, and exemptions from cleaning up all the pollution runoff they caused, politically entrenched agribusinesses lack sufficient incentives to move faster. The result is more than a missed opportunity for the United States to boost its overall economic growth and competitiveness through more efficient allocation of water. There are increasing negative economic, environmental, and equity costs, too. Inevitably, American irrigators are becoming more and more reliant on mining groundwater aquifers beyond replenishable rates to produce America's crops. Over two-fifths of all U.S. irrigation came from groundwater by 2000, nearly twice as much as a half century earlier.
Both from irrigated and rain-fed farmland, vital water ecosystems are also being damaged from the runoff of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Since it is hard to pinpoint the runoff to a single source, American farm pollution still is not adequately regulated. The pollutants that seep into slow-moving groundwater, wetlands, and rivers are poisoning drinking water and coastal fisheries near and far away. The Mississippi River carries so much nitrogen-rich nutrients from fertilizer runoff that an expanding, biological dead zone without fish life as large as the state of Massachusetts now rings its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Similar dead zones around the world have doubled in size since the 1960s and are a major contributor to the alarming collapse of ocean fisheries. It is a classic tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the producer of an environmental problem is exempted from bearing the full responsibility of its costs and thus of any incentive to rectify it-and, in the age of water scarcity, as well, one of the growing, hidden inequities between water Haves and Have-Nots.
The most intriguing models of improved agricultural water productivity, however, are developing far from America in smaller, water scarce industrial democracies, like Israel and Australia, where necessity is again acting as the mother of innovation. Australia faces the industrial world's harshest hydrological environment: The continent-nation suffers acute aridity, erratic rainfall patterns, exceptionally nutrient-poor, aged soils, and lacks long internal waterway transport routes across its vast expanses. As a result, its population of only 20 million, on a land as large as the lower 48 states of America, is concentrated in the river basin of the southeastern Murray-Darling, which also produces 85 percent of the nation's irrigation, and two-fifths of its food.
Australia developed along an economic model with many similarities to the American West-dammed rivers, subsidized irrigation, and profligate water use by farmers. By the early 1990s, the damage to river ecosystems became too great to ignore. Over three-quarters of the Murray-Darling's average annual flow was consumed by human activity. As on other overused rivers, the mouth was silting up. Water in the lower reaches became so saline that it was poisoning the municipal water supply of downriver Adelaide. Fertilizer runoff was triggering deadly algae blooms along a languid 625-mile stretch of the Darling.
The government's response to the Murray-Darling's ecosystem crisis was to radically restructure its water policies by emphasizing market pricing and trading, and ecological sustainability. The new governing principles ended irrigation subsidies, required farmers to pay for maintaining dams and canals, and, of critical importance, established a scientist-calculated baseline of how much water had to be left in the river to ensure the health of its ecosystem. To facilitate independent water trading, water rights were clearly separated from private property. Governance was managed by a new basin commission.
In little more than a decade, water trading between farmers, farmers and cities, and across state lines, had taken off. There were two computerized water exchanges; farmers were even accustomed to trading over mobile phones. A kindred scheme, akin to America's cap and trade in greenhouse gas emissions, enabled irrigation farmers, who added salt to the soil and into the river basin, to buy "transpiration credits" from owners of forests, whose trees removed salinity by sucking water up through their roots.
Just as its architects had hoped, Australia's water reforms are facilitating the transfer of irrigation water from salty soil to more fertile regions, from use on lower value to higher value crops, and generally from less to more productive methods. Soil salinization has fallen sharply. River fish populations are reviving. Overall water productivity is soaring. Australia's water reforms were implemented none too soon. In the early 2000s, the continent was enduring its worst drought in a century, reviving internecine political rivalries between states and vested interests that could have torn the democracy apart without a preexisting plan. Sheep farms in the arid outback are now being bought by the government to conserve the water the animals had consumed in order to replenish the basin. Water is being more tightly rationed and the government is stepping in to pay the highest price to obtain sufficient water for the priority need of recharging wetlands and safeguarding other components of ecosystem health. Climate change, too, stalks the political struggle over Australia's freshwater-scientists predict a decline in the Murray's flow by 5 percent to 15 percent in coming decades.
As Americans feel about their own bygone, settler frontier, Australians are nostalgic, uneasy, and sometimes despairing at the prospective decline of its individualistic family farm homesteads and livestock and sheep ranches, which alone consume half the nation's agriculture water. But the reality of water scarcity imposes tough, new choices upon modern societies about how to most productively allocate its precious resources. The hard truth is that less than 1 percent of Australia's agricultural land produces 80 percent of its agricultural profits-the vast majority of the rest are marginal enterprises that lived off resource-depleting farm subsidies. In effect, they are cultural relics, worthy perhaps of preservation for social and political reasons but carried along at the expense of some of Australia's competitiveness in the twenty-first-century global economy.
America and other leading industrial democracies have not yet fully awakened to the era's defining water challenge-or to their own strategic advantages in a world order being recast by water scarcity and ecosystem depletion. While the soft-path response emphasizing improved existing water productivity has been gaining ground, it has been doing so only fitfully. No coherent, national policy is helping nurture its embryonic development into an automatic invisible green hand mechanism with the potential to marshal water's full catalytic potency and possibly deliver a transformational, era-defining breakthrough.
Inertia and long-rooted institutional forces are formidable impediments to innovative change at any given moment of history. So it is today. Powerful water bureaucracies cling unimaginatively to approaches forged in previous eras; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, is still scoping plans for giant, river interbasin transfers between the Colorado and the Mississippi. Farm subsidies and protective tariffs are so firmly entrenched in the political landscape that Congress has been concentrating on how to extend them to biofuels like corn ethanol, even though doing so will divert water from food production and add to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Despite the success of thirty-five years of clean water legislation in improving water quality and stimulating dramatic water productivity gains among private enterprises, the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency unsettled the regulatory environment and reopened the door to special interest lobbying by reflexively dropping 400 cases against illegal industrial discharges after a split 2006 Supreme Court decision muddied the terms under which seasonal or remote wetlands and streams deserved 1972 Clean Water Act protections. Similarly, most environmental groups continued to view the world through the original regulatory prism of simple top-down government prohibitions and remain highly suspicious of any market-oriented, soft-path innovations. In short, the jury is still out on whether the water sufficient industrial democracies will fully grasp their leadership opportunity to achieve the water breakthroughs that could trigger another dynamic cycle of creative destruction within market economies or whether its trend toward improved water productivity will merely become a modest way to slim down from an abundant water diet without seriously confronting the underlying, politically entrenched and outdated practices.
Momentous innovations in water history only become clear in hindsight, after they have meandered and permeated through society's many layers, catalyzing chain reactions in technologies, organizations, and spirit that sometimes combine in new alignments to foment changes transformational enough to alter the trajectory and destinies of societies and civilizations. The way James Watt's steam engine, for instance, interacted with the nascent factory system, canal craze, coal mining and iron casting boom, Britain's growing imperial reach and the nation's new capital accumulation and entrepreneurship-friendly political economic atmosphere, to help launch the Industrial Revolution would have defied prediction at the time. Yet at times it is possible to foresee at least some of the channels through which a great water breakthrough might multiply its effects.
One such channel visible on today's horizon is through water's interaction with three other global challenges-food shortages, energy shortages, and climate change-that together are likely to profoundly influence the outcome of civilization's overarching challenge of learning how to sustainably manage the planet's total environment. While not always perceived as such, the four are so inextricably interdependent that a profound change in any one alters the fundamental conditions and prospects of the others. Irrigation, for example, depends not just on water to nourish crops but also on prodigious energy to pump water from underground aquifers, transport it long distances over hilly landscapes, and drive the sprinklers and other methods that deliver it to plant roots. Artificial fertilizer, too, a mainstay of large-scale irrigated agriculture, requires great energy to produce, and its runoff from cropland has significant impacts on water quality and nourishing ecosystems. Clearing grasslands, rain forests, and wetlands for agriculture, meanwhile, worsens global warming on at least two counts-by adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere directly through burning and plowing, and by removing nature's sponges that absorb carbon emissions. A zero-sum conundrum of using water either to grow fuel or food to meet shortages is inherent in the decision over biofuels like corn ethanol. The growing, interoceanic shipping trade in virtual water crops vital to alleviating impending food famines depends upon burning expensive, fossil fuel to power the world's supercontainer fleets. Near the end of the production chain, processing and canning food products are both extremely water and energy intensive processes.
Ever since the age of waterwheels, water and energy have been coupled in power generation. Today, they are wed on a mass scale through hydroelectricity and in the cooling process of fossil fuel thermoelectric plants; indeed, one of the main constraints on adding more power plants is insufficient volumes of river water to cool them. Filtering, treating, and pumping water for cities also consumes vast amounts of energy. To gauge some idea of the scale of the water-energy nexus, nearly 20 percent of all California's electricity and 30 percent of its natural gas are used by its water infrastructure alone.
Energy crises often became water crises, and vice versa. During the great northeastern U.S. power failure of August 2003, Cleveland mayor Jane Campbell soon discovered she had an even bigger crisis than darkness and a flustered White House wanting her to reassure the public that the cause was a local power grid failure and not international terrorism, when four electric water pumping stations shut down, and threatened to contaminate the city's drinking water with sewage; to stave off a public health catastrophe, she had to launch a second emergency action to warn citizens to boil their water, a practice that continued for two days after the lights returned. The causality of crisis transmission also frequently works in reverse, with drought-induced electrical power shortages diminishing drinking water supplies, irrigation, industrial operations, and shipping. With the river Po 24 feet below its normal level during Italy's severe drought in 2003, power stations shut down from lack of water to cool turbines, and electricity was curtailed to homes and factories. Likewise, hydroelectricity output was halved and shipping reduced on the Tennessee River when it shrank to record levels during America's 2007 southeastern drought.
