Peak Water E-Book

Alexander Bell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Civilisation is thirsty... it never stopped to think what would happen if the water ran out. ALEXANDER BELL Peak water is the point when the available water is not enough to meet the demands of the world's growing population. We might live on a watery world, but we are exhausting accessible supplies. Many parts of the world are already facing this crisis, and not only in the developing world. Some of the places experiencing 'peak water' are in the USA, Europe and the UK. Even the wettest lands will be engulfed in the global catastrophe that looms. This is the issue of our age. REVIEWS: What makes Peak Water interesting is the way it weaves such laconic personal predictions with a wealth of history, anecdote and analysis, all focussing on the vital role of water in the rise and fall of civilisations... [Bell's] aim is to provoke thought, to stir discussion amongst lay observers - and in that he certainly succeeds. SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS How we built civilization on water and drained the world dry is the subject of Alexander Bell's recent book, Peak Water. Bell delves deeply into the roots of modern civilisation, beginning just before the settlement of the first cities… There have been many books in recent years recounting the trouble we are in when it comes to water, but few that examine how we arrived at this point. Bell does just that… THE ECOLOGIST. BACK COVER: This tale flows from the moment a ditch was dug in old Iraq, to the way our modern cities work. It links the hanging gardens of Babylon to the first water supply for Los Angeles, the ancient myth of the Nile to swimming pools in the desert. Our world has been built around the control of water. We are fed by irrigated fields, live in plumbed cities, and turn on a tap without a moment's thought. Yet experts now believe that the next major war may be fought over water, and it will have life-altering consequences for every part of the world, wet or dry. Writer Alexander Bell discusses the way our civilisation moved from hunter gathering to the urban one we know today, and the influence that water had on this journey. He shows how water control flows through politics, religion, farming and the idea of the modern state. Yet history is littered with empires that have failed and vanished into dust, and Bell argues that we might face a similar fate unless we learn to manage our water better.

Leseprobe

ALEXANDER BELL is Head of Policy to the Government of Scotland and responsible for the world’s first national integrated water policy. Previously he has worked as a journalist for the BBC andThe Observer.

Follow him on Twitter at@mrpeakwater.

Peak Water

How We Built Civilisation on Water and Drained the World Dry

ALEXANDER BELL

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published2009

New edition2012

eBook 2012

ISBN (Print): 978-1-906817-71-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-21-2

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Alexander Bell 2009

Table of Contents

Introduction

I – THE FIRST TASTE

Chapter One – Where’s the Water?

Chapter Two – The Font of Civilisation

Chapter Three – Civilisations Bloomed from Water

Chapter Four – Egypt

Chapter Five – Athens and Rome

Chapter Six – God, Paradise and Gardens

II – THE GROWING THIRST

Chapter Seven – God’s Dry Land

Chapter Eight – Fountains of Rome

Chapter Nine – Taming the Rhine

Chapter Ten – Health

Chapter Eleven – Coal And Cotton

Chapter Twelve – Dams and Politics

Chapter Thirteen – America

III – PEAK WATER

Chapter Fourteen – Collapse

Chapter Fifteen – Luxury

Chapter Sixteen – Cities

Chapter Seventeen – Irrigation

Chapter Eighteen – Farming

Chapter Nineteen – Trade

Chapter Twenty – War

Chapter Twenty-One – Dubai

End Notes

Introduction

CHILDREN ARE PLAYING on the beach ahead, digging castles in the sand and cutting channels of water. At the café, I look out to the sea slipping into the horizon. The day is warm enough, a mix of sun, wind and occasional rain typical of a Scottish spring. I feel good – in the beautiful city of Edinburgh, on the beach, breakfast on the table and happy people enjoying the break of winter. This is civilisation at its easiest.

The children are doing what we all did as youngsters – playing with water. We have all stood on the beach and marvelled, both at the scale of the sea and the patterns of the streams that flow across the sand. The water dwarves us, putting us in our place in the scheme of the universe, while also tempting us in, to divert its currents and immerse ourselves in the waves.

