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To foster the illusion of a super capitalist paradise money has to be constantly on the move to create the billions and trillions that are more an indication of gross inflation than genuine prosperity.
But nothing comes without a price. The depletion of oil supplies, pollution and global warming are well known results but there is another more serious consequence, rarely mentioned, the depletion of water supplies worldwide.
Burac -the Bureau of Reclamation - is the US Government Agency that has built more large dams on more rivers than any other body anywhere in the world. It is interesting that Daniel Beard who recently retired as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation is now one of its loudest critics
In the second half of the twentieth century the World Bank spent an estimated $75 billion building large dams in 92 countries.
Fewer than half of all dams had an environmental appraisal before construction and even fewer had the consent of the people they displaced. Only since the turn of the century has consideration been given to the environmental, social and economic downside.
Modern water engineering began with Burac's Hoover Dam across the Boulder Canyon on the River Colorado in 1935. It was joined by the equally large Grand Coulee Dam on the River Columbia.
Most big river systems, including the twenty largest and the eight with the most biological diversity, the Amazon, Orinoco, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Zambezi, Amur, Yenisei and the Indus, have dams on them. Most of the surviving untamed rivers are in the Arctic tundra and northern boreal forests.
The old story of how rivers rose in mountains, gathered water from tributaries and finally disgorged their flows into the ocean is now fiction. Many rivers are dying as they go. The Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in China, the Indus in Pakistan, the Colorado and Rio Grande in the USA, all are reported to be trickling into the sand hundreds of miles from the sea.
In England the hills are being sucked dry, at least 40 out of about 160 chalk streams are under threat. The water companies, Wessex Water, Thames Water, the mid-Kent, etc., are capitalist undertakings, more interested in the return in pounds than caring what happens to the rivers or the water.
Water is not a static resource. It is constantly on the move through soils, geological formations, down rivers, into the ocean depths, freezing and melting, evaporating into the air and forming clouds to fall again as rain.
Aquifers should be the number one resource or so it seems. The volume of water down there is huge, dependable and ready to be pumped to the surface. But pumping out an aquifer empties it for ever unless it is being refilled, and wells dry up. In India farmers whose fathers lifted water from wells with a bucket now sink bore holes more than a kilometre into the rocks and still find no water.
By some perversity of nature many of the biggest aquifers are beneath deserts and get virtually no re-charge because there is no rain. The largest quantities sit in the pores of sandstone rocks beneath the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula or under the Australian outback and the arid high plains of the American west. Certainly it can be pumped out but probably only about one-tenth of one percent of the fresh water in the world's aquifers is replaced.
The three rivers with the biggest flows, the Amazon, the Congo and the Orinoco all pass through inhospitable jungle. These three alone carry almost a quarter of the water and two more of the top ten the Lena and the Yenesei in Siberia run mostly through arctic wastes.
In countries too, water can be inconveniently distributed. Most of India gets all its rain in 100 hours during 100 days.
The problem now is escalating shortages of water. Some 70% of all the water abstracted from rivers and underground reserves is being spread on the 270 million hectares of irrigated land that grows a third of the world's food. This massive global undertaking has kept the world's granaries full (and the capitalist tills clicking) but it has emptied the rivers.
In the 1960s and 1970s few people realised that the genetically engineered new crops were indeed very efficient at delivering more crops per hectare but very inefficient when measured against water use. The world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago but extracts three times more water from rivers and underground aquifers to do it.
Six countries have half of the world's total renewable fresh water supply on their territory Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia, China and Columbia. People in the driest countries have the greatest need to irrigate crops.
Israel drains the river Jordan into pipes before it reaches the country that bears its name. The Palestinian desert enclave, the Gaza strip, is the most water- starved political unit on earth with just 140 litres of brackish underground water a day for each inhabitant.
Israelis farm the Negev desert right up to the Gaza border. Seen from Gaza their greenhouses gleam in the sun, guzzling up water that should be growing Palestinian crops.
This is the coastal end of a desert drainage basin that begins in Palestinian territory on the West Bank south of Jerusalem then passes through the Negev desert in Israel and flows to the sea through Gaza where it replenishes the alquifer through a small coastal wetland. Or it did. The Israelis have built dams on the Wadi. These days little water ever reaches Gaza. Most of it is grabbed to irrigate Israeli fields and the wetland has turned into a sewage sump.
