Water
The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
Steven Solomon
For Claudine Mace
Water mingles with every kind of natural phenomenon; and more than one might imagine, it has also mingled with the particular destiny of mankind.
—Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean
When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water.
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac
Contents
Epigraph
List of Maps
Prologue
Part One: Water in Ancient History
1 The Indispensable Resource
2 Water and the Start of Civilization
3 Rivers, Irrigation, and the Earliest Empires
4 Seafaring, Trade, and the Making of the Mediterranean World
5 The Grand Canal and the Flourishing of Chinese Civilization
6 Islam, Deserts, and the Destiny of History’s Most Water-Fragile Civilization
Photographic Insert
Part Two: Water and the Ascendancy of the West
7 Waterwheel, Plow, Cargo Ship, and the Awakening of Europe
8 The Voyages of Discovery and the Launch of the Oceanic Era
9 Steam Power, Industry, and the Age of the British Empire
Part Three: Water and the Making of the Modern Industrial Society
10 The Sanitary Revolution
11 Water Frontiers and the Emergence of the United States
12 The Canal to America’s Century
13 Giant Dams, Water Abundance, and the Rise of Global Society
Part Four: The Age of Scarcity
14 Water: The New Oil
15 Thicker Than Blood: The Water-Famished Middle East
16 From Have to Have-Not: Mounting Water Distress in Asia’s Rising Giants
17 Opportunity from Scarcity: The New Politics of Water in the Industrial Democracies
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
LIST OF MAPS
Ancient Egypt and Nile
Mesopotamia and Fertile Crescent
The Indus River and India
Mediterranean World
China
The Silk Roads
Islamic World and Selected Trade Routes
Constantinople
Europe and Selected Medieval Sea Trade Routes
Voyages of Discovery: Da Gama and Cheng Ho
Suez Canal
Eastern U.S. and Mississippi
Panama Canal
American West
California Aqueducts
Modern Middle East
Israel and West Bank
PROLOGUE
In 1763 a twenty-seven-year-old instrument maker named James Watt repaired a model of a Newcomen steam engine owned by the University of Glasgow. Britain was in the grip of a dire fuel famine resulting from the early deforestation of its countryside, and many of the primitive engines invented by Thomas Newcomen a half century earlier were working to pump floodwater from coal mines so that more coal could be excavated as a substitute fuel. While repairing the Newcomen machine, Watt had been startled by its inefficiency. Filled with the spirit of scientific inquiry then going on in the Scottish Enlightenment, he determined to try to improve its capacity to harness steam energy. Within two years he had a much-more-efficient design, and by 1776 was selling the world’s first modern steam engine.
James Watt’s improved steam engine was a turning point in history. It became the seminal invention of the Industrial Revolution. Within a matter of decades, it helped transform Britain into the world’s dominant economy with a steam-and-iron navy that lorded over a colonial empire spanning a quarter of the globe. Britain’s pioneering textile factories multiplied their productivity and output by shifting from waterwheel to steam power and relocating from rural riversides to new industrial towns. Steam-driven bellows heated coke furnaces to produce prodigious amounts of cast iron, the plastic of the early industrial age. Watt steam engines helped overcome Britain’s fuel famine by pumping excess water out of coal shafts—and put the discharge to use by supplementing the water supply of the inland canals that had sprung up to expedite the growing shipments of coal from the collieries to the markets. Watt steam engines abetted the rise of urban metropolises, and improved the health and longevity of their residents, by pumping up freshwater from rivers for drinking, cooking, sanitation, and even firefighting. From Watt’s steam engine, a new industrial society took hold that launched human civilization on an altogether new trajectory. World and domestic balances of power were recast, and mankind’s material existence, population levels, and expectations increased more in just two centuries than they had in all the thousands of preceding years.