On the table is a glass of orange juice, a coffee and a bacon sandwich, along with my laptop. If this is all sounding a little too life-style perfect, forgive me – there is a point. Between the beach and the breakfast table is most of what you need to know about the water crisis. There is a plenty of water in the world – we are a ball of blue in the infinite expanse of dark space – but 97 per cent of it is seawater. Of the remaining three per cent, much of which is inaccessible in ice caps and remote locations, we are making ever greater demands.

The chair I sit on required water to be made. Roughly 20 per cent of the water we use is consumed by industry, making things like furniture, clothes and the laptop computer. Stuff is quite thirsty – but not as thirsty as agriculture, which consumes around 70 per cent of all the freshwater mankind uses. The orange in the glass, the wheat for the bread, the milk for the coffee all require large amounts of water to be grown, while the bacon and all meat production needs huge amounts of water. Life in the developed world – lots of stuff and a steady supply of food – means we need lots of water. Civilisation, and by that I mean the process of change that has taken us from the camp fire to the city, is thirsty.

The crisis we are facing is because there are lots more people on the planet who want to have more stuff and to eat better food but who do not live near water supplies. If you live in Scotland and are happy to eat locally grown food and stuff that is manufactured in your neighbourhood, then there is no problem. You have lots of water for all your needs. If you live in large stretches of western USA, Mexico, the Middle East, parts of China or around the Mediterranean then you are quite likely living beyond your water means – and that causes the crisis.

The problem is that the water is not where the people are – Canada is soaking, but is home to only 35 million people. India has around one billion people and is running short. Beijing, capital of the world’s boom nation China, is sinking into the ground because so much water has been pumped up from the land it sits on. The world is currently looking to Africa for its food but the water table in much of eastern sub-Saharan Africa is dropping as the developed world drinks parts of the continent dry.

The United Nations thinks that the global population will rise from around 6.5 billion today to around nine billion in 2050. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO) estimate that to feed the extra people, we will need to increase food production by 70 per cent. To do that will require twice the amount of water used in agriculture than at present. However, scientists such as those in the Boundary Group believe we are already taking around two thirds of the available water. And that is our problem – more people may well need more accessible water than exists. Civilisation could run dry.

This book explains that ordered life began at the point when mankind began to get the water to follow his wishes. The irrigation ditch is the true cradle of civilisation. The more civilised we became, the more water we needed. The connection between the two – between water control and civilisation, was obvious to a Mesopotamian or a Roman, who celebrated their mastery of H2O in fountains and gardens. Modernity does a good job of hiding our vital dependence on water – the pipes are tucked away out of sight. Peakwater attempts to make them visible again.

The idea of ‘water wars’ is a popular idea suggesting we may yet fight for the blue stuff much as wars have been fought for land and oil. There will be battles for rivers and wells, but the real battle will not be with guns. It is a battle for the future of civilisation – a battle for the way mankind lives on the planet. Our existing system depends on water following our whims. Peakwater asks what civilisation will look like when we are the ones who have to follow the water again.

This book is a flow across history to reveal a hidden story of our most important resource – a tale for the general reader about the essence of life.

It is dedicated to Murdo and Eilidh, the beginning of promise, and to Mo, my love.

I – THE FIRST TASTE

WATER IS A RENEWABLE RESOURCE, yet it is running out. How do we explain that puzzle? The answer lies in the way mankind has developed over the last 6,000 years. We invented and expanded civilisation, which has given us many wonderful things and allowed the population to dramatically increase. When lots of people want to enjoy a civilised lifestyle, they drain water reserves. By repeating habits begun millennia ago, we empty the wells that have made our cities and nations great. To understand this, we need to float down the river of history and watch as man learns to tap the essence of all life.

Chapter One – Where’s the Water?

LEONARDO DA VINCI would have marveled at the news channels in 2012. In the spring of that year England was suffering from a drought. TV screens were busy with experts talking of a crisis as taps were turned off and farmers worried for their crops. By the summer, England experienced some of the highest rain fall on record which resulted in floods across the country. There is something particularly telegenic about water, and the TV news ran a torrent of footage showing fields covered in water and desperate home-owners mopping up sodden possessions.