High energy costs are also one of the major constraints on many approaches to easing water scarcity. A third to a half of desalinization costs are energy, mainly fossil fuels-indeed, any large-scale takeoff of desal seems to be contingent upon a cost breakthrough in some renewable energy source. Likewise, the amount of weighty water that can be lifted from deep aquifers, or transported great distances through interriver basin pipelines like China's South-to-North Water Diversion Project is limited chiefly by the expenditure of energy for pumping such a heavy, hard to manage liquid.
Energy generated from fossil fuels, of course, worsens the mounting global warming crisis. When James Watt invented his steam engine in the late eighteenth century, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million; after two centuries of industrialization, the levels had risen by a third to over 380 parts-the highest level in 420,000 years and rapidly approaching the catastrophic threshold of 400 to 500 parts per million that scientists calculate could trigger the irreversible disintegration of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets.
The main feedback loops of warming-induced climate change are, in fact, also water related-an increase in what forecasting scientists call "extreme precipitation events": more prolonged droughts and evaporation, heavier flooding and landslides in wet seasons, more intense storms like hurricanes that need minimum temperatures to form, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, and, most widely felt of all, a disruptive alteration in historical seasonal precipitation patterns. Due to global warming more spring precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, intensifying spring flooding and mudslides, and diminishing summertime mountain snowpack melt that normally arrives just in time to replenish dry cropland. Since the world's dam and water storage infrastructure had been designed to accommodate traditional patterns, climate change is rendering that infrastructure increasingly "wrong-sized"-dam reservoirs can no longer capture and store all the available spring precipitation runoff, while its summertime irrigation and hydropower turbine output dwindles from reduced snowmelt. Food and energy output suffers, potentially tipping fragile, water scarce conditions to full-blown water famine. At the very least, a massive rebuilding of infrastructure looms to accommodate the change in climate.
Leading the way is one of history's stellar water engineering nations, Holland, whose society's very physical and democratic political foundations derive from extensive, ongoing water and land reclamation management in a low-lying, heavily flood-prone region. Following a giant 1916 flood, the Dutch accomplished one of the great engineering feats of the first half of the twentieth century. By closing off the Zuider Zee inlet from the North Sea with a giant dike, they created a Los Angelessized, artificial freshwater lake and a new water supply source near Amsterdam, known as the Ijsselmeer, or IJ. More recently, Dutch water engineers created a sophisticated combination of water pumps in winter and the natural phenomenon of planting trees-each of whose roots can suck up to 80 gallons a day-to help maintain drainage on reclaimed lowlands. But as rainfall and sea levels have been rising with early climate change, the Dutch have begun to pioneer what may become a new trend in the struggle to sustainably manage water ecosystems-the government is buying reclaimed land so that it can be flooded, thus diverting the rising water from cities and other invaluable societal infrastructure. Among those seeking to learn from the Dutch experience are state leaders from low-lying Louisiana, which is still recovering from the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina.
In water poor, monsoonal, subsistence countries that lack modern infrastructure buffers from water's destructive extremes, however, the impacts are likely to be reckoned by increased deadliness: Traditional, hand-built mud dams that aren't washed away in the intensified flooding often run dry of their precious, captured, seasonal flow during the prolonged drought that follows, withering crops and killing livestock. For the hundreds of millions who live daily in this precarious, impoverished condition, the consequences are often famine, disease, misery, and death. Worse lies ahead: Climate models predict that the harshest effects of global warming are likely to fall disproportionately on regions with the scarcest water; the temperate zones, inhabited by mostly water-wealthy nations, are expected to suffer the mildest initial effects. Yet in the end, no one will be spared if, as some models predict, the alarmingly rapid melting polar ice caps raise sea levels by 15 to 35 feet and inundate shorelines, and ultimately change the salinity and temperature mix of the North Atlantic enough to halt the interoceanic conveyor belt to bring a frosty, ice age ending to human civilization's brief reign during Earth's unusual 12,000-year stable and warm interlude.
More optimistically, the same relationships work in converse-any important innovation that alleviates water scarcity is likely to multiply the upside benefits to help societies meet their food, energy, and climate change challenges. Genetically modified crops that require less water, or breakthroughs in diffusing microirrigation and remote-sensing systems, would help feed the world's soon-to-be 9 billion and save fossil fuel burning energy now used to overpump groundwater for irrigation. Breakthroughs in desalinization could help provide water for crops and cities in coastal areas. Free standing, small water turbines, another promising innovation, could generate renewable electricity in fast-running streams and rivers around the world, producing inexpensive local electrical power, facilitating the removal of ecosystem-injuring dams and providing a clean alternative for communities, possibly augmenting their autonomy over the means to produce wealth and with it, their democratic voice in society. Much-ballyhooed fuel cells, which might get their hydrogen from water and yield water vapor as a by-product, could provide widely available clean renewable energy that liberates resources for food, water, and ecosystem health. But at least as important as any extraordinary new technologies-indeed, likely much more so-is the gradual, humdrum accumulation of low-tech and organizational advancements in the productive use of water supply already available to man in the form of more efficient existing waterworks, increased small-scale, decentralized capture and storage of existing precipitation, and smarter exploitation of nature's own cleansing and ecosystem renewal cycles. By one estimate, statewide application of existing efficiency techniques could reduce California's total municipal water consumption-with commensurately reduced energy costs-by one third. Water savings in profligate agriculture would be far greater.
With no technological panacea in view comparable to the giant dams and Green Revolution in the last century, the winning responses to the world's water crisis are most likely to emerge fitfully out of a messy, muddling-through process of competitive winnowing and trial and error experimentation with diverse technologies, scales and modes of organization, as each locality and nation seeks to find solutions tailored to meet its particular conditions. Uncertainty, multiplicity, and fluidity are likely to characterize the landscape until clear trends emerge. Historically, Western democracies' market economies have excelled at innovating and creating growth in just this sort of environment-indeed it is one of their main claims to fame. Centrally managed economies and authoritarian states, on the other hand, have tended to do best where technological trends are clear and the main challenge has been to apply them effectively. Thus the Western model enjoys a built-in organizational, as well as water resource, advantage in the unfolding global competition to find the most effective responses to the novel challenges of water scarcity.
Yet history also bears witness that the West's great water advances have been often brought forth by special leadership at key moments. Teddy Roosevelt's visionary commitment at the turn of the twentieth century to exploit the undeveloped potential of America's Far West by launching a new federal institution to promote irrigation and by building the Panama Canal stood out. Similarly, so did Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era commitment to swiftly multiply the benefits of the Hoover Dam by erecting similar government-built giant, multipurpose dams elsewhere in the country, and De Witt Clinton's use of New York State financing for the Erie Canal early in the nation's history to fulfill the founding fathers' vision of opening a route through the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley. By creating in each case a coherent environment with clear goals and reliable rules, these leaders inspired confidence among individuals and private enterprises whose participation was necessary for the achievement of their purpose. It is precisely such galvanizing, visionary leadership and reliable commitment to principles that is yet to arise today. Albeit, given the awareness and means in today's world to resist the social and economic displacements often attenuating to such bold, society-changing projects, doing so is comparatively harder. Nevertheless, until it does, the full potential of the organizational innovation of enlisting market forces in the delivery of a sustainable environment-an invisible green hand mechanism that improves water productivity, allocation and ecosystem health through an automatic market price signal for water that reflects the full cost of water supply, delivery, cleansing and ecosystem maintenance-is likely to be impeded by embedded vested interests, incomplete frameworks, and rules of the game that are too uncertain to fully engage private market participants.
Without any imminent solutions to the deepening global water scarcity crisis, water rich nations are likely to be buffeted by a growing number of unfamiliar foreign water shocks, much as they had been from oil in the latter twentieth century. Diplomatic standoffs, water violence, and possibly even water wars are likely to occur in overpopulated regions of extreme scarcity, such as the Middle East. Soaring world food prices, famines, and environmental spillover from the global quantum jump in resource consumption and waste generated by fast-growing Asian giants like China and India threatens to destabilize poor countries dependent upon good imports. When grain prices were spiking in the spring of 2008, World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned that without a new Green Revolution some 33 countries faced social unrest.
The smooth functioning of the integrated global economy and the critical trade in oil and food also depends upon some nation, or group of nations, stepping forward to commit their navies to guarantee unimpeded supercontainer sea passage through nearly a dozen strategic straits and canals that are potential choke points if closed. Feasible threats include terrorists or pirates sinking an oil supertanker in the narrow, pirate-infested Strait of Malacca, a war that closes oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, or a blockage of the Red Sea's southern strait at Bab el Mandeb.
Foreign policies are likely to be realigned and influenced by water-driven alliances, just as they were in the last century by oil. Saudi leasing of cropland in friendly nearby states; a similar, but ultimately unsuccessful effort by South Korea to secure the fruits of Madagascar's potential farmland; and China's provision of work crews and dams, bridges, and other water infrastructure to resource-rich African nations are possible harbingers of the formation of new virtual water and other resource-security and diplomatic blocs within the larger world order that could prove more bonding and outflank the defense umbrellas currently provided by the West. Indeed, water-based alliances could emerge as one of the new international paradigms of the postCold War order. New, nontraditional foreign policy thinking is required. Strategic alliances with other regional water Haves, for example, could offer many avenues for exerting increased leverage in many parts of the world. Turkey was already exerting its influence as the Middle East's water superpower to act as broker-and presumptive water enforcer-of peace talks between Syria and Israel. Over four-fifths of fresh river water flowing to oil-rich Arab lands originates in non-Arab states. Under more dire and polarized political conditions as water grows scarcer, it is conceivable as a thought experiment-however highly unlikely in practice-to imagine the formation of a water bloc among Ethiopia on the headwaters of the Nile, Turkey on the Tigris-Euphrates, and Israel on the tiny Jordan, perhaps in league with a cartel among international exporters of food-virtual water-as a diplomatic countermeasure should Middle Eastern oil suppliers turn extremist and try to take excessive advantage of their disproportionate oil power. Similar considerations could apply in central Asia, where the currently dysfunctional state of Tajikistan has potential control over 40 percent of the region's water sources and, through a program of giant dam-building, could deliver badly needed hydropower to nearby Afghanistan and Pakistan. Forward-looking Western foreign policy makers also have to be cognizant of the enormous leverage China's control of Tibet gives it over the mountain sources of the great rivers, and therefore the economic and political fate, of Southeast Asia.
