Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  The environmental movement represented a turning point in water and world history. For all human history, the governing view was that Earth’s freshwater resources were essentially unlimited, naturally self-cleansing, and free to extract from its ecosystem without consequences in any amount of which man was capable. In its place, increasingly, a new recognition was emerging: that in order for industrial civilization, with its prodigious power to alter the natural environment, to continue to thrive it was necessary to establish a sustainable equilibrium between economic growth and its host water ecosystems.

  America’s pioneering giant, multipurpose dams were the instant envy of the world. Within only a few decades, foreign states everywhere were striving to replicate America’s achievement. The result was a dam-building boom of epic proportions on virtually every major river of the planet. The resulting improvements in material well-being helped make communist states credible challengers to the postwar hegemony of liberal Western democracies, and allowed newly independent, poor countries, for the first time in history, to move up the industrial development ladder. Industrialized prosperity spread globally, transforming the world political economy and balances of power. By the end of the century, it had helped bring into existence a multiaxial, interdependent global order that was gradually superseding the long era of western European and U.S. hegemony.

  For all countries, the cheap hydroelectricity and freshwater unlocked by large dams was a panacea—irrigation for increased food production, power for industrial factories, healthy drinking water, sanitation services and illumination for large metropolitan centers, and popular hope of betterment in material life. Dams transcended political or economic ideology. Whatever the system, dams meant prosperity, more stable societies and greater governmental legitimacy. American president Herbert Hoover’s statement that “Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial returns to the nation is an economic waste” was virtually interchangeable with Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin’s maxim that “water which is allowed to enter the sea is wasted.” Every twentieth-century leader from Teddy Roosevelt to China’s Mao Zedong would have concurred. At the dedication of north India’s giant Bhakra Dam in 1963, an awestruck Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru echoed the rhapsodic Franklin Roosevelt at Hoover as he proudly likened the dam project to “the new temple of resurgent India.” Both his sentiment and metaphor were strikingly similar to President Nasser’s comparison of Egypt’s High Aswan Dam to a pyramid. To each and every leader, water seemed to be a potentially infinite, enriching resource of nature limited only by society’s technical virtuosity in extracting ever more of it from the environment.

  The centralizing, hydraulic society tendencies of dam-building conformed easily to the model of communist state planning. Marshaling an unpaid army of gulag laborers, Stalin began erecting dams on the Volga River in 1937, and thereafter built them on other great rivers including the Dnieper, Don, and Dniester. All across the huge nation, rivers were rerouted and lakes diverted to the design of Soviet water engineers and state industrial planners. With the help of giant dams, the Soviet Union increased its water use eightfold in the sixty years following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and rose to rival America as the world’s leading superpower.

  Aggressive dam construction and associated water management likewise was a centerpiece of Chairman Mao’s effort to reengineer Chinese society to communism in the postwar era. Given Chinese civilization’s storied heritage of heroic state waterworks, China’s communist mandarins took naturally to the opportunities of dam building on all its rivers, great and small. By the end of the twentieth century, China had some 22,000 large dams—nearly half the world’s total and more than three times as many as America—helping to more than double irrigated cropland in the first quarter century of communist rule from 1949. In 2006 it officially opened the world colossus of all dams at Three Gorges on the Yangtze—China’s Hoover, and linchpin of its bid for an accelerated economic transformation akin to America’s conquest of its western arid lands.

  Japan’s postwar economic miracle—and the largesse that kept the ruling liberal democratic party in power for so long—rested in part on the intensive exploitation of its limited arable land and its hydropower potential through the construction some 2,700 large dams on its mountain-fed rivers. India’s 4,300 large dams ranked it third in the world behind China and America and were vital to its keeping pace in food production for its explosively growing postwar population. Almost every developing nation had its signature giant dam project that was the political and economic centerpiece of its society. As the Aswan Dam transformed the Nile, and with it, all Egypt, Turkey’s giant, 1990 Ataturk Dam anchored its immense, region-transforming Southeastern Anatolia Project of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants, while downstream on the Euphrates, the national dreams of Syria and Iraq hinged on there being enough water for their own giant dams. Pakistan’s national pride was the huge Tarbela Dam on the Indus. Water-rich South America’s stupendous, 1991 Itaipu Dam, on the Parana River on the Brazil-Paraguay border, held the title as the world’s largest generator of hydroelectricity—at least until Three Gorges hit full capacity. Central Asia’s Tajikistan inherited the world’s tallest dam, the Nurek, at 984 feet, when the old Soviet Union broke up.

  In all, by the end of the twentieth century mankind had built some 45,000 large dams; during the global peak of dam building in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, some 13 were being erected on average every day. World reservoir capacity quadrupled between 1960 and 2000, so that some three to six times more water than existed in all rivers was stored behind giant dams. World hydropower output doubled, food production multiplied two and half times, and overall economic production grew sixfold.