On the West bank there is an ancient tunnel that channels water from the hills above the village of Madama. The shaft and the tunnel is very old and the tunnel concentrates seeps from tiny springs in the hills and brings them to the village. Similar tunnels are to be found all across the West Bank. They are an ancient water-catching system . Many have dried p as water tables have fallen.
In the 1950s when the Palestinians lived under Jordanian tutelage the West Bank had ample water. Far more rain was falling and filling the aquifers than the Palestinians needed. But as the Israeli population grew, they began to tap the water of the Western aquifer by sinking wells close to the border. Soon they were taking far more of the water under the West Bank than the Palestinians ever had
The water table under the western aquifer began to fall and the two rivers, the Yarkon and Taninim, died. The Yarkon's bed became an open sewer for the communities of Tel Aviv. When Israel took control fo the West Bank after the 6-day war in 1967 Israel has taken the lion's share of the water and the Palestinians have been forbidden to sink new wells and rarely get permission to replaced old ones.
Typically the Palestinian has a quarter as much water as his Israeli neighbour and pays more for it than the Israelis.
Since the 1970s Egypt has had to import growing amounts of food because there is not enough water to sustain the new high yielding varieties. A quarter of India's crops have been grown using underground water that is not being replaced by the rains. In others salt from the irrigation water is invading their fields and rendering large areas sterile and useless.
Half of the hydro-electric dams produce significantly less power than promised. Dams built to irrigate fields are no better. Typical was the million dollar Kariba Dam built on the Zambezi in 1959. It created the largest man-made lake on a rich flood plain where 57,000 Batongan people had lived. But far from benefiting from the project the Batongans found themselves expelled and left destitute in refugee camps while the electricity and water from the dam went to the multi-national corporations running copper mines.
The Manantali dam on the river Senegal in West Africa eliminated the floods that had provided free irrigation for half a million farmers. The Akosombo dam in Ghana flooded an area of fertile farmland the size of Lebanon while providing a paltry amount of power sold at a knocked-down price to an American aluminium-smelting company.
The true insanity of hydro electric dams in places like the Amazon has only recently emerged, where the rotting vegetation in the flooded forest is producing huge amounts of methane, one of the greenhouse gases thought to be responsible for global warming.
The Balbina reservoir in the Amazon rain forest 150 kilometres north of Manaus on the river Uatuma, a tributary of the river Amazon, is foetid, choked with weeds and swarming with mosquitoes, the rotting vegetation in the flooded forest is producing huge amounts of methane.
Until recently it was thought that the gases came mostly from vegetation trapped under water and that the rotting vegetation would soon be gone and emission would cease. This is inaccurate, for one thing rotting can be very slow. For another a lot of the rotting vegetation does not come from the reservoir but floats down the river that drains into the reservoir. Without reservoirs the decomposition would occur in a well-oxygenated river producing carbon dioxide whereas tropical reservoirs usually contain little oxygen and generate methane instead.
What will happen when the rivers run dry? Is salt waiting to turn everything back to dust?
The American West could well be the epicentre of the coming water crisis.
It is no exaggeration to say that water won the west. The 2,300 kilometre river Colorado which drained a twelfth of the USA is the life blood of 7 states. Since the 1930s many of its canyons have been flooded to make reservoirs. So much water is captured that the amount reaching the sea has fallen to almost zero, leaving the Colorado delta to shrivel in the sun. Nature has been sacrificed to the farmers The once rich landscape where jaguars and beavers roamed has not seen fresh water since 1993.
Two giant reservoirs control the flow of the middle reaches of the Colorado. Lake Mead built in 1930 and Glen Canyon in 1964. The two reservoirs collect water from the snow melt in the Rocky Mountains that fills the river.
A century ago more than 25 cubic kilometres of water flowed into the Gulf of California every year. In 1922 lawyers shared out the river's waters between the states, an amount that added up to 20.5 cubic kilometres which should have left water to spare, but since then flows have been diminishing. From 1999 to 2003 the average flow sank to 8.7 cubic kilometres.