There seems something inconsistent here. Leonardo da Vinci thought the same thing 500 years ago. One of the many areas the renaissance genius studied was water. The river Arno, which runs through Florence, fascinated him. He wondered where the water came from to keep the current flowing. His notes on this laid the foundations for some modern water studies. Leonardo was worried about the biblical flood. He couldn’t square the sudden appearance, and disappearance, of a vast amount of water, as described in scripture, with what he knew about the real substance. Where did it all go? How did it flow away, if there was no current? Yet the idea of a deluge fascinated him. He drew images of what it might look like, capturing the sense of chaotic power that a huge body of water has. As such, Leonardo identified a vital quality of water. It can be measured, and follows predictable patterns, but it is also wild.

We are familiar with the idea that water may be ‘running out’ in some way, but the floods suggest this is not true. The evidence in the north of Europe for the world’s water crisis seems to come and go like the tide. Is there a problem or isn’t there one?

Drought and flood are twin terrors which seem to be occurring more often across the planet. When there is a lack of water, people tend to blame global warming and talk of possible water wars. Floods invoke similar fears, of nature that seems out of control and the threat to civilisation. The drought feeds worries that water is running out; the flood that there is too much water. They seem to be contradictory.

The real contradiction, or puzzle, is why the modern world ever thought droughts and floods had gone away. We are as susceptible now, in broad terms, as we ever were to these twin terrors. Somehow we forgot that water was its own master, and imagined it had become our servant. As Leonardo Da Vinci pointed out, in its order is wildness.

Peakwateris about man’s relation to water. How it has shaped our civilisation, religions, culture and commerce. It is also about how we have built a world which depends on the water following the whims of man. Our future may depend on humankind learning to follow the water again.

This book will range across history and geography. The first leap is from the dewy fields of England to the desert.

It is 46 degrees. The air shimmers over sand dunes. Sun and dust are in your eyes, making the horizon a blurred line. Shapes seem to appear ahead. The vague forms look like huge buildings. Is this a mirage? Vast towers linger in the dust. Closer still and doubt passes. These are real. There is a city ahead, and it has been built on a fantastic scale. This is Dubai, a metropolis that jags out of the desert like a shaft of stone. It is the most astonishing new city in the world.

Astonishing it may be, but Dubai prompts a simple question – why build a city in the desert?

Deserts are hot and dry. Heat is something our culture has come to love – those in the colder north are left in no doubt that ‘paradise’ is hot sand and suncream. Drought is something we abhor. A shortage of water is an obvious and fundamental threat to our comfort and life. So why attract lots of people to a place that clearly has little water?

Of course we tend not to ask such questions. Cities seem an essential building block for progress and civilisation. When you are rich – and Dubai’s wealth comes from the oil beneath the sand – you build tall buildings and ribbons of asphalt. Dubai’s bold straining for the sky seems to be shouting how much better it is than the peaks of Manhattan, or the freeways of Los Angeles. As those cities wanted to be better than London or Paris, as ancient Rome wanted to be better than Egypt, Dubai is merely the latest urban wonder.

We know how important oil is to the global economy, how it can transform a nation within a few decades from a very poor place to one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. We know about capitalism and globalization and do not need to be economists to understand that oil equals success. Thus Dubai seems self-explanatory. It’s a monument to wealth.

Yet in the blazing heat of the desert, money and the inventions of man evaporate from your mind. It reverts to survival mode. Water is the priority. This is the story of why civilisation thought the broiling sun and bone-dry earth was no obstacle to urban life. It is about how civilisation became so successful at controlling fresh water it never stopped to think what would happen if the water ran out.