  The international dam boom facilitated one of the most dramatic physical man-made transformations of Earth—the rapid expansion of irrigated cropland, much of it far from natural riverbeds, often through the ferocious conversion of forests and wetlands. Abetted by the extensive mechanization of agriculture, irrigation nearly tripled in the half century after 1950 to cover about 17 percent of the world’s arable land and produce 40 percent of its food.

  Intensified application of water was a critical linchpin of the world-changing, twentieth-century Green Revolution, which spread from the West to produce surplus yields across the developing world from the 1960s and 1970s. The Green Revolution was based on breeding high-yielding strains of staple crops like corn, wheat, and rice that were highly responsive to intensive inputs of water and chemical fertilizer. One of the pioneering breakthroughs had been in hybrid American corn, starting in the 1930s. By the 1970s, virtually all the corn grown in the United States was hybrid, with yields averaging three to four times more than standard corn of the 1920s. Hybrid dwarf wheat, which carried many more grain seeds in its head than ordinary wheat, triggered its first Green Revolution in Mexico, then spread with spectacular results in the 1960s through the wheat belts of southwest Asia from India’s Punjab to Turkey at the head of the ancient Fertile Crescent. Regularly at the brink of mass starvation, staved off only by massive American food donations, India became self-sufficient in food following its 1974 adoption of hybrid wheat. From the late 1960s, hybrid dwarf rice took hold through the world’s rice belt, from Bengal to Java to Korea. Between 1970 and 1991, hybrid varietals increased their share from under 15 percent to 75 percent of developing world wheat and rice crop, while yields multiplied by two and three times.

  The Green Revolution was akin to other great agricultural revolutions that transformed world history, including the arrival of Champa rice in China in the eleventh century, the introduction of American maize, potatoes, and cassavas to Europe and Asia after the European Voyages of Discovery, and Britain’s successive, systematic Agricultural Revolutions from the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Instead of mass starvation and political upheaval from the twentieth century’s quadrupling of world population, world living standards per person ruptured from all historica
l trends and tripled. The global diffusion of wealth creation helped establish a new world economic order marked by an integrated web of fast-moving, cross-border exchanges of communications, capital, goods, ideas, people, environmental impacts as well as buffeting feedback loops. Goods moved around the world on an oceanic superhighway of intermodal container shipping to create a new phenomenon in which demand in any country could be met by supply produced outside its borders as readily as from within. By 2000, some 90 percent of world commerce moved by sea on some 46,000 giant ships amid 3,000 major ports and through a dozen strategically vital straits and sea canals. The stunning abundance of clean, cheap freshwater that became widely accessible through giant dams, motorized drills, pumps, and other advanced industrial technologies highlighted water’s indispensability in this remarkable achievement of civilization.

  Yet toward the end of the century, the global water cornucopia unlocked by the age of dams began to reach its limits and, as in America, peak out. A similar pattern of ecosystem depletions and limitations, yet on a much larger, planetary scale, was emerging. By 2000, some 60 percent of all larger river systems in the world passed through dams and man-made structures. Most of the best hydropower and irrigation dam sites in the world were already being used. So much freshwater had been redistributed across Earth’s landscapes in dams, reservoirs, and canals over the twentieth century as to account “for a small but measurable change in the wobble of the earth as it spins,” noted world water expert Peter Gleick. Like the Colorado, great rivers such as the Yellow, Nile, Indus, Ganges, and Euphrates no longer reached the sea much of the year, or did so carrying greatly diminished restorative water flows and sediment to their delta and coastal ecosystems. The deleterious side effects of protracted, intensive irrigation and inadequate drainage on soil pauperization through salinization, waterlogging, and silt erosion were everywhere in increasing evidence. Irrigated cropland that had provided such a spectacular growth in worldwide food production was being retired as fast as new irrigated land was developed—the historic net expansion of irrigated land had ended. As traditional surface resources ran low, more and more regions were mining groundwater for irrigation much faster than nature’s water cycle could restore it—some 10 percent of world farming was unsustainable in the long run. Water tables were sinking and desertification was spreading on several continents. Many parts of the world were compounding the problem by poisonously polluting their freshwater supplies, as well as their coastal fisheries, with industrial waste and farm runoff.

