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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745334912 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.30(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
A Floating Planet
The failure to provide drinking water and adequate sanitation services to all people is perhaps the greatest development failure of the 20th century.
The presence of water
Of all the water on earth, 97.5 per cent is too salty to drink. Two-thirds of the remaining 2.5 per cent is locked in the ice caps at the poles or in snow, though these areas are shrinking with the impact of global warming. There is water in the air – water vapour and then rain – and there is water held inside plants and other living beings, like ourselves. That leaves 16 million cubic kilometres, much of which is trapped in sedimentary rock too far underground to access. A further 90,000 cubic kilometres is in rivers and lakes. 500,000 cubic kilometres per year evaporate from the sea and from living plants, though about 60 per cent of that is returned in the form of snow or rain. The water held underground in aquifers, groundwater, has taken millions of years to accumulate. So the main source of fresh water, other than aquifers, is 'run-off, the water that seeps through the soil into rivers and lakes from their banks. This represents something like 34,000 cubic kilometres, which is about twice what is currently used. Rainfall amounts to some 110,000 cubic kilometres of which half is trapped by vegetation and around 30 per cent falls into rivers and lakes. The problem is that the gross figures for rainfall and river flows do not show how unevenly distributed that rainfall is, nor the differing rates at which aquifers, lakes and rivers assimilate the run-off. The flow from river bank into rivers is visibly rapid, though the speed of flow will be affected by the condition of the river banks, the amount of vegetation and the number of trees. The recharging of water into the shallower aquifers through the soil takes longer, and is not to be hurried, but penetration into the deeper water basins can take centuries, or never happen at all. Fred Pearce estimates that some 14,000 cubic kilometres are really accessible. Rivers, after all, flow through networks which when seen from the air resemble the jumble of veins in our hand; they are systems rather than single courses flowing neatly down a predetermined route. Indeed if the meandering of a river is disturbed, or the course of the river is straightened, and shortened, swamps will be drained and the run off will rush to the sea more quickly instead of penetrating the soil. In some seasons of the year their flow turns to flood, expanding across flood plains; at others it dries up. Rivers are by definition anarchic, and a great deal of human effort and resourcefulness over time has gone into attempting to control or direct their flow to guarantee stable supplies of water, especially for irrigation. One result has been the proliferation of dams across the world, built in the optimistic expectation that they would guarantee water supply and energy provision for generations; their unforeseen consequences are now emerging in the form of huge displaced populations, the accumulation of silt which would previously have flowed with the river and dispersed on deltas and flood plains, and which reduces the amount of water in reservoirs, the spread of poisonous algae as a result of inadequate oxygenation of the water, and the stagnant water and rotting materials expelling methane gas into the air from the surface of the reservoirs, among others. In the USA these monuments are now being rapidly dismantled; elsewhere, and particularly in China, they continue to be built on an increasingly massive scale, with accelerating negative consequences.
And the problem is even more complex than that. Humanity has controlled and contained rivers – it has also polluted them. The refusal of rivers to acknowledge national frontiers has produced other kinds of conflict, to which we shall return. The rain, while replenishing the planet's resources, falls unevenly – flooding here, while leaving deserts there. And the supply of water from rivers, even after the construction of dams, has proved inadequate for the needs of industry, agriculture and people, so attention has turned to the giant aquifers beneath the ground. The current statistics for the depletion of aquifers are truly alarming, especially in the knowledge that the deeper water basins are pretty much inaccessible.
It is easy to be blinded, or depressed, or confused (or all three) by statistics, especially with these astronomical numbers. What we need to know is how much water is available to us, where that water is, how it is currently used, and how we can use it differently. It is more than an issue of conservation – though there is clearly an urgent need to husband, control and conserve our water supplies over time. Recent studies have begun to speak more and more insistently about 'peak water', drawing an analogy with the argument about 'peak oil'. There is an undoubtedly catastrophist element to these discussions. We know that fossil fuels do have a tangible limit, although there are immense reserves still to be exploited – in Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Saudi Arabia for example; but the reality is that oil cannot be regenerated and that its available quantities are finite. Fracking has opened a new avenue of supply, but with consequences for the stability of the planet about which we still know very little, and with disastrous consequences for the water table which remain to be calculated, although a recent report in the United States indicates that the water used in the extraction process shows a level of benzene contamination that is 'off the charts'. The analogy between oil and water, however, does not apply, for one very simple reason. Water is a renewable resource – though with humanity's sometimes diabolical ingenuity, it is probably possible that it could be contaminated to such a degree that large numbers of people could be denied the most essential component of survival. One prediction has it, for example, that two-thirds of world's population will live in water-stressed conditions by 2025, if current consumption continues. But that will occur only to the extent that we allow the current system of production, with its uncontrolled and unregulated use of water, to continue. 'Peak water' is not the consequence of limited supply but of a specific pattern of use – and that is what has to be urgently addressed.