It is also about our resources. Oil lubricates modern life and it may be running out. This is expressed as ‘peak oil’, which means the point at which global supplies can only diminish. I once spent an afternoon with an oil economist for an international bank. He had been told off for talking down ‘peak oil’. Peak oil is good for business, as it boosts prices. The economist explained that estimates of reserves were unreliable, the statistics used to calculate peak oil were flawed, and anyway mankind was gifted at finding more of the stuff.

The economist would scoff at the idea of peak water. There is plenty of it. Not only that, it is renewable and inexhaustible. No matter how we use water, it will be recycled back to the sea, up to the clouds, and fall as rain again some day. But this isn’t an exercise in numbers: this is about life. Peak oil isn’t just about cold statistics, much as that may horrify the economist. It’s a way of focusing minds on the future, when the gas station will be empty. And ‘peak water’ is not about global supplies, but the fact that civilisation depends on wells that are empty and rivers that have run dry.

Dubai has the highest water consumption per capita in the world. The heat plays a part certainly, but equally important is that civilisation is thirsty. It sucks up water for construction, agriculture and industry. It gulps in the name of luxury and cleanliness. Civilisation is wet. For man to build such monuments, to travel the amazing path of civilisation, he had to keep inventing new ways of getting fresh water, and it is the legacy of this thirst that means we are reaching peak water.

Some of the crisis is caused by global warming, but not all. If the climate didn’t change one jot within the next millennia, our civilisation would still have to adapt, because we have created a civilisation based on water usage that is not sustainable.

Of the three and half million years that humans have existed, we have been civilised for only 6,000, of which only the last 200 years have provided anything close to what we now consider to be normal. The idea of civilisation as a default position is fiction. We live at the peak of human ingenuity, but it is a fragile state. All that we have can go in a frighteningly short period of time.

When Kenneth Clarke wrote a TV series and book entitledCivilisation, he admitted he ‘…had no clear idea what it (civilisation) meant, but I thought it was preferable to barbarism’. That’s the point of civilisation to some – it’s where man would rather be. It is a dualistic set-up; if we are not civilised, we must be barbarians.

Clarke went on to write; ‘Writers and politicians may come out with all sorts of edifying sentiments, but they are what is known as declarations of intent’. I should be careful of my own self-serving declaration on civilisation. That said, it is important to pin down the idea.

To the ideas of the city and justice, it’s reasonable to attach notions of cleanliness, science, medicine, and social stability. Couple all this to the ideas of progress and betterment, of improvement, and you have civilisation.

We know Dubai is civilised, even if it isn’t quite to our taste. To some, man has propelled himself into civilisation, incapable of moderating the process. It is tempting to think of civilisation as an end, rather than a means, of human existence. But that would be wrong. There is no primary law that drives people towards civilisation as a mode of living. Civilisation is a very impressive demonstration of human ingenuity applied to the problems of fulfilling human requirements, but it is neither fixed nor permanent.

I don’t assume that ‘civilisation’ is better than other social systems and accept that it comes freighted with ambiguity. What matters in this context is that a new way of organising ourselves occurred in Mesopotamia around 4,000 BC, and we still rely on this innovation. More of us live in urban areas now than in the countryside. We huddle together in apartment blocks, swarm towards school buildings and offices, gather food on supermarket shelves, and seek happiness in the dark corners or the sunlit parks. However, for the sake of argument, let us destroy all that.

Rip up Dubai, break it down to its core parts. Beneath the stone and tarmac are wires and pipes – a knot of services that make city life possible. If you were to rip out all the telecoms cables, you’d end up with billions of miles of copper string and fibre optic and a world that could no longer talk via machines. The phones would go down and the computers would stop scattering bytes of trivia to one another. The great technological leap of the digital age would come to an end. There would be a huge price to pay for this, in the loss of services that relied on computers, but civilisation would adapt.

Strip out the electricity cables, and the city would go dark, its hum and buzz run down to an unpleasant silence. Machines would shut off, air-con would stop and the signals that keep the city functioning would go black. But civilisation would adapt.