The drought crisis continued until early in 2005 and the Bureau of Reclamation says average river flows will take ten years to refill the reservoirs. If the drought persists the whole region is in deep trouble.
Most observers of hydro politics of the COlorado believe that the days when most of the waters of the mighty river could be used to irrigate crops cannot last much longer and even if water shortages don't see off the farmers, salt may be the deciding factor. Experts state that the Colorado basin will eventually become salt encrusted and barren because of the salt. All down the river more and more salt is clogging up the system, flowing downstream from the headwaters in the Rockies. The river and the extensive man-made irrigation and drainage network that circulate its waters have become a vast system for collecting and distributing salt.
Almost all the water flowing down the Colorado leaves the river several times to irrigate fields and returns via drains. It loses water volume at each step through evaporation and picks up salt from local rocks, thus increasing the concentration of salt in the water as it travels downstream.
Until, the 1960s the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined and contained more than 1000 cubic kilometres of water. It was renowned for its blue waters, plentiful fish, beaches and fishing ports. The sea is broken now into three hyper-saline pools containing about a tenth of the wsater it contained before.
The cause of this disaster is the death of the two great rivers that once drained Central Asia into the Aral Sea. The larger is the Amu Darya, once named the Oxus, which was as big as the Nile and rises in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, but now, like its smaller twin, the Syr Darya, is lost in the desert lands between the mountains and the sea.
Soviet engineers contrived to divert almost all the flow to irrigate cotton fields planted in the desert. This was one of the greatest assaults on major rivers. Nowhere else on earth shows so vividly what can happen when rivers die.
Lenin in 1921 lectured the southern republics of the new Soviet Union that "irrigation will do more than anything else to revive the area, bury the past and make the transition to socialism more certain."
Under his successor, Stalin, the region's farms were turned into Moscow-run "collectives" growing cotton for the textile mills of European Russia.
By 1960 the canals were removing a staggering 40 cubic kilometres of water from the rivers, but the Aral Sea remained full partly because the rains had been good and partly because the irrigation systems had returned much of the water to the sea as drainage. But between 1965 and 1980 the area of irrigated land more than doubled. Central Asia became one of the largest irrigated areas on the planet with 8 million hectares of fields and 85% of all the fields in the Aral Sea basin were growing cotton. Orchards, vineyards, wheat fields and vegetables no longer featured.
But this marvel of organisation carried the seeds of its own destruction. The newest canals were delivering water to the driest areas with the poorest soils and increasing amounts of water never returned to the river but accumulated in water-logged soils, evaporated from fields or drained into the desert. Much the biggest reason for this dispersion was the creation in the 1960s of the Karakum canal which tapped the Amu Daryr as it poured out of the mountains.
The canal has taken 500 cubic kilometres of water from the river and it has taken that water right out of the basin of the Aral Sea. None of it ever returns. By 1990 when the Soviet empire imploded the sea was receiving one tenth of its natural flow and its volume was down by two-thirds.
Nobody can escape the deteriorating climate. Once the Aral Sea moderated the harsh desert environment, cooling summers, warming winters and ensuring rainfall. Since it disappeared the summers have become shorter and hotter, the winters colder and longer and rainfall has declined. The region is increasingly ravaged by dust storms carrying with them an alarming cocktail of farm chemicals brought to the sea in past decades in drainage water. They include long-lasting pesticides like Lindane , DDt and Phosalone. Traces have been found in the blood of Antarctic penguins and in Norwegian forests.
Alarming though this spread of pesticides may be there is a still more devastating threat in the dust storms and that is salt.
This is of course not the complete story. Irresponsible water engineering has wreaked disaster in other countries - India, Australia, China, West Africa... Despite this there are more ambitious ideas in the pipeline.
China has a multi-billion plan to move the waters of the Yangtze to the north. Bush (that should be enough to raise anyone's doubts) is turning his eyes towards the Great Lakes and the Yukon, while the Congo and the Ebro are also ear-marked as victims.
And so the demented merry-go-round continues with the World Bank dishing out funds so that Monsanto can sow its water-guzzler seeds and wreck the environment with its pesticides.
The information contained above is taken from the excellent book "When the rivers run dry" by Fred Pearce.