Endless foreign policy challenges are also likely to emanate from the world's abject water poor, roughly calculated as the one-fifth of humanity without access to enough clean water for their basic domestic needs of drinking, cooking and cleaning, the two in five without adequate sanitation, including simple pit latrines, and the 2 billion more whose lives are devastated every decade by their exposure to recurring water shocks like floods, landslides, and droughts. For the most part they live in Africa and Asia, both in failing states and poor, usually rural regions of developing ones. For them, progress is not primarily measured in terms of harnessing hydrological resources to enhance their productive society but in terms of brutal survival against the natural ravages of unmanaged water and the prevention of catastrophes stemming from the collapse of aging and often poorly built waterworks. As world population soars, so too will the absolute number of abject water poor and international spillover to the richer parts of the world. From India to Africa, hundreds of thousands of climate migrants are already on the march from unbuffered water shocks, shortages and infrastructure failures-there is no reason to expect that they will politely stop at their national or regional borders to quench their driving thirst for survival.
On the hopeful side, a Western breakthrough in exportable techniques that dramatically increases existing water use productivity, improves sustainable water ecosystems, and enhances international food export supplies, of course, would quickly become a powerful lever to helping other nations and individual communities cope with their water scarcity challenges. Abundant production of internationally traded food could help strengthen the existing world political economic order by reassuring water-poor countries that their best interests lay in relying upon the liberal, free-trade region to provide, at fair prices, the food they need to import. They could yield extensive diplomatic goodwill for Western interests and promote indigenous democratic development in other parts of the world as well.
But any such water-driven democratic development would likely require imaginative, flexible, and conditional solutions beyond solely large-scale, national government-ministry-directed projects of the twentieth-century variety, including a willingness to build upon and help revive traditional, small-scale water management practices from the precolonial era. In rural parts of India and central Asia where British colonialism did not penetrate with its centralized, modern water techniques, for example, some such traditional methods and local governing mechanisms have remained intact. Village built and managed water tanks in India offer small, local, partial, but helpful solutions to the nation's great water storage shortages. In rural Afghanistan and eastern Iran, highly respected village mirabs, mirabs, or water foremen, are still selected annually among local orchard growers and farmers who share a water source to set watering schedules and amounts and to settle disputes so that wellhead and upstream farmers do not consume more than their fair share before it flows to users at the bottom. The or water foremen, are still selected annually among local orchard growers and farmers who share a water source to set watering schedules and amounts and to settle disputes so that wellhead and upstream farmers do not consume more than their fair share before it flows to users at the bottom. The mirab mirab system is remarkably reminiscent of the Dutch water parliaments that became a prototype for the founders of the Dutch Republic's democracy, as well as of democratically functioning local institutions like Valencia's public water court. It does not require too great a leap of thinking to imagine how expanding the power base of such long-established, local water institutions and practices might become one of the building blocks to rebuilding failed, or never fully formed, states that otherwise menace the world order. system is remarkably reminiscent of the Dutch water parliaments that became a prototype for the founders of the Dutch Republic's democracy, as well as of democratically functioning local institutions like Valencia's public water court. It does not require too great a leap of thinking to imagine how expanding the power base of such long-established, local water institutions and practices might become one of the building blocks to rebuilding failed, or never fully formed, states that otherwise menace the world order.
Although the water crisis of the world's poorest has been on the international agenda and the subject of numerous, high-level meetings among serious-minded people since the 1970s, and the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, endorsed by world leaders at the second Earth Summit at Johannesburg in 2002, included a specific target of halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015, the truth is that the legions of the world's water disenfranchised are continuing to swell. The familiar dynamics of ruthless indifference among those far away and diffused political power are at perpetual play. Moreover, one perverse, unintentional effect of the multilateral campaign for clean drinking and sanitary water has been to divert increased investment away from also badly needed food production infrastructure. Without a pressing crisis to rivet all world leaders' serious attention, there is not nearly enough financial commitment from rich countries, nor even sufficient political will from government leaders of many suffering, water poor ones. In a changing global order without a single dominating world power to set the agenda, the task of rallying action is chiefly being left to an amorphous international process led by weak, multilateral institutions and diverse nongovernmental entities. If only a small fraction of the debate and study they have committed over the years had been translated into concrete action, the water crisis might have been solved many times over.
Several promising principles have been enunciated. These include striking a balance between the "3 E's": Environmentally sustainable use of water; Equitable access by the world's poor to fulfill their basic water needs and for communities to share in the benefits of local water resources with the poor; Efficient use of existing resources, including recognition of water's value as an economic good. Yet no galvanizing consensus has emerged on how to practically realize these or other principles. As a result, the small army of jet-setting, water conference-goers often resemble the proverbial endless talking shop, issuing declarations of broad good intentions but disagreeing too much to get on board with concrete paths proposed to achieve them. This was illustrated at the third triennial World Water Forum held in Japan's historic capital of Kyoto in 2003, impressively attended by 24,000. Conference-goers became embroiled in a furor over a report of a high-profile committee headed by former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus that proposed specific financial means to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for water. Citing the staggering investment sums needed-on the order of $180 billion globally per year-for water infrastructure, and recognizing the paltry commitments industrialized governments were willing to make, the Camdessus report strongly endorsed private sector participation; adding fuel to a controversial suggestion, it cited large-scale, centralized waterworks like dams as potential targets for private financing that are an anathema to activists who had fought against them on the World Commission on Dams. Protests erupted at the session where the Camdessus report was launched. Angry anti-private-market water activists, NGO representatives, and union members marched through the venue, and unfurled a banner that read, "Water for People, Not for Profits."
On current dynamics and trajectories, not only will the U.N.'s self-declared International Decade for Action "Water for Life" (20052015) likely expire without achieving the Millennium targets, but the massive dry shift in the global water continuum of Haves and Have-Nots will continue to lurch toward deepening scarcity. Countries with scarcity are likely to veer toward famine; countries already in water famine face greater human catastrophes and political upheavals. Overtaxed water ecosystems are likely to grow more and more depleted and less and less capable of sustaining their societies. As the gulf between those with sufficient water and those without deepens as a source of grievance, inequity and conflict, the new politics of scarcity in mankind's most indispensable resource is becoming an increasingly pivotal fulcrum in shaping the history and environmental destiny of the twenty-first century.
EPILOGUE.
Looking back over time brings into relief the close association between breakthrough water innovations and many of the turning points of world history. From about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago, following several millennia of experimentation and development, large-scale irrigated agriculture in the arid, flooding river valleys of the Middle East's Fertile Crescent and the Indus River, and along the Yellow River's soft loess plateaus, provided the technological and social organizational basis for the start of modern human civilization. During the same period, man began transporting large cargoes on rivers and along seashores in reed and wooden sailing vessels, eventually aided by a steering rudder. Sailing in turn, nurtured the rise of international sea trade and Mediterranean civilizations where indigenous agricultural conditions were relatively poor. Civilization's slow march through rain-watered, cultivatable lands began in earnest a little under 4,000 years ago with the spread of plow agriculture that allowed more intensive farming over a greater expanse of cropland through the application of animal power.
Mastery of the art of quenching red hot iron in water to make steel weapons and tools about 3,000 years ago made possible construction of qanats and aqueducts, which reliably conveyed enough freshwater to sustain the rise of the great cities that anchored every civilization. The inland expansion of civilization was facilitated by the innovation of transport canals that connected natural waterways, starting in China 2,500 years ago and replicated everywhere with great impact over the centuries from southern France's seventeenth-century Canal du Midi to America's nineteenth-century Erie Canal. Some 500 years ago, global distance barriers were defeated by Europeans' momentous discovery of how to sail back and forth across the open oceans; from the mid-nineteenth century, interoceanic sailing times were compressed by the cutting of great sea canals for new, speedy steamships and gunboats that forged the world order of the colonial age.
Just prior to start of the Christian Era 2,000 years ago the seminal invention of the waterwheel captured the power of flowing water to turn mills to grind man's daily bread; a thousand years later water-power was applied with more complex gearing to a widening array of industrial applications and ultimately, a quarter of a millennium ago, to power the first factories. The waterpower barrier was finally shattered by the steam engine in the late eighteenth century-arguably the greatest invention of the last millennium which catalyzed the defining innovations of the Industrial Revolution-and was transcended yet again by hydroelectric power in the late nineteenth century and a panoply of water-assisted power generation inventions in the twentieth century. The sanitary revolution helped foment transformations in human health, demography, and clean drinking water that sustained massive modern industrial urban concentrations. Less than a century ago, 5,000 years after the original big dams of antiquity, history's first giant, multipurpose dams began harnessing the planet's great rivers to deliver electricity, irrigation water, and flood control on a massive scale that remade landscapes at a stroke and was vital to launching the worldwide Green Revolution that nourished humanity's stunning population surge. Modern industrial technologies also permitted man to mine the earth of water from its deep underground reservoirs as he had drilled oil, and to pump the water unprecedented distances over and beyond mountains in long-distance aqueducts. By the end of the twentieth century, an ocean fleet of intermodal supercontainers speedily delivering goods ordered from foreign factories from a nearly real-time information web to local markets across the planet served as the transport backbone of the new, integrated global economy.
With each major breakthrough, civilization had been transformed by the conversion of a key water obstacle into a source of greater economic power and political control; invariably its accessible water resources became more productively utilized and more voluminous in absolute supply. Time and again, the world order of the age was recast, elevating societies to preeminence that proved most adept at harnessing the new form of water's catalytic potency and pushing the laggards toward decline. Today, man has arrived at the threshold of yet a new age. His technological prowess has reached the point that he possesses the power, literally, to alter nature's resources on a planetary scale, while soaring demand from swelling world population and individual levels of consumption among the newly prospering urgently impel him to use that prowess to extract as much water as he can. The alarming, early result is a worsening depletion of many of Earth's life-sustaining water ecosystems that, nonetheless, are not keeping pace with the growing global scarcity.