Six countries have between them half of the world's renewable fresh water: Brazil, Canada, Russia, Indonesia, China and Colombia. Some 14,000 cubic kilometres of water are in rivers; the Amazon, the Congo and the Orinoco hold 25 per cent of the total, but none of them are in areas that are easily accessible. River water that can easily be reached and used probably amounts to around 9,000 cubic kilometres. Boiled down to individual consumption that would represent about 1,400 cubic metres per person per year, though a typical individual consumer in the West could use between 1,500 and 2,000.
Inevitably, the mention of consumption conjures up images of individuals and households using their water in tangible ways – to flush toilets, water lawns, wash clothes or dishes, clean the car and so on. The emphasis is on individual and household consumption. And there are certainly many ways in which fresh water can be conserved on quite a large scale – by recycling waste water, for example, or reconsidering the symbolic cultural value of lawns in dry areas (like California), severely limiting the use of garden hoses and even – that holy of holies – restricting the number of golf courses that are built, for golf courses are among the most demanding consumers of water on behalf of a tiny clientele. These are some of the many tangible measures which will improve the way we use water, reduce quite significantly the impact of overuse and misuse of water on the environment and raise the level of awareness of people in this and other areas. But domestic uses of water account for only 10 per cent of the total; 25 per cent is currently consumed by industry and the remaining 65 per cent by agriculture.
The situation is further complicated by the issue of distribution of water resources; water scarcity – and it is important to emphasise, as Maggie Black insists we do, that it is not only water to drink that we are discussing, but water to wash in, water to flush away human detritus – affects the world's population in very distorted ways. The 2.6 billion people without adequate sanitation are concentrated almost entirely in the developing world. There are poor communities in Europe and North America, of course, but water continues to be available to them – for the present. This picture will surely change, however, if it becomes generally acceptable to view water as a consumer good, which people can have to the extent that they can pay for it.
For most of human history, it was rivers and lakes that provided for the water needs of human societies. The rise and decline of civilisations, the 'hydraulic societies', were directly attributable to the management (or mismanagement of water). But with industrialisation and the growth of cities, especially in the twentieth century, rivers were dammed to create artificial reservoirs – or man-made lakes – where natural watercourses could not provide for growing populations increasingly concentrated in urban spaces. As the dams grew in size and the reservoirs in capacity, the water cycle – that process of renewal and replenishment of water that ensures that water is a renewable resource – was progressively disrupted, with long-term effects that were only recognised at a much later stage.
The Colorado, on which the Hoover Dam stands, once reached Mexico and flowed into an estuary 40 kilometres wide. Today, it does not reach the delta at all. The Indus dries up and disappears 80 miles from the sea, while China's giant Yellow River failed to reach its estuary for nearly eight months a year in the 1990s and today barely reaches it at all. The course of many rivers has been altered, rapidly drying out fertile wetlands, just as the flood plains once reached by dammed rivers – fertile places for a seasonal agriculture – have now shrunk or disappeared. The emblematic dam of the post-Second World War era is the Aswan, the great dam on the Nile in Egypt eventually financed by Russia, after the USA withdrew its support from the increasingly independent and nationalist Nasser government. Work on it began in 1960 and the High Aswan Dam was completed ten years later. The Nile originates in Sudan and flows through Ethiopia to Egypt, which takes 77 per cent of its flow – the lion's share. The giant Aswan Dam blocked the river, interrupting its flow towards the flood plain of the Nile delta. The bulk of its water is used to irrigate the Upper Nile, where cotton is the principal crop. Yet Egypt is a major importer of wheat – though the inadequacy of supplies was illustrated in Egypt's bread riots in 2004.
It is now generally recognised that Lake Nasser, the reservoir above the High Dam, loses 15 per cent of its volume annually in evaporation, releasing methane gas. And like all dams, the build-up of silt in the lake bed – silt which would previously have swept down towards the delta, de-oxygenates the water, where poisonous algae can now proliferate, and over time reduces the lake's capacity. This is not exclusive to Lake Nasser, where large budgets have gone into digging drainage channels to prevent the accumulations.