Tear up the underground tanks which store petrol for the street level pumps and there would be chaos. The city depends on a constant stream of food being trucked in, and on the economic output of car-driving workers. Also, carbon fuel occupies a special place in the heart of modern citizens – a kind of liquid nutrient that feeds a sense of identity and independence. Anyway – rip it up, and civilisation would adapt. The gas pipes, feeding the boilers and kitchen rings, would be missed no doubt, and the resulting return to open fires would be risky in a modern city, but civilisation would cope.

What would bring the city down are the remaining pipes and tunnels. The oldest hidden infrastructure of any city is the drinking water and the sewage system. Water is the first service to be provided to the citizens, and for good reason. Without it, you have no city. And for significant tracts of the globe, you would have no farming either, if the irrigation ditches were trashed.

On this simple provision civilisation was born and grew; allowing mankind to grow from a wandering, vulnerable hunter-gatherer to a clean, healthy, city-living creature functioning in a complex society. This is the age of water.

The amount of water on the planet is fixed. To get a sense of how much fresh water is available to humans, imagine you have a full bucket. This is all the water on the planet. You cup your hands and scoop out a tiny fraction of the water, which now sits in your reservoir of flesh. That is all the fresh water on the planet.

The vast majority of blue gold is salty; 97 per cent is undrinkable. With your hands full, you have the three per cent that is fresh. You hold life and civilisation. To have an idea of how much water is available to humans, you must open your hands and let the water fall. The dampness left, the glistening traces of water in the crease of your skin, that is, very roughly, the fresh water accessible to humans. Most of the fresh water is locked in the ice caps at the poles, or is in inaccessible aquifers underground. It is estimated that of all Earth’s water, you and I have a reasonable shot of reaching less than one per cent of it. On reading this sequence, it’s like learning you won the lottery, but gradually discovering that everyone called the same numbers, and your sweepstake is worth pennies. It may be small in the scheme of things, but it should be enough.

Accessible water is the stuff captured in rainfall. This is a part of the water cycle, the process whereby water evaporates off the sea’s surface and from lakes, rises into the atmosphere to form clouds, and then falls as rain. It’s estimated that 30 trillion gallons of fresh water falls every day. The vast majority returns to the sea before we’ve had a chance to get to it; so it’s reckoned that roughly a third is available to us, of which floods and inaccessible rivers deny us even more. The punch line is that around 12,500 cubic km per year are yours and mine – the traces of water caught in the creases of your palm.

Distillers call whisky that evaporates during storage the angels’ share. It may not be scientifically precise, but in essence we have access to the angels’ share of water that wafts off the planet’s vast reserves. And it should be enough to slake our thirst, wash our skin and grow our food. In fact, we are probably only using about half of it right now. Statistically, we are good for water.

Water consumption shot up with modernity. The need for more food to feed more people, who needed more commodities, contributed to a major increase in water use. The informed guess is that we used 110 cubic km of water in 1700 AD. Three hundred years later, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are using around 5,000 cubic km. That sounds alarming, but use of water in the developed West is steadily declining. Our washing machines use less, the production of commodities such as steel or cars uses less and irrigation farmers are learning to spread the water better. In the USA, water use per capita peaked in 1980, and had dropped by a tenth by 1995. So, while contemporary civilisation has found a multitude of new ways of using water, and uses far in excess of what any previous civilisation has used, it has also learnt to curb this consumption. However, civilisation is an aspirational brand. Thus two billion Chinese and Indians are struggling to catch-up with western living standards. This is part of the bad news. Current estimates suggest that the world may begin to use 100 per cent of the available run off by 2035. The UN reckons we will suffer serious water shortages from 2020 onwards. So how do we tally an apparent excess of fresh water, and current usage running at around 50 per cent, coupled to a reduction in water consumption in the developed world, with water shortages? Much as Leonardo da Vinci puzzled over the biblical flood, so the modern water crisis seems to make little sense. When environmentalists shout that water is running out, hydrologists and scientists yell back that it isn’t. Factually, the scientists are right. If you want to know that water shortages will never be an issue in your life (not allowing for the wild card of climate change) then move to Siberia. On the shores of Lake Baikal you will witness the largest body of fresh water in the world. The trouble with Lake Baikal, and with Siberia, is that the world doesn’t live there. There is plenty of water, but not in the same place as the people. That is the world’s water problem.