Until now, all history's water breakthroughs have fallen into four traditional categories of use-domestic needs, economic production, power generation, and transport or strategic advantage. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, civilization faces an imperative fifth category that defines the era's new water challenge: how to innovate new governing organizations and technical applications that make available sufficient supplies of freshwater for man's essential purposes in an environmentally sustainable manner and relieves the scarcity of an increasingly thirsty planet. No technological panacea that extracts more renewable water from nature is available or on the near-term horizon to answer the call. Some societies may borrow time by mining Earth's underground reservoirs or transferring freshwater from river basin to river basin until their total water reserves give out. For others, comprising many hundreds of millions of people, the day of reckoning has already arrived. For everyone sharing the planet, the destiny of human civilization as we know it hinges on the responses to this challenge. History suggests those societies that make big breakthroughs that maximize productive use of their renewable water resources and possibly usher in a turning point in practices and applications are the likeliest to be rewarded with rising economic wealth and international power.
The most obvious, environmentally sustainable large source of freshwater at hand to alleviate the crisis is simply to use the current supplies more efficiently. Tapping them, however, is more difficult than it seems at first glance. For starters, it requires major organizational changes in the way water is managed, politically and economically. Enormous inefficiencies, waste, and political favoritism have been built up in the government command systems that controlled water use in almost every society through the centuries-the true paradox of water is that despite its scarcity, it nearly everywhere remains the most shortsightedly and poorly governed critical resource. Reform can come in one of two main ways: by foresightful, effective, top-down political leadership that uproots its own embedded systems and then makes wise choices about the governing technologies and methods to replace them; or by turning loose the proven reorganizing power of impersonal market forces within a properly regulated, governing framework to winnow out the inefficiencies and redeploy the existing water resources from less to more productive hands.
It is, of course, conceivable that uncommon leadership might arise within a handful of governments around the world to implement the necessary internal reforms. Yet judging from history, it seems highly imprudent, even fanciful, to bet that such exceptional leadership will arise across many continents at one time. Better-more pragmatic-odds of success almost surely lie with greater reliance upon the self-interested, profit motive of individuals organized by the politically indifferent market anchored in a pricing mechanism for valuing water that reflects both the full cost of sustaining ecosystems through externally imposed environmental standards and a social fairness guarantee for everyone to receive at affordable cost the minimum amounts necessary for their basic needs. Those uneasy with the market system's history of yielding widely unequal wealth distribution patterns should be partially heartened by the fact that competitive, free markets' singular devotion to lucre has on its side the considerable merit of being one of history's most subversive and undiscriminating enemies of unfairly entrenched privilege and deserves credit as a prodigious creator of the wealth that necessarily precedes any debate about how to make its distribution more equitable.
A second obstacle is that the precondition for any effective organizational innovation, either market-based or government-imposed, is adequate water infrastructure and control for basic delivery, protection against shocks, waste removal, and measurement of use. In vast swathes of the world this precondition is in shocking deficit. The dearth of infrastructure is central, for example, to the deplorable failure to achieve the most elementary, universally sought goal of providing at least 13 gallons, or 50 liters, to meet the minimum basic daily domestic and sanitary needs for each individual. This is a minuscule drop-the equivalent of eight low-flow toilet flushes-that even the water poorest societies have enough supply to provide. Any legitimate government would readily strive to do so. Moreover, many nongovernmental and official international institutions have been trying to assist countries to achieve it and other very basic water needs. Prominent water experts are campaigning for this tiny amount to be recognized as a universal human right to water. Yet it is unachieved for two-fifths of mankind for one overriding, simple reason-the deficit of existing infrastructure and competent, institutional governance.
Finally, there is no one-size-fits-all remedy for the global crisis of water scarcity. Each society's hydrological reality and challenges, like its political, economic and social conditions, are unique. Some societies have to cope with monsoonal seasonality, others with perennial rainfall, and some with almost none at all. Some entire regions, such as Africa, have scarcely tapped their hydroelectric power development and irrigation water storage potential; while in America and Europe, additional giant damming has mostly yielded environmentally counterproductive and diminishing economic returns. Investing local, mostly poor stake-holders who have historically been dispossessed by large waterworks in the success of a new water project is a paramount challenge in many developing countries but almost nonexistent in leading industrial democracies with responsive governing structures. Some nations' most urgent need is to resurrect and expand traditional small-scale, low-tech methods for water storage and terracing, while for others it is to apply modern water technologies on a large scale as rapidly as possible. Pragmatism, not universality or bias of principle, is what is called for: It is, quite frankly, hypocritical and even morally obscene, to witness activists and officials from water-Have nations whose material benefits-albeit often gained with ugly social, economic, and environmental side effects-have been so visibly aggrandized by giant dams to use their international clout to reflexively oppose virtually all similar development in water poor ones. In short, the world water crisis is a multidimensional crisis. It requires myriad responses targeted at each specific layer and situation, much trial and error adaptation of what works elsewhere, vast capital investment in infrastructure, relentless hard work governed by a pragmatic intelligence and a few, flexible guiding principles. The world has no previous model or institutional framework for coping with it. Everything has to be invented on the fly.
Every society in the age of scarcity faces its own particular version of the era's defining water challenge. How each copes with its challenges, and which societies make the most dynamic breakthroughs, will partly dictate the winners and losers in a century where water's role is of increasingly paramount importance. History is agnostic as to whether a water rich society is likeliest to seize upon its opportunity to exploit its initial water resource advantage in a dynamic new way or whether its relative comfort instead will make it a complacent onlooker while some water indigent society, driven to innovation by the dire necessity of survival, makes the pathbreaking innovations that unlock a new, hidden aspect of water's extraordinary, catalytic properties and transforms the obstacle of scarcity into a propellant of expansion toward wealth and possible global leadership. Whether in the end it is a Western liberal democracy, China's authoritarian, state-directed market system, a resurgent totalitarian, command economy state like antiquity's hydraulic societies and the industrialized twentieth century's Nazi Germany or Soviet Union, or a nation rising on some other new model, which proves most adept at making the breakthrough responses, will influence the type of governing model that prevails in this round of history's endlessly shifting contest between political economies.
Throughout history water has been a great uniter and a great divider, a barrier and a conveyance, but always a great transformer of civilization. As history's most critical natural resource, vital in virtually every aspect of human society, and one that interactively leverages food, energy, climate change, and other grave problems facing a world rising toward 9 billion souls, all striving for first world material standards, water also represents an early proxy test for human civilization's impending survival challenge of learning how to sustainably manage Earth's total planetary environment. Geographer Jared Diamond has grimly concluded that, on current trajectories, there are simply not enough planetary environmental resources, including accessible freshwater, to even come close to satisfying the aspirations of several billions to move up the development ladder to industrial-world levels of consumption and waste. As in previous eras, human population and available environmental resources are again widely out of balance. Famines, genocides, wars, disease, mass migrations, ecological disasters, and untold miseries are history's remorseless mechanisms for reequilibration. In the end all nations will be buffeted, if not engulfed, by the myriad feedback channels of water crises that originate elsewhere. How much tumult and suffering lies ahead depends in significant measure upon how well mankind manages the total global freshwater crisis on our shared planet. Looking farther ahead, the extraordinary, unique substance that gave life to man and shaped the destiny of human civilizations is still the indispensable, prerequisite stepping-stone to some day transplanting our species beyond Earth's sphere to colonize other orbs in the solar system.
There is one more special attribute about water that must inform any study of its role in history: The inextricable affinity between water and our own essential humanity-not merely with human life, but with a dignified human life. My visit to Kenya in the summer of 2004 set off a personal alarm of just how dehumanizing and economically crippling the lack of water for basic needs could be. It drove home the mind-numbing inequity that a majority of humanity still struggles to extract its meager material surplus from nature using obsolete and even ancient water technologies. In the semiarid, rural Chyulu Hills in southeast Kenya on the edge of the Great African Rift Valley congeries of otherwise vibrant, culturally robust communities live in literally dirt-poor subsistence for one overriding reason-insufficient freshwater.
It shocked my sense of common humanity to see the small group of men and women work so tenaciously with hand tools such as picks, shovels, and sisal sacks to perform the backbreaking manual labor of digging and carrying the reddish dirt week after week to reinforce the earthen dam they'd built nineteen years earlier-precisely like those built in ancient timesto trap the seasonal monsoonal rainwater through the dry season so that their cattle can survive, when they and I knew that one-day access to a simple bulldozer could do the job of a whole season, and a few days with a cement mixer could alleviate the task for years. In the nearby Machacos Hills, where low-tech terracing has improved water management and agricultural production, Kenyan farmers step up and down for hours each day on a treadle water pump-much as Chinese rice farmers did using bamboo tubes centuries ago and modern Westerners do at the gym on their exercise StairMasters-to lift water from a muddy creek up the hillside in plastic tubes to fill cans they use to hand water their crops.
More striking still is the ubiquitous sight of large numbers of women and children acting with their feet by marching two to three hours or more per day on dusty roads to fetch clean water from wells or other sources in large, yellow, plastic "jerry" cans, which they carry on their heads, on the ends of poles laid across their shoulders, and packed on bicycles or donkeys. A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy. There was genuine rejoicing when the two miles of piping our small, humanitarian group of American volunteers had financed, for a pittance in Western terms, was connected to the well pump and began to deliver water directly to a simple, plastic water tank located in one of the villages.
I will never forget the sense of disempowered injustice we felt when we met a thoughtful young man as enterprising, vivacious, and worthy of a fair opportunity as anyone his age in industrial America, Europe, or Asia who was studying on his own every night, in a home without electric lighting, for a high school equivalency exam on the remote chance that he could qualify for a special scholarship to attend the University of Nairobi; his family was too poor to pay the couple of hundred dollars for his formal high school education, and I knew that had the water pipes we financed arrived years earlier and been put to productive economic use for modest, gravity-fed irrigation as well as drinking and cleaning, this young man might well have gotten the professional chance he deserved and which my own daughters take for granted. His country would also have gained important human capital in its struggle for development. In Ethiopia, where my wife, a high school teacher, traveled in the summer of 2008, the situation was similar, and the poverty even more desperate. When she arrived in the beautiful, remote mountain highlands that provide the headwaters of the Blue Nile, she felt as if she had been dropped back into medieval times as she saw farmers scratching out meager livelihoods with oxen-pulled wooden plows.