There are unlimited examples of dams and diversions drying the lower reaches of otherwise healthy rivers. The most notorious example is the Aral Sea, in what was Soviet Central Asia. It is the 'ultimate ecological cautionary tale'. Once the fourth largest inland sea on the planet, two major rivers flowed into the Aral, the Amu and the Syr, originating in the Himalayas. In the 1950s, Soviet engineers diverted the rivers to grow cotton in what was a desert terrain. The waters of the Sea receded, leaving what were once islands at an increasing distance from the sea. The fishing industry, on which 40,000 local families depended, was decimated as the concentration of salt killed the fish. Wildlife disappeared and irrigation increased the levels of salt, which then melded with pesticides to create what Maggie Black describes as 'a stew of poisonous sediments'. The climate changed, making it impossible to grow cotton after all; farmers switched to rice, which consumed even more water. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, five Central Asian states found themselves jointly responsible for the Sea. To date nothing has been done and all that remains is a grotesque landscape of boats stranded in a desert as camels make their way past them.
Far less known, but in many ways even more catastrophic, is the disappearance of the Hamoun wetlands on the Iran-Afghanistan border. Before the discovery of oil and gas in the region, the Hamoun lakes covered 5,600 square kilometres serving nearly half a million people in 935 villages. But in the 1990s, Afghanistan's control of the Helmand River and the Kajaki Dam, built by US engineers, spelled disaster for Iran. In 1998, the Taliban effectively cut off the two Hamoun lakes in Iranian territory until the Afghan reservoir filled – which it rarely did. The years of drought that followed, added to the failure of the irrigation works at the dam, and transformed the region into the dry place it is today. Now, like the Aral Sea, all that remains is parched dry land where derelict boats lie rotting. The local populations have suffered raised rates of heart disease and respiratory disorders are general, the result of the contaminated dust that floats up from the old lake bed. In Africa, Lake Chad, bordered by four African nations – Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad – was once 25,000 square kilometres of inland lake that supported two million people from fishing and farming on the lake shores. It was once again a story of drought combined with the diversion of water in ill-conceived irrigation projects that reduced the great lake to 2,500 square kilometres, and its fishing communities to farmers cultivating local crops – sorghum, millet and cowpea; when rice was introduced, and dykes were built around the paddies, the river was deprived of part of its flow and the flood plain ecosystem was undermined. In China, meanwhile, the unregulated and breakneck development of industry and industrial agriculture has polluted 80 per cent of its rivers, almost all of which flow down from the Himalayas through China to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand.
The story these examples tell is in one sense very complex, but in another sense can be summed up as the consequence of ill-considered water projects imposed largely for financial reasons by international agencies and aid programmes, the bulk of which were designed to profit industries and investors in the donor countries. Thus, for example, external insistence on providing aid for the digging of deep tubewells in the Indus River Basin took no account of the naturally occurring arsenic in the aquifers of which millions of people have been or will become victims.
Water projects, if they are to be what they claim to be – projects for development rather than profit for capital – should be prepared and thought through in collaboration with the people who are most intimately familiar with each region, the local farmers and communities who know how to read their own land and their own climate. But because development rarely means social transformation for the benefit of the population, schemes are imposed using the wrong criteria – with catastrophic effects.
The hole in my bucket
The statistics tell us that there is more than enough water on earth to supply the needs of the world's population. And yet there is an accelerating water crisis that is affecting above all the world's poorer communities. So where is the water going?
The rise of industrial society and the growth of cities for the first time separated human beings from their water sources. Growing populations crowded together in the slums and shanty towns of the nineteenth-century city. The diseases that proliferated there were not at first linked to water; the prevailing doctrine, the miasma theory, held that disease was spread through the air. But major cholera outbreaks and the pioneering work of mid-nineteenth-century visionary scientists like Edwin Chadwick, author of the historic 1842 Report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Great Britain; Lemuel Shattuck who, under the influence of Chadwick, wrote the first comprehensive public health plan in the United States; or Dr John Snow in London, who in 1854 established the link between the ravages of cholera and water, and initiated the discussion of water and public health. Snow did not, as yet, understand the relationship between cholera and contaminated water, and nor did the British parliament until the Great Stink, when the intolerable smell of a fetid Thames forced them into action. In Glasgow too, it was a cholera outbreak that led to the construction of a pipeline from Loch Katrine into the city in 1859. The result was a doctrine of public health that in the succeeding four decades or so led to serious municipal commitments to the provision of clean water and sanitation. The solution was seen to lie with engineers rather than politicians, and the costs would be borne by the public purse. There was an essentially humanistic view underpinning many of the discussions of public health, heavily underpinned with Victorian moralism and a dose of paternalism. There was also, of course, a barely hidden financial motivation – sick workers were not productive workers. Critically, these pioneering projects established a link between the provision of drinking water and systems of sanitation. This connection has been central to water management in Western Europe and North America from the outset. In the current debates, however, the two have become separated – the argument about drinking water is more easily understood and less uncomfortable than long discussions about human waste. More recently, the international debate has turned to sanitation, especially after the major outbreak of that most emblematic of diseases – cholera – in Peru in 1990, and in KwaZulu, South Africa, in 2000.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Drop"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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