An important part of the problem is the method by which water reserves are assessed. Water control played its part in the creation of the nation state, as we shall see, but national boundaries are an awful way of measuring water resources, as if a line of ink on a map has any relevance to a river. Statistically, Australia is in the lucky group of nations with plentiful supplies of water. The United Kingdom has insufficient water. Better off than the UK is the USA, with relatively sufficient supplies. Go tell the people on the banks of the Murray River in Southern Australia that they are the lucky ones. A decade-long drought reduced the river to a trickle for the first decade of the 21st century. Look at the patterns of human habitation in Australia and you can tell it is not water rich. There a few big cities and long stretches of nothing in between. The statistics show the nation to be water rich because of the tropical forest in the north.

The black umbrella is an icon of London. We rightly associate the UK with rain – in many parts it rains a lot. Break the UK into its constituent nations, and Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales don’t lack for water. Split England into regions, and most of them are sodden. The statistical blip putting the UK into the insufficient category is the concentration of the population in the south east of the country. The people have gathered where the water isn’t. The UK has a water problem, but most of the people in the UK do not. They are much better off than their cousins in the populous parts of Australia, despite what the numbers show. As for the USA, providing one statistical verdict on its water supplies is meaningless. The water demands of New York, Florida, New Orleans and Las Vegas couldn’t be more different. In broad terms, the west of the nation has a major water shortage, while the east is okay. Of course, one could say the same of oil reserves. The oil in the USA is to the west and north, the reserves in the east having been pumped dry. The oil in the UK is in Scotland, England never having had any to speak of. Yet the economy in both is oil-based, and successful. But water isn’t oil. You can pump up the black stuff and put it into tankers and ship it anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t work with water. Moving water is the Faustian pact that man always regrets. It becomes a burdensome task that ultimately ruins environments, destroys productive land, wastes fantastic amounts of resources, and leads to the destruction of nations and empires. Taking water from wet areas to arid zones is like pumping more fuel onto a burning oil well – pointless and wasteful. That is the trouble with water, and that is the world’s trouble. For the Canadians, the north Europeans, and the Russians, for the northern Brazilians and the war-battered lands of the Congo in Central Africa there is no problem. There is plenty of water. However, the increase in global population isn’t predicted for Brazil or Canada. The rise to a population of just under nine billion people by 2050 is forecast to occur in China, India, Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Thus our problem is not simply a mismatch between people and water reserves, but between population expansion and water.