  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a new water challenge was rising to the forefront to reshape world civilization, geopolitics, and governing hierarchies between and within societies—an impending famine of freshwater and the depletion of Earth’s civilization-sustaining water ecosystems. What was happening was that for the first time in history, mankind’s unquenchable thirst, whetted by voracious industrial demand, gargantuan engineering capacities, and sheer multiplication of human population and individual consumption levels, was starting to significantly outstrip many planetary ecosystems’ absolute supply of readily accessible and renewable clean, fresh liquid water. Based on current usage trends, practices, and foreseeable technologies, it was doubtful there was enough freshwater returning to the Earth’s surface in the natural water cycle of evaporation and precipitation to sustain the economic growth necessary for the developing world’s billions to attain anything close to the levels of prosperity and health enjoyed in the West—and for a terrifyingly large percentage of humanity, there wasn’t enough clean water to live healthy, natural lives at all. An explosive competition for scarce water loomed. Many of the driest, most heavily populated, and destitute regions, already couldn’t feed their populations and had little realistic hope of doing so soon. Even in parts of the world where freshwater was relatively abundant, growing shortages were triggering a new cycle in the age-old struggle to control regional water resources, and with it, new realignments of political and economic power.

  The new era of freshwater scarcity was the by-product of the classic historical cycle of resource intensification, population boom, resource depletion, and flattening or falling economic growth until the next round of intensification and growth increased accessible water supply and made more productive uses of existing, available water resources. In the twentieth century, populations had multiplied based partly on the one-time surge in water supply from the era’s great hydraulic innovations. But now that water supply boom was peaking out, leaving behind populations in many parts of the world with greater material needs and expectations than resources to satisfy them. With human population projected to balloon 50 percent by midcentury, the second scissors blade was now ineluctably closing. The planet’s supply of accessible freshwater, as presently managed, was insufficient to meet the demands of many of the world’s mostly young, restive, and growing multitudes. Fresh, clean—and utterly indispensable—water, in short, was fast becoming a depleted global natural resource and the world’s most explosive political economic problem.

  PART IV

  The Age of Scarcity

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Water: The New Oil

  The challenge of freshwater scarcity and ecosystem depletion is rapidly emerging as one of the defining fulcrums of world politics and human civilization. A century of unprecedented freshwater abundance is being eclipsed by a new age characterized by acute disparities in water wealth, chronic insufficiencies, and deteriorating environmental sustainability across many of the most heavily populated parts of the planet. Just as oil conflicts played a central role in defining the history of the 1900s, the struggle to command increasingly scarce, usable water resources is set to shape the destinies of societies and the world order of the twenty-first century. Water is overtaking oil as the world’s scarcest critical natural resource. But water is more than the new oil. Oil, in the end, is substitutable, albeit painfully, by other fuel sources, or in extremis can be done without; but water’s uses are pervasive, irreplaceable by any other substance, and utterly indispensable.

  The long sweep of history revealed that long enduring civilizations were underpinned by effective water control using the technology and organization methods of its time. Whether it was the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia, the Grand Canal of imperial China, the waterwheels and steam engine of early industrial Europe, or the giant, multipurpose dams of the twentieth century, societies that rose to preeminence responded to the water challenge of their ages by exploiting their water resource potential in ways that invariably were more productive, larger in scale, and unleashed larger usable supplies than their slower-adapting rivals. In contrast, unmet water challenges, a failure to maintain waterworks structure, or simply being overtaken by more productive water management elsewhere was a common factor of many of history’s declines and collapses. Likewise, the economic productiveness and political equilibrium of today’s advanced societies depends critically upon the robustness, security, and continuous innovative development of an interlinked array of giant dams, electric power plants, aqueducts, reservoirs, pumps, distribution pipes, sanitary sewage systems, wastewater treatment facilities, irrigation canals, drainage systems, and levees, as well as transport waterworks including port facilities, dredgers, bridges, tunnels, and ocean-spanning shipping fleets. In the unfolding reality of the new millennium, water use and infrastructure are also at the heart of the interlinked challenges of food, energy shortages, and climate change dictating the fate of human civilization.

  Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is hardly an accessible freshwater source or a strategically placed waterway on an economically advanced part of the planet that has not been radically, and often monumentally, engineered by man’s prodigious industrial power. As world population continues to be propelled toward 9 billion by 2050, and with so many third world inhabitants starting to move up toward consumption and waste-generation levels of the one-fifth living in industrialized nations, demand for more freshwat
er is continuing to soar. Yet no new innovative breakthrough capable of expanding usable water supply on a large enough scale to meet the demand is anywhere evident on the horizon.

  Over the past two centuries, freshwater usage has grown two times faster than population. About half the renewable global runoff accessible to the most populated parts of the planet is being used. Simple math, and the physical limits of nature, dictates that past trends cannot be sustained. Throughout history the ceiling of man’s capacity to extract greater water supply from nature had been bounded only by his own technological limitations. Now, however, an additional, external obstacle has arisen to impose the critical constraint—the depletion of the renewable, accessible freshwater ecological systems upon which all human civilization ultimately depends. As a result a new application of water is emerging to join society’s traditional four primary uses—the allocation of enough water to watersheds and related natural ecosystems to sustain the vitality of the hydrological environment itself.