Pearce - When the rivers run dry: water, the defining crisis of the twenty-first century

It would be wrong to say that I have been obsessed with rivers all my life. But, much as when taking a drive down a long river valley, I cant seem to avoid coming back to them. They have a hold on me.

I was brought up in a village in southeastern England where two small rivers begin their journey to the sea. One, the River Len, flowed west to the Medway and the Thames estuary. It powered a mill, I remember, and filled a lake in a park. Then one day it flooded and I couldnt get to school. That struck me: the power of a river unleashed.

The other river, the Stour, flowed east through the cathedral city of Canterbury, took in some extra water bubbling up from the bowels of the East Kent coal mines, and finished in a marshy mess called Pegwell Bay. Its currently in the news for almost the first time, because my childhood backwater of Kent is to spawn a New Town, and there are plans to dam the Stour to supply its water. I am amazed that anyone believes such a little river can provide enough water to make it worthwhile. But when you are trying to water the driest corner of England, you take what you can get, apparently. And even the smallest river can fill the oceans if it flows for long enough.

Rivers so often define our world. Is there a better book about America than Huckleberry Finns journey on the Mississippi? Is there a better way of seeing London than taking a boat down the Thames to Greenwich? Some of the greatest human adventures have been along rivers: up the Orinoco to find El Dorado, or the search for the source of the Nile. Millions of Indians keep bottles of Ganges water in their homes, like holy water. We romance on the Blue Danube and the Seine and fight over the Jordan and the rivers of Babylon.

And yet something disturbing has been happening. I only slowly became aware of it: just a news story here and there seeped through. But the maps in my atlas no longer seemed to accord with reality. Inland seas and lakes were disappearing. The old geography lesson about how rivers emerged from mountains, gathered water from tributaries, and finally disgorged their bloated flows into the oceans were now fiction. Many rivers were dying as they went on, not growing.

Because I am a journalist, I assembled a small file of press clippings. The Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in China, the Indus in Pakistan, the Colorado and Rio Grande in the United Statesall were reported to be trickling into the sand, sometimes hundreds of miles from the sea. Individually, these were interesting stories. Taken together, they seemed to me to be something more. Some kind of cataclysm was striking the worlds rivers. And so began the idea for this book.

I soon learned more. Israel is draining the Jordan River into pipes before it reaches the country that bears its name. There has been drought on the Ganges, because India has sucked up the holy rivers entire dry-season flow. The great Oxus, the Nile of Central Asia, was diverted into the desert, leaving the Aral Sea to dry out. This was a real shocker; the shoreline shown on most maps of what was once the worlds fourth largest inland sea was hundreds of miles distant from the reality. Even the chalk streams of my childhood were disappearing.

The wells have been drying up, too. Half a century of pumping on the Great Plains of the United States has removed water that will take two thousand years of rain to replace. In India, farmers whose fathers lifted water from wells with a bucket now sink boreholes more than half a mile into the rocksand still they find no water.

My book is a journey of discovery on the worlds rivers: to find out why we face this crisis, what happens when great rivers die, where we could be headedand how we can restore the rivers health and our hydrological future.

Although it is mainly about rivers, it is also about how we use water: about the staggering amount that it takes to feed and clothe us, and about how the world trade in food, cotton, and much more is also a trade in virtual waterthe water it takes to grow those crops. And that implicates Western consumers directly in the emptying of many of the worlds great rivers.

As I took this journey, I met men in overcoats huddled in drafty offices, trying to keep the Ruritanian badlands of Karakalpakstan from turning to desert. I marched with a man who used to run the worlds largest dam-building organization and now campaigns to tear down dams. I drank with Chinese bureaucrats who say that droughts on the Yellow River will one day trigger a flood disaster on a par with the one half a century ago that they try not to talk aboutit was manmade and killed almost a million people. I met Indian rainwater harvesters and the last man alive with the secrets of divining water from underground Cyprus.

Here too are the stories of Colonel Qaddafis Great Manmade River, pumping the worlds greatest reservoir of freshwater from beneath the Sahara; of the worlds third tallest dam, which any day could be ripped apart by either an earthquake or a civil war; of the river that flows backward to feed 10 million people; of the extraordinary ancient water tunnels beneath Iran that could stretch to the moon three times over; of the British-built irrigation project that is 60 miles from the nearest water. And here is the secret truth of the worlds biggest ever water-poisoning scandal.

I hope to answer some pressing questions. Can we fill the worlds faucets without emptying its rivers? Do we need megaprojects to empty the Great Lakes into the American West, the Congo River into the Sahara, or the torrents of Siberia into the deserts of Central Asia? Or should we think small, catching the rain from our roofs and irrigating crops with bicycle inner tubes or plastic sheaths bought from ice cream salesmen?

Nothing, perhaps not even climate change, will matter more to humanitys future on this planet over the next century than the fate of our rivers. Plenty of explorers have sought the source of the worlds great rivers. This is a journey to chart their deaths. But it is a hopeful journey nonetheless. I am an optimist. Water, after all, is the ultimate renewable resource.

For Joe, another river
who died before his time

Few of us realize how much water it takes to get us through the day. On average, we drink no more than a gallon and a half of the stuff. Including water for washing and for flushing the toilet, we use only about 40 gallons each. In some countries suburban lawn sprinklers, swimming pools, and sundry outdoor uses can double that figure. Typical per capita water use in suburban Australia is about 90 gallons, and in the United States around 100 gallons. There are exceptions, though. One suburban household in Orange County, Florida, was billed for 4.1 million gallons in a single year, or more than 10,400 gallons a day. Nobody knows how they got through that much.

We can all save water in the home. But as laudable as it is to take a shower rather than a bath and turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth, we shouldnt get hold of the idea that regular domestic water use is what is really emptying the worlds rivers. Manufacturing the goods that we fill our homes with consumes a certain amount, but thats not the real story either. It is only when we add in the water needed to grow what we eat and drink that the numbers really begin to soar.