As it is, the great rivers of the world are already running dry. The Colorado doesn’t make it to the Pacific Ocean for half the year, its delta is eroding and the seawater encroaching on what was once a delirious torrent. The rivers that made China, the Yellow and Yangtze, also fail to reach the sea for stretches of the year. For those reading in wet countries, imagine the Thames reduced to a muddy ditch outside the Palace of Westminster, or the Rhine petering out somewhere in northern France, so that children can cross the bed without fear. That’s what happens to the Nile and the Ganges. The iconic rivers of our imagination, the primal flow of mankind, of civilisation, of progress and the binding myths of our existence, are drying up. The rivers are the visible, potent, symbols of our deluded belief in water control. With them come wetlands, flood plains, natural irrigation and the steady, if slow, replenishment of underground water reserves. In the dry riverbed, in the cracked soil, see the withering of all our various water supplies. The consequence is already there to be felt. ‘All peoples, whatever their stage of social development and their social and economic conditions, have the right to have access to drinking water in quantities and of a quality equal to their basic needs’. That was the goal of the first United Nations water resources conference, held in Mar Del Plata in 1977. Wrapping water in the language of rights may have comforted the delegates, and may still seem a good thing to do, but it has only gone so far in letting people drink. By 2050, around half of the world will live in nations which are short of water. Allowing for the regional variation in water supply within these nations, water deprivation will affect billions of us. As it is, 65 per cent of the world’s water reserves are in just 10 nations. Again, the Canadians and the Brazilians, through no ingenuity but the luck of geography, are water rich while the booming populations of the Middle East and Asia are dry. One fifth of the population occupy land supplying two per cent of the globe’s water. There is another problem. For civilisation to bloom, it had to tap underground water. Wells seem a benign, ancient way of getting water. Yet the bucket on the rope, or the pump sucking deep in the earth, may be as dangerous to the environment as the oil well. When we extract oil from the ground, we expect it to run out eventually. The same happens to water. Underground water reservoirs are called aquifers. They form when rainwater seeps through the soil and collects in rocky chambers. Rain has been falling for billions of years and these subterranean reserves can be huge. However, if the bucket is big enough, or the pump strong enough, the rate at which man takes water out will outpace the rate at which nature replaces it. Many areas of human population are dependent on underground water. The rivers of the Middle East, the western USA or India are incapable of providing enough water for the scale of human development that exists in these regions. The cities and farms of these places grew up because water was pumped up from wells. That water is running out. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reckons a third of the Earth’s population lack the necessary quantities of water to survive, which is said to be 100 to 200 litres a day, when all agriculture, industry and domestic uses are accounted for. WHO says half the world already suffers from poor to no sanitation, while a quarter of us have no clean water at all, contributing to one third of all fatalities in developing nations, with 80 per cent of all disease in these parts water-borne. Our inability to truly control fresh water for all is the single largest threat to the health, happiness and longevity of many. We have failed, and are set to do a lot worse. The statistics may give us 12,500 cubic kilometres of water, but it is more useful to think in terms of population density and local reserves. Peak water occurs when water is extracted at a faster rate than it can be replenished: that may happen to a village or a city, a valley or a nation. We are on the brink of it occurring in several large regions and it will affect everyone on the planet. Water is running out in places where millions of us live and people will suffer from thirst, famine, disease and ruined economies. Worse will come as peak water will not be measured in abstract numbers but in the register of births and deaths. What follows is the story of how we got into this situation. It is a long tale, stretching back to before civilisation and covering some of mankind’s greatest achievements. To understand why there is a modern water crisis, it is necessary to understand that our chosen form of survival, civilisation, is built on water.

Chapter Two – The Font of Civilisation

‘THE HAND OF THE LORD came upon him. And Elisha said: make this valley full of ditches. Ye shall not see wind; neither shall ye see rain, yet that valley shall be filled with water.’ This is how the Bible describes the founding of the world’s first city, Jericho. It all sounds very impressive but poses a problem. The ditches must be water channels, yet there is no evidence of irrigation around the site of the ancient city. So why does the Bible describe God bestowing irrigation on the people, when there was none? The authors of the Book of Kings, writing over 8,000 years after Jericho had fallen to dust, equated success, and urban living, with controlled water. But why?

To explain how the age of water began, we need to go back to the ice. For long periods of time, Earth is very cold for humans. This is because of our orbit around the Sun; we travel in an ellipse, the shape of a gently squashed hula hoop. Various factors mean the journey is never quite the same, and that affects the temperature of the planet. Roughly, these factors combine to give us a cycle of around 100,000 years of warmth, and 100,000 of cold, or Ice Ages. We stand on a rock that weaves through space like a drunk man, dipping and wobbling, while staying fixed on the path home. Never before, and never again, will things be as they are now, when the planet is, in human terms, at its most agreeable for billions of years.

We have been walking upright on this planet for 3.6 million years. Some historians claim we made stone tools as long ago as 2.5 million years. Others put it at less, around 1.9 million years. We discovered fire around 250,000 years ago. Our ancestors, Homo Erectus, survived for around two million years in this cycle of cold and warm, with little technology to help.

