Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  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. I’ve been privileged to have him as a best friend and intellectual companion as well as a father.

  Jean Michel Arechaga and Nicole Macé 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 Macé, 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, 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, 2000–2001, 19–37. 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, chap. 5, “Challenge and Response,” 60–79.

  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, 10.

  four primary terrestrial elements: Ball, 3, 4, 117–120. 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, 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, 40–45. 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 Catalhüyük 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, 46.

  barbarian waves: The four great barbarian waves were (1) the Bronze Age charioteers, circa 1700–1400 BC; (2) the Iron Age invaders from around 1400–1200 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, 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, 389–395.

  nilometers: Collins, 13–14. 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, 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, 37–38; Shaw, 61.

  reservoir dam: Smith, History of Dams, 1–4. 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, 59–60. 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, 193.

  sultan and the Christian king: Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, 34, 38.

  “A society dependent”: McNeill, Rise of the West, 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 (1929), quoted in Ponting, 69–70.

  “black fields becoming white”: Cited in Pearce, 186.

  1700 BC almost no wheat: Ponting, 71. See also McNeill, Rise of the West, 48.

  water war: Van De Mieroop, 48–49. See also Gleick, World’s Water, 1998–1999, 125; Reade, 40–41; 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 Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815), http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruction.html.

  stone aqueduct: Smith, History of Dams, 9–12; Smith, Man and Water, 76–78. The aqueduct is known as the Jerwan aqueduct bridge.

  Tehran’s water supply: Smith, Man and Water, 70–71.

  tried almost every water supply technique: Ibid., 79.

  King David discovered: Johnson, 56, 72–73; Smith, Man and Water, 77.

  “only deep enough”: Herodotus, Histories, 113–118. 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, 34.

  Great Bath: Keay, 12–14.

  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, 157–176. 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, 87–92, and Pacey, 58–61.

  monsoon’s start date: As late as the 1970s, the arrival of clou
ds 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, 15; Gunter, 2–19, 104–113. 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, 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.