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A review by ryandandrews
Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti
3.0
This book is DENSE. In some good ways and some not-so-good ways. It was a bit more detail than I was looking for around the history of civilizations and water.
Here are a few of my favorite clips:
Sedentary agriculture changed human society. Most natural ecosystems do not maximize digestible calories for humans, but farming can.
Salinization is a process by which the magnesium, calcium, and sodium found in water accumulate in soil, binding with clay and making the soil impermeable. In those conditions, plants struggle to germinate, and roots fail to absorb nutrients.
The Mississippi is a gigantic river basin, covering 40% of the modern continental U.S. Its drainage is almost 3 million square kilometers, comparable to the size of India. Only the Amazon and Congo river basins are bigger. One of the consequences of such a wide, dendritic system is that the river intercepts many climates, from winter rains, to snowmelt, to summer rains, all happening in different parts of the basin. As a result the flow in the lower river can be highly variable. Peak floods can carry thirty times the water of low flow.
The flood of 1927 was the worst in American history. In the end, it inundated 7 million hectares of land, killed about 500 people, and left seven hundred thousand homeless. Its damages were equivalent to a third of that year's U.S. federal budget.
Mussolini turned to the impoverished south, where there was no organized labor, and he could rely on the landowners to control the rural population. Exploitation of farm laborers reached depths of inhumanity seldom witnessed in twentieth-century Europe.
In the early thirties, a severe drought hit the Great Plains right as grain price collapsed in the wake of the Depression. It was bad timing. The Dust Bowl had started. Overextended farmers went bankrupt. Land was abandoned at the same speed at which it had been developed. As farmers left their properties, the exposed topsoil baked and pulverized in the drought. The winds of the Great Plains then lifted up the dust into huge black blizzards, big enough to block the sun, worsening drought conditions further. When cold air from Canada and warm air from the Dakotas swirled over the plains igniting storms, the atmosphere became a huge planetary vacuum cleaner, sucking up into the sky hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt in squalls hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet tall.
In 1930, only 10% of farms had access to electricity.
[In regard to Mao and China] ---> The commitment to water projects was so substantial that it become the primary drain of labor from the farms. Between 1958 and 1959 an estimated hundred million peasants were assigned to dig canals and other irrigation projects. The drain of labor from the field meant that when harvest came there was no one to collect it and it remained to rot. By early 1958 one in six people were digging to transform the landscape of the nation. Six hundred million cubic meters of rocks and soil were moved during that year. The human cost of these efforts was enormous. One estimated suggested that for every fifty thousand hectares under irrigation, a hundred lives were lost.
During the 20th century, inspired by the success of the model republic of the modern age, most rich societies replumbed the planet to insulate their citizens from the impact of the planet's climate and give their economies a comparative advantage. To do so, they harness the power of water while allowing everyone to live their lives at the sole beat of industrialization. For all intents and purposes, in wealthy countries at least, the climate system had mostly disappeared from people's lives. Never before had water always been available, when and where needed, and always of a quality fit for its purpose. Never before had people been able to move around the landscape unimpeded, going about their technology-laden day, streams paved over, rivers contained, and all floods avoided. But while technology has changed people's relationship to climate, the thousands of years of layered institutions, which have defined the relationship between society and water over time, continue to play the dominant role in shaping the outcomes.
The deepest tension: That of a sedentary society trying to live together while negotiating a world of moving water.
The story of water is principally a story of political institutions.
Here are a few of my favorite clips:
Sedentary agriculture changed human society. Most natural ecosystems do not maximize digestible calories for humans, but farming can.
Salinization is a process by which the magnesium, calcium, and sodium found in water accumulate in soil, binding with clay and making the soil impermeable. In those conditions, plants struggle to germinate, and roots fail to absorb nutrients.
The Mississippi is a gigantic river basin, covering 40% of the modern continental U.S. Its drainage is almost 3 million square kilometers, comparable to the size of India. Only the Amazon and Congo river basins are bigger. One of the consequences of such a wide, dendritic system is that the river intercepts many climates, from winter rains, to snowmelt, to summer rains, all happening in different parts of the basin. As a result the flow in the lower river can be highly variable. Peak floods can carry thirty times the water of low flow.
The flood of 1927 was the worst in American history. In the end, it inundated 7 million hectares of land, killed about 500 people, and left seven hundred thousand homeless. Its damages were equivalent to a third of that year's U.S. federal budget.
Mussolini turned to the impoverished south, where there was no organized labor, and he could rely on the landowners to control the rural population. Exploitation of farm laborers reached depths of inhumanity seldom witnessed in twentieth-century Europe.
In the early thirties, a severe drought hit the Great Plains right as grain price collapsed in the wake of the Depression. It was bad timing. The Dust Bowl had started. Overextended farmers went bankrupt. Land was abandoned at the same speed at which it had been developed. As farmers left their properties, the exposed topsoil baked and pulverized in the drought. The winds of the Great Plains then lifted up the dust into huge black blizzards, big enough to block the sun, worsening drought conditions further. When cold air from Canada and warm air from the Dakotas swirled over the plains igniting storms, the atmosphere became a huge planetary vacuum cleaner, sucking up into the sky hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt in squalls hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet tall.
In 1930, only 10% of farms had access to electricity.
[In regard to Mao and China] ---> The commitment to water projects was so substantial that it become the primary drain of labor from the farms. Between 1958 and 1959 an estimated hundred million peasants were assigned to dig canals and other irrigation projects. The drain of labor from the field meant that when harvest came there was no one to collect it and it remained to rot. By early 1958 one in six people were digging to transform the landscape of the nation. Six hundred million cubic meters of rocks and soil were moved during that year. The human cost of these efforts was enormous. One estimated suggested that for every fifty thousand hectares under irrigation, a hundred lives were lost.
During the 20th century, inspired by the success of the model republic of the modern age, most rich societies replumbed the planet to insulate their citizens from the impact of the planet's climate and give their economies a comparative advantage. To do so, they harness the power of water while allowing everyone to live their lives at the sole beat of industrialization. For all intents and purposes, in wealthy countries at least, the climate system had mostly disappeared from people's lives. Never before had water always been available, when and where needed, and always of a quality fit for its purpose. Never before had people been able to move around the landscape unimpeded, going about their technology-laden day, streams paved over, rivers contained, and all floods avoided. But while technology has changed people's relationship to climate, the thousands of years of layered institutions, which have defined the relationship between society and water over time, continue to play the dominant role in shaping the outcomes.
The deepest tension: That of a sedentary society trying to live together while negotiating a world of moving water.
The story of water is principally a story of political institutions.