Something happened in the last Ice Age to change history forever. Mankind became clever. Around 50,000 years ago, our brains got bigger. Homo Sapiens arrived, a smarter version of Homo Erectus: the brain capable of understanding an iPod or a sonnet arrived. People like you and me, with our curious minds and agile bodies, were here.1

It seems an infinitely melancholy thing, that we should have had the capacity to wonder at the stars when we led such a brutal existence. We are the descendants of those who survived and bred 50,000 years ago. If we take a conservative view of man’s development, we have been civilised for 0.01 per cent of our time as a two-legged beast, and for only about 10 per cent of our time as a clever animal. If we were intellectually ready for the modern world 50,000 years ago, why did it take over 40,000 years to start making it?

The last Ice Age began to thaw around 20,000 years ago. Don’t think in terms of a sudden warming; it took around 8,000 years before Earth was close to today’s temperature, and even then cold snaps still occur. Before that, our ancestors survived in hostile conditions. They hunted for food and sheltered from the cold. Life was about survival.

Mankind’s big break comes when things get warm. In other words, upright and sentient man gets lucky. A smart brain hits a good climate. It may constitute a fraction of the time we have been here, but the last 10,000 years are our rich time; we evolved and nature became more pliable to our imaginative brains. Had the climate stayed cold, we might have stayed tribal and uncivilised. Civilisation may just be our chosen way of coping with current circumstances.

We can chart the slow journey to civilisation from archaeological sites. Around 25,000 BC, humans were staring at the cave walls of Pech Merle in France and imagining the hunt of the day before, or the day to come. On the stone surface are pictures of bison and deer. Men with spears and stone arrowheads would hunt and kill them. That they had time, and safety, to portray this suggests times were good. We can conjure in our mind’s eye the wall, images dancing in the flickering light of an animal fat-burning lamp, the people smiling at their achievement.

Around 20,000 BC in the warmer climate of what is now Israel, people lived in dwellings made of wood and collected grass seed, the forerunners of wheat and barley, in baskets. Five thousand years later, flint-based tools were in use.

Move forward again in time, about 2,000 years, and the grass seeds are semi-domesticated, and animal husbandry has started. With fire and farming, man edges ever closer to the brink of urban organisation. One archaeologist has called this ‘the point of no-turning-back’.2

A shock dip in global temperature and a drought, known as the Younger Dryas period, brought a stop to these early experiments in settled living, but by 9,600 BC, global temperatures rise again, by seven degrees centigrade in a few years. This allows farming to return and become widespread. This isn’t just happening in the Middle East. In the Far East, Central America and Andean South America crops are domesticated around this time. What does happen in the land to the east of the Mediterranean is the emergence of the large settlement.

Jericho was a dense pile of buildings all contained in a small space. To the modern eye it would look like a single small city block constructed without planning. This was mankind’s first city. Two thousand years later, in 6,000 BC, in what is modern Turkey, Catal Huyk would be the largest settlement to date. Both relied on local springs for their water, and so were limited in size. Jericho was a mere four acres, while Catal Huyk was only one twentieth of a square mile.

As noted, neither had irrigation. They didn’t need to control water in order to grow food. It would seem that this lack of ditches, despite what the Bible says, is what stopped either becoming the birth place of mankind’s greatest invention. Civilisation starts in a ditch. It is the muddy channel that marks the great leap from the proto-cities of Jericho and Catal Huyk to the birth of civilisation. This occurs further south, in what is modern day southern Iraq.

The land south of Baghdad doesn’t look like a valley filled with water. Criss-crossed by tank tracks, oil seems to be the business of this disputed land. The mighty rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris run nearby, but the desert floor is hot and dry. Yet this is where the ancient cities of Ur and Uruk and Lagash and Eridu bloomed. This is where the fantastic experiment in social order and human achievement called civilisation began.

This place is called Mesopotamia by archaeologists. The word means ‘between two rivers’. The people who lived here were the Sumerians. Six thousand years ago there was water across this land. The Tigris and Euphrates would flood, and water would bring life to the soil. It was good earth – it had been washed down from the mountains to the north over the previous millennia. The trouble was the flooding. When the snows of what is now modern Turkey melted, the rivers blasted water over everything, and then subsided, leaving a wet bog.