As recently as the 1950s in early postwar France, my Bretagne mother-in-law was still washing clothes with river water and carrying upstairs water buckets of captured rainwater with which to bathe her children and cook the family's food. It further illustrates how much water history was everywhere a layered history: Ancient, medieval, and modern methods always coexist; yet, crucially, it is an unevenly unevenly layered history, imparting enormous-and easily overlooked-advantages to the comfortable water Haves and crippling disadvantages, starting with a life handicapped by malnutrition, ill health, and sacrifice of education to the daily search for water, to the world's water Have-Nots. The need for water trumps every human principle, social bond, and ideology. It is literally indispensable. With extreme water scarcity showing through as a root cause of many of the world's famines, genocides, diseases, and failing states, I am inclined to believe that if there can be a meaningful human right to any material thing, surely it starts with access to minimum clean freshwater. layered history, imparting enormous-and easily overlooked-advantages to the comfortable water Haves and crippling disadvantages, starting with a life handicapped by malnutrition, ill health, and sacrifice of education to the daily search for water, to the world's water Have-Nots. The need for water trumps every human principle, social bond, and ideology. It is literally indispensable. With extreme water scarcity showing through as a root cause of many of the world's famines, genocides, diseases, and failing states, I am inclined to believe that if there can be a meaningful human right to any material thing, surely it starts with access to minimum clean freshwater.
At the end of the day, how each member of the world community ultimately acts in response to the global freshwater crisis is not just a matter of economic and political history, but a judgment on our own humanity-and the ultimate fate of human civilization. As one scientist succinctly put it: "After all, we we are water." are water."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
In writing the history of water, I have had the intellectual pleasure of having been able to stand upon the broad, high shoulders of many first-rate thinkers and scholars who have written insightfully about the subject from the perspective of their own disciplines and times. I salute them, and the civilized enterprise of accumulating knowledge that hopefully helps human society to inch forward with better understanding and management of our shared world.
Many exceptional personal contributions have also informed my work. I have learned an immense amount from David Grey, who heads the World Bank's water group. David not only has an amazingly profound and broad understanding of the complexities of today's water issues, but he brings inspiring passion, energy, intelligence, and an encyclopedic knowledge of water history to his work. At the outset of the project, Dr. Allan Hoffman of the U.S. Department of Energy and senior adviser to Winrock International's Clean Energy Group, impressed upon me the inextricable interconnectedness of water, energy, and climate change issues, and pointed me in fruitful directions. Many of my conceptual frameworks developed from stimulating conversation with Peter H. Gleick, president of Pacific Institute, a fantastically useful, research-based NGO specializing in water issues, and with Professor J. A. "Tony" Allan of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Kings College London, who imparted his important idea of thinking of food as "virtual water" as we tackle the world's interrelated food and water problems.
Others who generously shared their time and minds were Jim McMahon at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Philip Duffy and Andy Thompson of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Ambassador John McDonald of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. They provided me with an educated start in understanding energy, climate change, hydrology, and global water diplomacy, respectively. One delightful experience was discussing the waters of Rome with Katherine Wentworth Rinne, whose interactive cartographic project, "Aquae Urbis Romae," at the University of Virginia tracing the evolution of the Eternal City's water development is exploring new boundaries in the use of online technology to study history. Professor Peter Aicher of the University of Southern Maine enthusiastically shared his extensive knowledge about Rome's aqueducts and water management. Veteran journalist Bill Kelly was a veritable Virgil in guiding me through the intricate underworld of California and Colorado River water politics and ever graciously answered my many follow-up questions. I'd also like to thank Bob Walsh of the Bureau of Reclamation office at Boulder City near the Hoover Dam for a warm and illuminating welcome to an unannounced walk-in.
My parents, Ruth and Lee Solomon, deserve a special "shout-out" in more ways than can be expressed for their unwavering, lifelong encouragement and comfort whenever adverse winds buffeted. My father's insightful critique of each chapter as it was written provided invaluable feedback that enriched the final text of Water Water. I've been privileged to have him as a best friend and intellectual companion as well as a father.
Jean Michel Arechaga and Nicole Mace were tireless and resourceful field detectives in investigating water mills, canal locks, and weirs with me in northwestern France. The Monagan Writers' Group was a tolerant foil for my testing out of myriad stories and ideas about water during lively give-and-takes at our regular biweekly luncheons at the Women's Democratic Club; I regret only that John Monagan did not live long enough to see the final publication of the work. My long involvement with the environmentalists and local community activists of Washington, D.C.'s Klingle Valley Park Association deepened my appreciation of the profound ways water interacts with urban ecosystems and infrastructures, as well as the obdurate difficulty of overcoming entrenched, reflexive political opposition even when all objective analyses argue overwhelmingly for environmentally sustainable, economically less-expensive, and democratically more-equitable alternatives to the status quo.
Nola Solomon did a magnificent job of preparing the endnotes and the bibliography, and correcting some of the text along the way. Brittany Watson was a stellar blend of artistic creativity, flexibility, and perseverance in creating the maps. Stephanie Morris deserves thanks for her generous guidance on the artwork. Cordelia Solomon provided valuable assistance in marketing research, and, along with Brittany Wilbon, helped me organize the research material at an early stage. Aurelia Solomon made a valued contribution on publicity research, as well as stimulated fruitful discussion on the environmental aspects of water.
Tim Duggan of HarperCollins has been a paragon of what an editor should be: patient, encouraging, considerate, always with the big picture in view, ready with sensible suggestions, and possessing a knack for knowing just the right time and degree to apply pressure. The foresight, efficiency, positive spirit, and all-around intelligent beneficence of Allison Lorentzen, Tim's wonderful assistant, facilitated the project from start to finish.
As always, my agent, Melanie Jackson, has been outstanding in all facets and phases-a great collaboration.
This book also could not have been completed without some timely and superlative medical intervention. Above all, I owe unrepayable debts of gratitude to neurosurgeon Fraser Henderson and infectious disease expert Dr. Mark Abbruzzese, as well as to doctors William Lauerman, Kevin McGrail, Gil Eisner, and James Ramey, and the remarkable team of nurses at Georgetown Hospital's concentrated care unit.
The most special acknowledgment of all, however, is reserved for Claudine Mace, my comrade in passion and life's adventure for nearly three decades over many continents and conditions. A dedicated high school teacher in Washington, D.C., Claudie organized a service learning trip to the Rift Valley of Africa a few years ago to lay water pipes for waterless villages in rural Kenya that became a transforming voyage of discovery about the surpassing importance of water to human life for all who participated in it. I aspire to fulfill her unflagging expectation that the best is yet to come.
Finally, I'd like to thank the unnamed, many tens of thousands who are out in the field working each and every day in all kinds of conditions doing the good work to alleviate, and hopefully one day solve, the local and global water challenges facing us all.
NOTES.
Prologue.
ninefold increase in the twentieth century: Paul Kennedy, foreword to McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, Something New Under the Sun, xvi. xvi.
Chapter One: The Indispensable Resource.
water in the soil: Water's high specific heat capacity, which allows it to maintain its liquid form over an extremely wide range of temperatures and pressures, is essential to Earth's having maintained its moderate climate despite the fact that the Sun had grown about 33 percent hotter over the past 4 billion years.planet's infancy: Most scientists now believe that instead of being a hellish fireball 4.2 billion years ago, Earth was fairly settled geologically, with both land and oceans, with parts of the surface covered in ice due to the 30 percent lower heat output of the young Sun.climate change cycles: Short cycles covering centuries of warm, wet climate commonly alternated with long cold, dry, windy periods; sometimes climates fluctuated unstably between extremes within a single year. Over the past 700,000 years, these short cycles have been dominated by dramatic swings between very long, severe, dry ice ages and warm, wet interludes.favorable climatic conditions: Alley, 3, 14. The stability of the current warm period is the longest in the 110,000 years of ice core data. Alley notes that the fluctuations that marked Earth's past "were absent during the few critical millennia when humans developed agriculture and industry."atmospheric water vapor: Water vapor was the planet's most prolific, heat-trapping "greenhouse gas."warm Atlantic Gulf Stream: Water temperature variations also help drive the oceanic wind systems, including both the sinking, weak doldrums near the equatorial horse latitudes loathed by mariners in the age of sail as well as the Atlantic's favorable, wet trade wind system, which, when at last decoded, became the ocean-crossing expressways for European explorers' world-transforming Voyages of Discovery.conveyor belt: Too much extra cold freshwater introduced into the North Atlantic by the melting of polar glaciers-say, from global warming-might trigger a new shutdown of the conveyor, setting off an abrupt return to ice age conditions. Past shutdowns and slowdowns appear to have been quite abrupt, as short as fifty years. Once shut down, the conveyor was difficult to get moving again.fresh liquid water: Water stock data is primarily from Shiklomanov and Rodda, 13, And Gleick, World's Water, 20002001, World's Water, 20002001, 1937. The total amount of water on Earth is 1.386 billion cubic kilometers, of which 96.5 percent is in the oceans and only 2.5 percent (or 35 million cubic kilometers) is fresh. 1937. The total amount of water on Earth is 1.386 billion cubic kilometers, of which 96.5 percent is in the oceans and only 2.5 percent (or 35 million cubic kilometers) is fresh.three lake systems: Shiklomanov and Rodda, 8, 9.constantly being replenished: Transpiration from plants also adds to water vapor. Much of the precipitation never reaches land because it evaporates en route. To give some sense of proportion, it takes about 3,100 years for a volume equal to all the world's oceans to recycle through the water cycle.lost in floods: Some 15 percent of falls occur in the Amazon rain forests, which have less than one-half of 1 percent of the world's population; water-short Asia receives 80 percent of its rain as hard-to-capture monsoons that fall during only five months (from May to October)."Every day the sea": Durant and Durant, 14.