Yet as momentous as it was, Watt’s innovation for exploiting steam power was but one of a long list of water breakthroughs that have been causally entwined with major turning points in history—much like the one unfolding before us today. Water has strongly influenced the rise and decline of great powers, foreign relations among states, the nature of prevailing political economic systems, and the essential conditions governing ordinary people’s daily lives. The Industrial Revolution was akin to the Agricultural Revolution of about 5,000 years ago, when societies in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and northern China separately began mastering the hydraulic arts of controlling water from large rivers for mass-scale irrigation, and in so doing unlocked the economic and political means for advanced civilization to begin. Ancient Rome rose as a powerful state when it gained dominance over the Mediterranean Sea, and developed its flourishing urban civilization at the heart of its empire on the flow of abundant, clean freshwater brought by its stupendous aqueducts. The takeoff event and vital artery of China’s medieval golden age was the completion of its 1,100-mile-long Grand Canal, which created a transport highway uniting the resources of its wet, rice-growing, southerly Yangtze region with its fertile, semiarid Yellow River northlands. Islamic civilization’s brilliance was sustained by the trading wealth that accompanied the opening of its once-impenetrable, waterless deserts by long-distance camel caravans that spanned from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans. Open oceanic sailing was the West’s breakthrough route to world dominance, which it built upon through its leadership in steam, hydraulic turbines, hydroelectricity, and other water technologies of the industrial age. The sanitary and public health revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that underpinned mankind’s unprecedented demographic transformations sprung from efforts to provide freshwater free of filth and conditions inhospitable for disease-carrying organisms. America’s historical rise, too, was explained in important part by its mastery and integration of its three diverse hydrological environments: exploitation of the industrial waterpower and transport potential of the year-round rivers in its temperate, rainy eastern half, highlighted by the catalytic Erie Canal; the naval domination of its two ocean frontiers, and ascendance to world leadership, following the epic building of the Panama Canal; and the triumph over its arid Far West by its pioneering innovation of giant, multipurpose dams inaugurated with its Depression-era Hoover Dam. The worldwide diffusion of giant dams, in turn, was a linchpin of the Green Revolution, and ultimately the emergence of today’s global integrated economy.
That control and manipulation of water should be a pivotal axis of power and human achievement throughout history is hardly surprising. Water has always been man’s most indispensable n
atural resource, and one endowed with special, seemingly magical powers of physical transformation derived from its unique molecular properties and extraordinary roles in Earth’s geological and biological processes. Through the centuries, societies have struggled politically, militarily, and economically to control the world’s water wealth: to erect cities around it, to transport goods upon it, to harness its latent energy in various forms, to utilize it as a vital input of agriculture and industry, and to extract political advantage from it. Today, there is hardly an accessible freshwater resource on the planet that is not being engineered, often monumentally, by man.
Whatever the era, preeminent societies have invariably exploited their water resources in ways that were more productive, and unleashed larger supplies, than slower-adapting ones. Although often overlooked, the advent of cheap, abundant freshwater was one of the great growth drivers of the industrial era: its usage grew more than twice as fast as world population, and its ninefold increase in the twentieth century rivaled the more celebrated thirteenfold growth in energy. By contrast, failure to maintain waterworks infrastructures or to overcome water obstacles and tap the hidden opportunities water always presents has been a telltale indicator of societal decline and stagnation.
Every era has been shaped by its response to the great water challenge of its time. And so it is unfolding—on an epic scale—today. An impending global crisis of freshwater scarcity is fast emerging as a defining fulcrum of world politics and human civilization. For the first time in history, modern society’s unquenchable thirst, industrial technological capabilities, and sheer population growth from 6 to 9 billion is significantly outstripping the sustainable supply of fresh, clean water available from nature using current practices and technologies. Previously, man’s impact on ecosystems had been localized and modest. Across heavily populated parts of the planet today, much of the rivers, lakes, and groundwater on which growing societies depend are becoming dangerously depleted by overuse and pollution. As a result, an explosive new political fault line is erupting across the global landscape of the twenty-first century between water Haves and water Have-Nots: internationally among regions and states, but just as significantly within nations among domestic interest groups that have long competed over available water resources. Simply, water is surpassing oil itself as the world’s scarcest critical resource. Just as oil conflicts were central to twentieth-century history, the struggle over freshwater is set to shape a new turning point in the world order and the destiny of civilization.
