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—"A
History of Water and Humankind," by Brian Fagan;
Bloomsbury (385 pages, $28)
———
It's a
typically Western irony that a well-researched and
thoughtful book about water and its scarcity would be
published during a spring that left nearly every river
from the Mississippi to the Colorado brimming and water
managers facing the unusual task of optimizing nature's
largess.
But Mark
Twain had it right when he said climate is what you
expect; weather is what you get. The West largely got
strange weather this year. In its climatic history, the
bulk of the West beyond the 100th meridian is
constrained by aridity.
Into this
volatile mix wades Brian Fagan, an anthropologist and
archaeologist, with "Elixir: A History of Water and
Humankind," a work that juxtaposes ancient and
contemporary cultures' veneration of water with the
current commodification of it, and finds the latter
morally lacking and potentially self-destructive.
"We
live in an industrial age of water as a commodity, yet
alongside us thrive much smaller societies that use
water wisely, as they always have," writes Fagan.
"History teaches us that the societies that last
longest are those that treat water with respect, as an
elixir of life, a gift from the gods. We seem to have
forgotten this compelling lesson."
Fagan
offers ample evidence that water has been managed
respectfully and peacefully at local levels, without
centralized water boards or heavy-handed governments —
the Berbers did it before the Romans; the ancient
Greeks, from whom the Romans borrowed, largely managed
water through cooperation and self-regulation; and the
Hohokam in the present-day Southwest apparently did so
without "great leaders who supervised water
harvesting, canal construction or allocation of water to
the fields."
Fagan is
taking a position against the mainstream, which holds
that the need for massive waterworks created
"hydraulic powers" that were highly
centralized and often despotic. Such was the underlying
theme of Steven Solomon's "Water: The Epic Struggle
for Wealth, Power and Civilization," which was
released earlier this year in trade paperback.
Rather
than drive his counterpoint home, however, Fagan
ultimately circles about in the manner of a long series
of lectures that exhaustively catalog hydrological
developments from qanats to norias, yet never develop
the sweeping narrative promised in the title.
"Elixir" is a sprawling survey of hydrology
through time, not really "a history of water and
humankind."
Fagan's
thesis of divorcing the control of water from the rise
of empire ultimately amounts to academic quibbling that
gets in the way of explaining the Romans and ancient
Chinese, both of whom achieved hydrologic wonders
through despotic central rule and conscripted labor.
It's also a safe argument that only a strong executive
branch during an economic Depression could have built
the Hoover Dam — largely on the back of compliant
labor in a company town under the thumb of monopolistic
contracting companies. (See: "Colossus: The
Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of Hoover
Dam," by Los Angeles Times columnist Michael
Hiltzik.)
When
Fagan finally lands on Phoenix as the poster child of
sprawl versus scarcity, he acknowledges the role of a
hydraulic power imposing its will: "All prudent
estimates suggest that it is not too late to discourage
through taxation and other types of pricing the growth
of populations on the urban periphery who will be most
vulnerable to water shortages." Republican Phoenix
must impose a tax or its water agencies must hike their
prices, in other words.
Fagan is
a passionate and lively writer who has enjoyed breakout
success from the shelves of academia with "The
Great Warming," about the tumultuous medieval
period of climate change in Europe. The work rode atop a
hot current topic and was written for the layman, with
numerous fictional verbal dioramas that made that
world's detail come to life.
In
"Elixir," these vignettes get in the way of
what ultimately is an academic book. The broad facts
underlying such verbal flights are supported by the
archaeological record, but Fagan waxes too fanciful. For
example: There was a catastrophic flood on China's Huang
River in the second or third century of the Common Era.
But there is no way to substantiate this: "A man
points to a high river levee some distance away. A
violent flood from rainfall far upstream had breached
the earthen bank. Yellow-brown floodwater cascades
through a widening gap in the embankment with a dull
roar."
Fagan's
explanation of how water-seeking desert dwellers
abandoned horizontal tunneling into alluvial fans in
favor of safer vertical tunnels called qanats works well
enough without a saccharine tale. "One can imagine
two boys tunneling into sand and loose gravel,"
Fagan writes. "Water percolates alongside their
sweating bodies, as their father offers encouragement
from outside. Suddenly, the ceiling collapses in a
torrent of gravel and groundwater that buries the
diggers in an instant. The father darts forward, grabs
each boy by the ankles, and drags them clear."
Those who
approach this book from academia will rightfully
shudder. But those who approach from the unschooled
masses cannot be sustained this time by these passages.
For them, "Elixir" may come up dry.
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