Chapter Two: Water and the Start of Civilization.
Arnold Toynbee: Toynbee, Study of History, Study of History, chap. 5, "Challenge and Response," 6079. chap. 5, "Challenge and Response," 6079.biological cycles: During a day of normal activities, approximately 0.3 quarts were exhaled, 0.5 quarts sweated out, and the excess expelled as waste.death struck: Swanson, 9. As the body dehydrated, the blood thickened and the heart had to pump harder as circulation became less efficient."Almost every mythology": Campbell, Hero's Journey, Hero's Journey, 10. 10.four primary terrestrial elements: Ball, 3, 4, 117120. Water, Earth, Fire, and Air were the Greek foursome; Chinese philosophers, from about 350 BC, agreed with the first three but replaced Air with Wood and Metal. The Mesopotamian cosmology concurred on Water and Earth, but substituted Sun for Fire and Sky for Air, and added its unique fifth, Storms.mini ice age: Alley, 3, 4, 14; Kenneth Chang, "Scientists Link Diamonds to Quick Cooling Eons Ago," New York Times, New York Times, Janurary 2, 2009. The well-documented, millennium-long paleoclimatic episode, called the Younger Dryas event (after a tundra-loving plant), was probably triggered by the collapse of a huge melting ice sheet or lake in North America that sent a torrent of cold freshwater draining through the St. Lawrence Seaway into the North Atlantic, slowing the oceanic conveyor belt and temporarily reversing the retreat of the ice age. What caused the water surge is much debated, with some hypothesizing a meteor strike. The event was incomparably more extreme than Europe's Little Ice Age that ended in the mid-nineteenth century and triggered significant lifestyle adaptations around the continent. Janurary 2, 2009. The well-documented, millennium-long paleoclimatic episode, called the Younger Dryas event (after a tundra-loving plant), was probably triggered by the collapse of a huge melting ice sheet or lake in North America that sent a torrent of cold freshwater draining through the St. Lawrence Seaway into the North Atlantic, slowing the oceanic conveyor belt and temporarily reversing the retreat of the ice age. What caused the water surge is much debated, with some hypothesizing a meteor strike. The event was incomparably more extreme than Europe's Little Ice Age that ended in the mid-nineteenth century and triggered significant lifestyle adaptations around the continent.Jericho's location: Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Memory and the Mediterranean, 4045. Control of trade routes and the watery sources of salt, so prized over the centuries that it was accepted as money and traded for gold, was a source of power and wealth until modern times. Jericho's founding goes back to about 9500 BC. Two other important original cities were Jarmo, on the edge of a deep wadi in the Zagros Mountains that fed the Tigris River, and Catalhuyuk in mountainous Anatolia, which was advantaged by its virtual monopoly in the trading of the highly prized, hard-edged volcanic stone, obsidian. 4045. Control of trade routes and the watery sources of salt, so prized over the centuries that it was accepted as money and traded for gold, was a source of power and wealth until modern times. Jericho's founding goes back to about 9500 BC. Two other important original cities were Jarmo, on the edge of a deep wadi in the Zagros Mountains that fed the Tigris River, and Catalhuyuk in mountainous Anatolia, which was advantaged by its virtual monopoly in the trading of the highly prized, hard-edged volcanic stone, obsidian.farmers to relocate: Some paleoclimatologists believe that the proximate force driving the advent of irrigation farming in the Near East may have been an increasing regional aridity exacerbated by a 200-year cold drought period between 6400 and 6200 BC, which caused farm hilltop settlements to be abandoned across the Levant and northern Mesopotamia.independent, smaller communities: McNeill, World History, World History, 46. 46.barbarian waves: The four great barbarian waves were (1) the Bronze Age charioteers, circa 17001400 BC; (2) the Iron Age invaders from around 14001200 BC; (3) the Hsiung-nu from 200 BC and then in the fourth century AD the Juan-juan confederations of the eastern steppes; and (4) the great Turkish-Mongol invasions from the 700s arguably to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.world population: Ponting, 37.
Chapter Three: Rivers, Irrigation, and the Earliest Empires.
"creates a technical task": Wittfogel, 15.fast-growing maize: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, Structures of Everyday Life, 161. Maize was a miraculous plant due to three attributes: (1) it was fast growing, (2) it was edible even before it was ripe, and (3) it grew with little effort-requiring less than fifty days of total farming work. Potatoes thrived at high altitudes. 161. Maize was a miraculous plant due to three attributes: (1) it was fast growing, (2) it was edible even before it was ripe, and (3) it grew with little effort-requiring less than fifty days of total farming work. Potatoes thrived at high altitudes.giant dams built in the twentieth century: The pioneering Hoover and Grand Coulee dams were built by New Deal America; major Russian and European giant dam building coincided with the rebuilding after World War II; and Communist China, along with many newly independent developing countries, erected dams as foundations of their new regimes.three great kingdoms: Kingdom date estimates vary by source. Those used here combine the Thinnite period with the Old Kingdom, and follow Grimal, 389395.nilometers: Collins, 1314. The earliest existing nilometer readings, covering the period up to 2480 BC, are from Memphis; although the nilometer itself has disappeared, its data were carved on the stela fragment known as the Palermo Stone.total water volume: Based on renewable water resources per year. Shiklomanov and Rodda, 365.fertile black silt: Ancient Egyptians called this flooded, silt-laden plain the "black land," or kmt, kmt, which was also their name for Nile Valley Egypt itself. The barren soils untouched by the floodwaters were known as the "red land." which was also their name for Nile Valley Egypt itself. The barren soils untouched by the floodwaters were known as the "red land."Menes: Grimal, 3738; Shaw, 61.reservoir dam: Smith, History of Dams, History of Dams, 14. It is believed this dam failed from overflow shortly after its construction. 14. It is believed this dam failed from overflow shortly after its construction.peasant's duty: Egyptian frescoes and bas-reliefs depicted the dreary, duty-bound daily life of peasants performing their routine farm toil in the fields, carrying grain to the granary, drawing fishing nets, unloading boats, and brewing beer, all under the stern watch of an armed supervisor.a transformative innovation: The world's earliest surviving water clock also dates from the New Kingdom.secure precious, high-quality timber: Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Memory and the Mediterranean, 5960. Owing to the dearth of useful tree species, both Egypt and Mesopotamia traded and sometimes waged war to secure vital timber from Levantine forests. Egypt's only hardwood trees were the sycamore and the acacia. 5960. Owing to the dearth of useful tree species, both Egypt and Mesopotamia traded and sometimes waged war to secure vital timber from Levantine forests. Egypt's only hardwood trees were the sycamore and the acacia.Neko's canal: Neko's canal may have tracked a possible previous canal effort obscured to history by the filling in of the desert sands.120,000 died: Herodotus, Histories, Histories, 193. 193.sultan and the Christian king: Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, Muslim Discovery of Europe, 34, 38. 34, 38."A society dependent": McNeill, Rise of the West, Rise of the West, 32; Unlike on the Nile, upriver transport on the twin rivers required laborious oar power and portage. 32; Unlike on the Nile, upriver transport on the twin rivers required laborious oar power and portage.Mesopotamia: Van De Mieroop, 13."the first efficient means": Mumford, 71.flood myth: Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of frequent, huge inundations. The flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak in 3100 BC may have inspired the Bible's great flood story.easier to control: Campbell-Green."Why...if Sumer": Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees Ur of the Chaldees (1929), quoted in Ponting, 6970. (1929), quoted in Ponting, 6970."black fields becoming white": Cited in Pearce, 186.1700 BC almost no wheat: Ponting, 71. See also McNeill, Rise of the West, Rise of the West, 48. 48.water war: Van De Mieroop, 4849. See also Gleick, World's Water, 19981999 World's Water, 19981999, 125; Reade, 4041; and Pearce, 186.under modern Baghdad: Van De Mieroop, 64.earthworms had perished: Kolbert, 95, 97. The original research was done by Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss, who led the excavation of ancient Tell Leilan in modern Syria near the Iraq border."provider of abundant waters": Harris, 123."If anyone be too lazy": Hammurabi, Law 53.Hard iron weapons: Refined, harder steels with much-sharper edges were produced in the ensuing centuries, starting in India and China. For centuries, Western smithies vainly tried to reproduce "watered steel" (as it was known in Persia) or "Damascus," or "damask," steel (as it was known in Europe). Success came only with the application of waterpower in the early nineteenth century-the birth of modern metallurgy."gleaming in purple": George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Life and Work of Lord Byron The Life and Work of Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib" (1815), http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruction.html.stone aqueduct: Smith, History of Dams, History of Dams, 912; Smith, 912; Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 7678. The aqueduct is known as the Jerwan aqueduct bridge. 7678. The aqueduct is known as the Jerwan aqueduct bridge.Tehran's water supply: Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 7071. 7071.tried almost every water supply technique: Ibid., 79.King David discovered: Johnson, 56, 7273; Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 77. 77."only deep enough": Herodotus, Histories, Histories, 113118. Herodotus also relates that a previous ruler had rechanneled the Euphrates from its previously straight path into a winding course in order to slow its current through Babylon and to impede any direct approach by enemy vessels. 113118. Herodotus also relates that a previous ruler had rechanneled the Euphrates from its previously straight path into a winding course in order to slow its current through Babylon and to impede any direct approach by enemy vessels."No Persian king": Herodotus, Ibid., 117. The river was the Choaspes.contacts with Mesopotamia: McNeill, A World History, A World History, 34. 34.Great Bath: Keay, 1214.rivers that had radically changed course: Some are referred to in the Rig Veda. Rivers that dried up included an eastern tributary of the Indus and the Ravi, upon which Harappa had been located.decline and emigrate: One possibility is that some Indus people migrated to southern India and Sri Lanka. Indus writing has some earmarks of being a proto-Dravidian language, which is among that region's tongues. The ingenious, huge artificial reservoirs and canal networks that before the third century BC irrigated Sri Lanka's golden age might also hint at the possible knowledge of the lost Indus descendants.irrigation canals: Pacey, 59.drought cycle: Diamond, Collapse, Collapse, 157176. Regional Mayan collapses in 810, 860, and 910 coincided with severe intracycle drought peaks. The rise of classic Mayan civilization started during a wet period, which had followed a 125-year drought (after AD 125) that brought about the demise of the preclassic Mayan era. See also Harris, 8792, and Pacey, 5861. 157176. Regional Mayan collapses in 810, 860, and 910 coincided with severe intracycle drought peaks. The rise of classic Mayan civilization started during a wet period, which had followed a 125-year drought (after AD 125) that brought about the demise of the preclassic Mayan era. See also Harris, 8792, and Pacey, 5861.monsoon's start date: As late as the 1970s, the arrival of clouds in the southern state of Kerala, where the monsoon first appeared, would trigger an urgent message to the prime minister's office in New Delhi heralding the start of the monsoons. Economic growth could fall to zero if monsoon rainfall was poor; even in India's more advanced twenty-first-century economy, deficits in precipitation could reduce economic growth by up to four percentage points.in the aftermath: Keay, 83.Sabaeans from the Arabian Peninsula: Smith, History of Dams, History of Dams, 15; Gunter, 219, 104113. The Sabaeans were also famed pioneer irrigators; their huge dam at Marib-by far the largest city in ancient Arabia-on the Wadi Dhana was enlarged several times from its first 1,800-foot-wide earthen iteration in about 750 BC, and intercepted the wadi's periodic floodwaters to intensively irrigate over 4,000 acres. 15; Gunter, 219, 104113. The Sabaeans were also famed pioneer irrigators; their huge dam at Marib-by far the largest city in ancient Arabia-on the Wadi Dhana was enlarged several times from its first 1,800-foot-wide earthen iteration in about 750 BC, and intercepted the wadi's periodic floodwaters to intensively irrigate over 4,000 acres.