Humanitarian crises, epidemic disease, destabilizing violence, and corrupt, failed states are already rife in the most water-deprived regions, where 20 percent of humanity lacks access to sufficient clean freshwater for drinking and cooking and 40 percent to adequate sanitation. Those who have predicted that the wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water have foremost in mind the water-starved, combustible Middle East, where water looms omnipresently over every conflict and peace negotiation, and where those with oil are desperately trying to postpone their day of reckoning by burning it to pump dry aquifers and desalinate seawater in order to sustain farms and modern cities in the desert. Freshwater is an Achilles’ heel of fast-growing giants China and India, which both face imminent tipping points from unsustainable water practices that will determine whether they lose their ability to feed themselves and cause their industrial expansions to prematurely sputter. The buffeting global impact will be especially far-reaching for the fates of water-distressed developing nations that are reliant on food imports to feed their swelling, restive populations. While the West, too, has some serious regional water shortages, its relatively modest population pressures and generally moist, temperate environments make it an overall water power possessing significant water resource advantages. If aggressively exploited, these advantages can help relaunch its economic dynamism and world leadership.
The lesson of history is that in the tumultuous adjustment that surely lies ahead, those societies that find the most innovative responses to the crisis are most likely to come out as winners, while the others will fall behind. Civilization will be shaped as well by water’s inextricable, deep interdependencies with energy, food, and climate change. More broadly, the freshwater crisis is an early proxy of the twenty-first century’s ultimate challenge of learning how to manage our crowded planet’s resources in both an economically viable and an environmentally sustainable manner. By grasping the lessons of water’s pivotal role on our destiny, we will be better prepared to cope with the crisis about to engulf us all.
PART I
Water in Ancient History
CHAPTER ONE
The Indispensable Resource
Earth has aptly been called the “water planet.” It is, like ourselves, 70 percent water. Alone among the solar system’s apparently lifeless planets and moons, it contains abundant surface water in all three of its natural states—solid ice, gaseous vapor, and, most important, flowing liquid. Water’s pervasiveness and indispensable capability to transform and transport other substances played a paramount role in forging Earth’s identity as a planet and the history of all life upon it. Its deceptively simple molecular architecture of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms possesses a mighty range of powers and functions unique among Earth’s substances. Water is the planet’s universal solvent: its extraordinary capacity to saturate, dissolve, and mingle with other molecules to catalyze essential chemical reactions makes it Earth’s most potent agent of change. It is water that conveys the life force of nutrients and minerals upward against gravity to crops, treetops, and the blood vessels of human beings. It is water that enabled the earliest forms of life to evolve and help create the planet’s oxygen-rich atmosphere. Water’s anomalous property of becoming less dense and more expansive as it freezes helps fracture rocks to promote geological change and fortuitously means that an insulating layer of ice forms first over the top of lakes and rivers, protecting the water-living creatures below.
Movements of liquid water and ice sheets over eons likewise carved many of Earth’s geographic landscapes and defined the changing characteristics of its habitats and climates. It is water’s exceptional capacity to absorb great amounts of heat before heating up itself that moderates seasonal surface temperatures and prevents the planet from becoming a perennially steamy hothouse like Venus or a frigid desert like Mars. It is the absence of water in the soil that causes deserts to suffer the extremes of heat in daytime and intense cold at night, while it is water’s presence that maintains comfortable ranges in temperate zones. Moving water creates and constantly redistributes the planet’s skin-thin layer of fertile topsoil, which when cultivated and magically watered in the right amounts yields civilized man’s daily bread—primarily wheat in the Mideast and Europe, rice in south Asia, maize and potatoes in the Americas, and tubers in Africa.
Among water’s most indispensable qualities is that it is Earth’s only self-renewing vital resource. Evaporated water precipitates in a desalinated and cleansed form over the planet through Earth’s continuous water cycle to restore natural ecosystems and make sustained human civilization possible. Although the remarkably constant total volume of accessible, self-renewing freshwater is infinitesimally tiny as a virtual few droplets of the planet’s total water, it has sufficed to provide all of the water needed to support mankind throughout the entirety of human history—until today.
Water appeared on Earth early in the planet’s infancy over 4 billion years ago, possibly through collisions with ice-bearing comets. Over time it assumed its familiar forms, such as oceans, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands on the surface, rainfall, snow, and water vapor in the air, and the invisible subsurface of shallow groundwater systems, soil moisture, and deep reservoirs of confined aquifers. Transmutations between water’s three natural states help drive Earth’s climate change cycles, prominently including the long fluctuations between cold, dry ice ages and warm, wet interludes like the present era.
Earth’s
last great ice age lasted some 90,000 years and reached its zenith about 18,000 years ago with ice covering one-third of the planet, compared to about one-tenth today. With so much water locked up in ice, global sea levels were about 390 feet lower. Now separate landmasses were traversable on foot. As the ice sheets melted and receded over the next several thousand years, they enriched the soil, filled underground aquifers, and created the contours of our present geography of lakes, rivers, and harbor-rich coastlines and filled in the shallow seas and channels—the English Channel, for instance, land-bridged England and continental Europe as recently as 9,000 years ago. Thick forests grew in the new temperate zones left behind by the glaciers, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, where the glaciers had been concentrated. Then, about 10,000 years ago, the planet entered an anomalous interlude in which the climate became both warm and unusually stable. It was under these highly favorable climatic conditions that human civilization made its debut on Earth’s stage.
Basic water conditions of aridity and moisture, seasonality and variable predictability patterns of precipitation, and river flow signatures and navigable lengths are defining elements of the planet’s diverse range of habitats to which each occupying civilization tried to gainfully adapt during its few moments in history. Heat dispersal by ocean currents and the blanket of warm atmospheric water vapor help keep Earth habitable for humans from the equator to the subarctic latitudes. Within these boundaries are a half dozen main landscapes, each with a unique hydrological identity: Near the poles is the bitterly cold, low-rainfall, high-permafrost, and poorly drained tundra. The taiga, featuring large coniferous forests, lay south of the tundra in the Northern Hemisphere. Temperate forests, with good soil, ample rainfall, and rich flora, follow next, moving toward the equator. Then comes a belt of semiarid grasslands with less-fertile soil and erratic rainfall, such as in the barely cultivatable prairie of the North American Great Plains, Africa’s savanna, and the steppes of central Asia. Interspersed among these regions are transition zones, notably one stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and another in northern China, marked by drying, semiarid climates and several large rivers that flood over wide plains—the eventual cradle habitat of the ancient irrigation-farming-based civilizations. Between the 30-degree latitudes lie large deserts; around the equator are vast tropics with extreme rainfall, high temperatures, and rapid evaporation. Both are among the most water-fragile habitats on Earth—the former due to its dryness, and the latter due to its inundating, ever-soggy excess. Water also governs the crucial microclimates that exist within each basic zone. The seas play a dynamic role: it is the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream current that flows northeasterly from the Gulf of Mexico that keeps northern Europe wet and warm despite being at the same latitude as Canada’s frigid Hudson Bay, just as the swift, northeasterly Kuroshio, or Japan Current, in the Pacific Ocean warms North America’s coastal northwest. The Gulf Stream, in turn, also influences the prominent summer monsoons of Africa and Asia. Climatologists today postulate that the global conveyor belt circulation of deep and surface ocean currents acts as a key on-off switch of ice ages and is triggered by shifting mixtures of oceanic salinity and heat, particularly at the delicately balanced turnaround point in the North Atlantic. Similarly, the early signs of global warming are expected to express themselves in the form of more extreme precipitation events—more intense, frequent, and seasonally unpredictable storms, melts, and droughts. In short, every aspect of the past, present, and future of the planet and its inhabitants has been and will be powerfully influenced by water’s pervasive impact.
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