Chapter Four: Seafaring, Trade, and the Making of the Mediterranean World Bronze had first appeared: Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Memory and the Mediterranean, 60. Copper smelting began in the fifth millennium, but it took a long while before it was discovered that adding tin could strengthen it as bronze. 60. Copper smelting began in the fifth millennium, but it took a long while before it was discovered that adding tin could strengthen it as bronze.their civilization: According to Greek myth, under Minos's palace at Knossos lay a labyrinth inhabited by a sacrificial-maiden-devouring Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Minos's wife and a bull sent by the sea god Poseidon that ultimately was slain by the Greek hero Theseus.mariners from Miletus: Cary and Warmington, 37.manifestation of water: Jones, History of Western Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy, 3234. 3234.trireme lay low: Casson, 85.great cajoling: To entice Xerxes-as well as to prevent his vacillating allies from changing their minds at the last moment-Themistocles devised one of history's most famous deceptions. Pretending to turn traitor, he sent an informant to Xerxes' headquarters with the credible news that the Greeks were preparing to slip away and disperse rather than fight a single big battle against long numerical odds. Xerxes took the bait. He ordered his patrols to row all night to prevent a Greek breakout."they gathered the grass": Herodotus, Persian Wars, Persian Wars, 642643. 642643.asymmetrical advantages: Athens's surrounding seas and rugged landscape provided a further defensive buffer against land armies-a distinguishing advantage lacked by both Phoenicia and Miletus.more representative: Athens's laws and magistrates were decided by a majority vote of the citizens' assembly, normally in accordance with a representative advisory council. In time voting rights were extended to the poor as the growing wealth of the state came to depend on the large naval manpower needed to pull the galley oars. Even naval commanders, such as Themistocles, were elected by popular vote.Alexander turned it into an opportunity: Cary and Worthington, 179180; Foreman, 188189.700,000 items: Daniel J. Wakin, "Successor to Ancient Alexandria Library Dedicated," New York Times, New York Times, October 17, 2002. Government officials boarded ships in Alexandria's harbor, seized whatever scrolls were on board, and then had them copied. The originals were returned to their owners; the copies were added to the library's collection. October 17, 2002. Government officials boarded ships in Alexandria's harbor, seized whatever scrolls were on board, and then had them copied. The originals were returned to their owners; the copies were added to the library's collection.body lay in state: After his death Alexander's body had been intercepted en route from Babylon to its final resting place in Macedon by Ptolemy I, his trusted general and boyhood friend, to bolster the legitimacy of the Egyptian dynasty he founded and which would rule Egypt until Rome incorporated the country, and its agricultural bounty, into its empire. The site of Alexander's tomb was lost in the riots of the third century AD.7677. consolidated slowly: Rome's expansion progressed slowly through military victories, regional political alliances, and the granting of citizenship to absorbed Italic tribes; plebeian classes that served in the army gradually gained greater political representation in government.100 quinqueremes: Casson, 145."by the sea": Mahan, 15.Carthage's surrender: The brief, one-sided Third Punic War, initiated by Rome on flimsy pretexts, ended in 146 BC with the destruction and plowing under of the city of Carthage itself.influence indirectly: Where force was required against a hardened enemy, such as Macedon, it deployed its army as a first resort. Only when absolutely required by military exigencies did it exercise its naval might directly.1,000 ships: Casson, 180.ruling triumvirate: Norwich, Middle Sea, Middle Sea, 34. 34.civil war: In all some 1,000 ships and tens of thousands of Roman mariners were lost throughout Rome's civil wars.help of the catapult grapnel: Reinhold, 2934, 161. Agrippa also built Rome's first naval port to support the sea war.thirty- to sixty-day voyage: Casson, 206207.position vertical to the water: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, Structures of Everyday Life, 355. 355.grind 10 tons: Williams, 5556.hydraulicking: Bernstein, Power of Gold, Power of Gold, 14. Hydraulicking's horrendous environmental impacts, including the denuding of hillsides, topsoil erosion that destroyed farmland, and the silting up of rivers and harbors, finally caused Californians in 1884 to rise up and have it outlawed. 14. Hydraulicking's horrendous environmental impacts, including the denuding of hillsides, topsoil erosion that destroyed farmland, and the silting up of rivers and harbors, finally caused Californians in 1884 to rise up and have it outlawed.concrete was derived: Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Memory and the Mediterranean, 30; "Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath." Heating common limestone to high temperatures for a prolonged period produced a very light derivative, quicklime. Adding water caused the hot quicklime to sizzle, steam, swell, and ultimately transmute into a new material: a very fine powder, or "hydrated lime." Adding more water to the lime powder created a putty adhesive strong enough to bind sand, stone, and crushed tile chips, which were the coarse components of Roman concrete; later, where possible, Romans used volcanic ash. When hardened, the substance became miraculously waterproof. 30; "Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath." Heating common limestone to high temperatures for a prolonged period produced a very light derivative, quicklime. Adding water caused the hot quicklime to sizzle, steam, swell, and ultimately transmute into a new material: a very fine powder, or "hydrated lime." Adding more water to the lime powder created a putty adhesive strong enough to bind sand, stone, and crushed tile chips, which were the coarse components of Roman concrete; later, where possible, Romans used volcanic ash. When hardened, the substance became miraculously waterproof.Aqua Appia: Evans, Water Distribution in Ancient Rome, Water Distribution in Ancient Rome, 6574. 6574.Hellenist water engineering: Aicher, 23.total aqueduct water: Evans, 140141.only six cities: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, Something New Under the Sun, 282. 282.150 to 200 gallons: Peter Aicher, cited in "Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath."best water quality: Rome's suburban hills had fresh springs and deep volcanic lakes, while the porous travertine bedrock of its surrounding valleys acted like a natural purifying filter for underlying aquifers. Romans tried to use the best-quality water for human consumption and route brinier and poorer-tasting water for tasks like irrigation, street cleaning, and filling theater basins for mock sea battles."have laid hands upon the conduits": Frontinus, 128.Waterworks were the centerpiece: Evans, 137138; see also Reinhold, 4751; Shipley, 2025."sheltered place": Mumford, 225, 226; "Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath."periods of aqueduct building: Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 84; Evans, 6. 84; Evans, 6.Emperor Claudius: Claudius added the Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus in AD 52. Trajan's Aqua Traiana was the first to serve the Trastevere quarter across the Tiber.emperor's baths: The Aqua Alexandriana was built for the baths of Alexander Severus to replace Nero's baths.pirates, Goths: Casson, 213.The Huns: McNeill, A World History, A World History, 195197. The fleeing Huns displaced the Ostrogoths from southern Russia in 372 and caused their weaker Visigoth neighbors to enter Roman frontiers. 195197. The fleeing Huns displaced the Ostrogoths from southern Russia in 372 and caused their weaker Visigoth neighbors to enter Roman frontiers.floating water mills: Procopius of Caesarea, 5, 191193."Rome's decay": Hibbert, 74.Martin V: Karmon, 113."Water Popes": Nicholas V (founder of the Vatican Library, who hired Leon Battista Alberti to work on the aqueducts) added a simple terminal fountain in 1453 that in the prosperous eighteenth century was transformed into the elaborate Trevi Fountain. Gregory XIII built the conduits that give its name to Via Condotti as well as many fountains. Sixtus V, born Felice Peretti, in the late sixteenth century rebuilt the last aqueduct, Aqua Alexandriana, and renamed it Aqua Felice, after himself; he also added many underground pipes, 27 fountains, and some bridges across the Tiber. Paul V, who became pope in 1605, outdid him with monumental fountains, some by Bernini, supplied by rebuilding Trajan's aqueduct, now called Aqua Paola, after himself.
Chapter Five: The Grand Canal and the Flourishing of Chinese Civilization "The Chinese people": Needham, vol. 4, pt. 3, 212.33rd parallel: Fairbank and Goldman, 5.15 times more water: Shiklomanov and Rodda, 365."mastered the waters": Yu the Great, quoted in Fernandez-Armesto, 217.humble water's yielding: Lao-tzu wrote, "Water flows humbly to the lowest level. Nothing is weaker than water. Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong, nothing surpasses it." Cited in "Sacred Space: Rivers of Insight," Times of India Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3423508,prtpage-1.cms.millet noodle: Among other revelations, the noodle put an end to the centuries-long canard that Marco Polo had introduced the pasta noodle to China during his famous late thirteenth-century trading expeditions.Li Bing: Kurlansky, 2325; China Heritage Project, "Taming the Floodwaters: The High Heritage Price of Massive Hydraulic Projects," China Heritage Newsletter China Heritage Newsletter 1 (March 2005), China Heritage Project, Australian National University, http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=001_water.inc&issue=001. 1 (March 2005), China Heritage Project, Australian National University, http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=001_water.inc&issue=001.population of 5 million: Needham, 288.thousands of waterwheels: Ibid., 296.bamboo tubes with leather flap valves: Kurlansky, 2628.Treadle chain pumps: Temple, 5657.government monopolies: Elvin, 29.government controlled: Fairbank and Goldman, 59.malleable cast iron: Temple, 4243.noted Chinese engineer Tu Shih: The device had reciprocating action. Ibid., 5556.vertical waterwheels: Gies and Gies, 8889.same essential design: The machines, lacking only the steam engine's crankshaft, operated on the reciprocating action of a rod-driven piston attached to a waterwheel-powered crank. Temple, 64.one pound of raw silk: Fairbank and Goldman, 32.Emperor Tiberius: Edwards, 20.silk industry: Persia, India, and Japan each developed silk culture independently. By some accounts Alexander the Great brought silkworm cocoons back with him from India, but the art of cultivating them was lost by the time of the Romans.web of international exchange: McNeill, Global Condition, Global Condition, 92, 9699. 92, 9699.barbarian raiders: The Han's main tormentors had been the Hsiung-nu, but by 350 a new powerful Mongolian confederation, known to the Chinese as the Juan-juan, had arisen. It was their westward irruption that put to flight the fearsome Huns, who displaced the Ostrogoths from southern Russia in 372 and caused their Visigoth neighbors to enter Roman frontiers. The Juan-juan confederacy was finally destroyed in 552 by an alliance of Chinese armies with Turkish tribes, who quickly established a formidable steppe empire of their own."there was insufficiency": Record of the Three Kingdoms, Record of the Three Kingdoms, quoted in Elvin, 37. quoted in Elvin, 37.Grand Canal: Needham, 307310; Elvin, 5455.one-third less: Elvin, 138.pound lock: Temple, 196197.Yangtze salt and iron fleet: Elvin, 136. Each of the 2,000 boats built had a capacity of 110,000 pounds."the amount of shipping": Polo 209.rice-farming revolution: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, Structures of Everyday Life, 146155. 146155.Champa rice: McNeill, Rise of the West, Rise of the West, 527; Pacey, 5; Elvin, 121. 527; Pacey, 5; Elvin, 121.120 million: Fairbank and Goldman, 89.technological leader: Pacey, 7.coke-burning blast furnaces: A similar coal-for-wood substitution was the coking process developed by England's Abraham Darby-one of the watershed events of England's Industrial Revolution-but only in 1709.114,000 tons of pig iron: Fairbank and Goldman, 89.water-powered spinning machines: Elvin, 194195; Pacey, 2428, 103.water clock: Boorstin, 6061, 76. Imperial ladies of the highest rank were bedded by the "Son of Heaven" nearest to the full moon when their female yin influence was strongest and best able to balance his yang, or male, aspect, and thus ensure the favorable virtues for offspring then conceived. The "Heavenly Clockwork," invented by government official Su Song, also corrected an astronomical error that had corrupted the accuracy of China's official calendar. Driven by a noria wheel mounted with 36 water-lifting buckets that made exactly 100 revolutions each day, Su Song's water escapement ingeniously exploited the fluid properties of water.river- and canal-fighting vessels: McNeill, Pursuit of Power, Pursuit of Power, 42. 42.gorge at Chu-tang: Elvin, 9394.Cheng Ho's 27,000 man fleet: McNeill, Rise of the West, Rise of the West, 526; Fairbank and Goldman, 137139; Boorstin, 192. 526; Fairbank and Goldman, 137139; Boorstin, 192.ruler in Ceylon: McNeill, Pursuit of Power, Pursuit of Power, 44. 44.Heaven Well Lock: Elvin, 104."With the re-construction": Ibid., 220.rely exclusively: Some Ming officials worried about exclusive reliance on the inland waterway network. Likening the summit passage portion of the Grand Canal (the Hui-t'ung Canal) to a man's throat that if choked off for even a single day would result in death, they argued for maintaining the sea transport network. In the event, save for periods of Yellow River flooding in 1571 and 1572, the Grand Canal passage remained uncut until the end of the Ming dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. Ibid., 105.China's inner dynamism: Ibid., 203.labor-saving technologies: The labor-intensive bias of China's state-directed economy was notably evident in its prodigious iron industry, in which, despite waterpower's demonstrated superiority, use of manually powered bellows remained predominant. Pacey, 113.opium imports: British India's opium exports rose from 400 chests in 1750 to 5,000 in 1821 and 40,000 in 1839. McAleavy, 44.free trade: Britain's policy shift from mercantilism to espousal of "free trade" principles coincided with the rise of its world-class industrial factories, which enjoyed unrivaled competitive advantage. This was not the first, nor would it be the last, instance in world history that self-serving economic advantage informed the adoption of grand economic principles.worst flood: McAleavy, 59.
Chapter Six: Islam, Deserts, and the Destiny of History's Most Water-Fragile Civilization water was always highly esteemed: By Islamic custom visitors are always offered free water. Water is central to daily purification rituals at prayer. Paradise is described as a shaded garden with cooling fountains. And the ritual Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, to the Ka'bah at Mecca includes racing seven times between two nearby hills to commemorate Hagar's frantic quest for water after Abraham had expelled her and Ishmael from her tent.reputable but weaker clan: The clan was the Hashemites, whose descendants include today's royal family of Jordan.armed struggle: Hourani, 18.2.5 million: Collins, 2021.ships loaned: The Christians had their own religious and political divisions. The Byzantines were rivals of the Visigoths, who in 589 had adopted the Filioque Filioque interpretation to the Nicene Creed that was vigorously rejected by Constantinople and would become a factor in the Great Schism between Latin and Eastern Christendom in the eleventh century. interpretation to the Nicene Creed that was vigorously rejected by Constantinople and would become a factor in the Great Schism between Latin and Eastern Christendom in the eleventh century.caliphate's revenue: Braudel, History of Civilizations, History of Civilizations, 73. 73.Its agriculture was confined: Hourani, 100.built on slopes: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, Structures of Everyday Life, 507. 507."Not being well endowed": Braudel, History of Civilizations, History of Civilizations, 62. 62.camels: Saharan camels could carry half the weight of their heavier, cold desert Bactrian cousins. Camels originated in North America and were close relatives of the South American llama and alpaca. They were domesticated for food in the Middle East by 2000 BC. By 1000 BC they were commonly used as transport animals.deserts: Fernandez-Armesto, 67.seasonally reversing wind system: Ibid., 384, 389. Reliable sailing conditions and a relatively safe way home were the major reasons for the Indian Ocean's precocious development as mankind's richest, earliest long-distance trade highway.13637. In Mesopotamia goods: Hourani, 44."Greek fire": White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 96. Greek fire seems to have been invented, fortuitously for Constantinople and the West, just prior to 673 by a refugee architect from Syria named Kallinikos. Its spectacular effects in repelling Muslim forces ignited the history of the search for combustible weaponry, which ultimately produced the seminal invention of gunpowder and cannons. 96. Greek fire seems to have been invented, fortuitously for Constantinople and the West, just prior to 673 by a refugee architect from Syria named Kallinikos. Its spectacular effects in repelling Muslim forces ignited the history of the search for combustible weaponry, which ultimately produced the seminal invention of gunpowder and cannons.long-distance aqueduct: Valens, in the fourth century, and Justinian, in the sixth century, were the major aqueduct and cistern builders, respectively.Famine and disease: Norwich, Short History of Byzantium, Short History of Byzantium, 110. 110.lifted the siege: Davis, 100 Decisive Battles, 100 Decisive Battles, 102. 102.the First Crusade: Ironically, the most immediate effect of the halt of Islam's expansion at Constantinople's seawalls in 718 was to sow discord within Christianity itself. Soon after the victory, Leo III decided to forbid the use of religious icons, following Muslim and Jewish practice. But iconoclasm was an anathema to the pope in Rome. Although Constantinople ultimately renounced it just over a century later, the rivalry between Eastern and Latin Christianity endured for centuries.Abbasid engineers: Pacey, 10.; Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 16, 18. 16, 18."in Cairo": Ibn Battutah, 15. By way of comparison, Paris in the glory years of the eighteenth century employed 20,000 carriers of Seine River water.paper pulp mill: Gies and Gies, 42.over a hundred bookshops: Pacey, 41; Public libraries were opened, too. Caliph al-Hakam of Cordoba in the latter part of the tenth century reportedly had a library of 400,000 manuscripts-by comparison, the library of France's mid-fourteenth-century king, Charles V, had only 900. Braudel, History of Civilizations, History of Civilizations, 72. 72.Mesopotamia's irrigation system: Smith, History of Dams, History of Dams, 81; Pacey, 20; McNeill, 81; Pacey, 20; McNeill, Rise of the West, Rise of the West, 497. 497.Nahrwan transport and irrigation: Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 18; Temple, 181. 18; Temple, 181.cannibalism, plague, and decaying waterworks: Collins, 21; Smith, Man and Water, Man and Water, 16. 16.water court at Valencia: All the elected members of the weekly Tribunal de las Aguas sit at a round table and in full public view discuss and settle farmers' disputes over use and maintenance of water and infrastructure. Judgments are based on common sense and no written records are kept.parity with Islam: Pacey, 44.under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent: Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, Muslim Discovery of Europe, 32. 32.30,000 men died: Howarth, 1821.engage on equal terms: Africa was slow to learn about the development of the wheel and the plow, for instance. Moreover, Africa may also have been impeded by its southerly latitude to the main Eurasian belt; biota seemingly adapts best in similar latitude bands, which may have added the benefit of scale to Eurasia's other comparative advantages.