Written in 2006, Fred Pearces's book " When the Rivers Run Dry", seems somewhat prophetic to those of us living in the Southwest United States. I think Charles Fishman's The Big Thirst was a better read on this subject. He questions the wisdom of dam-building, says that cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas need to be more conservation-minded, and that farmers worldwide need to use more water-efficient irrigation methods. Fred Pearce has been to many places and talked to many people, and what he's produced is a global atlas of water mismanagement, wrapped up in the end with a few cheery programs that might solve a few of them, and some suggestions that no one is really going to heed. While there are some compelling stories in here, and enough facts and history to make you think, When the Rivers Run Dry was. Then there is the Middle East, where Palestinians go thirsty in sight of Israeli swimming pools. The author's visit to the region around the Aral Sea was particularly depressing, as he describes a stunted, poisoned land where the people have no jobs, no hope, and no future. China and the former Soviet Union have literally killed millions in man-made floods. While America's water woes are certainly serious (at least in the west), the most tragic regions of the world are, predictably, the places where government policy is completely disconnected from local resource management, or where politics and war mix violently with water rights. India and China and their respective mistreatment of the Ganges, the Indus, the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers are all covered, as is the madness that is Los Angeles and Las Vegas, currently draining the Colorado River dry and casting thirsty eyes thousands of miles north to the Great Lakes. When the Rivers Run Dry is a bit of travel journalism that covers nearly every continent. As many of the farmers Fred Pearce interviews point out: "If everyone stopped using the water, that would be great, but if only we do, it won't make a difference, except that our family will starve." It is the Tragedy of the Commons on a regional scale. Everyone knows that wells used to hit water at 200 feet and now have to go 1500 feet or more, but this doesn't stop everyone from trying to get the last drop. Much like oil, once you tap them dry, they're gone (and they also destabilize the surrounding earth, leading to erosion and possibly even earthquakes), and farmers and cities around the world, from the American west to India, are tapping them at an alarming rate. These are the underground reservoirs of water which, unlike rivers, are non-renewable. Oh, the author ends with an optimistic chapter, as all these books do, detailing bold and forward-thinking news plans from economists and water engineers and politicians and scientists around the world - all the ways in which we could save the water tables, grow crops more efficiently with more "crop per drop," irrigate more cheaply, supply urban populations more sustainably, etc.īut that's after chapter after chapter detailing such disasters as the Aral Sea, which the Soviets basically destroyed and which the current government is continuing to destroy, and the Salton Sea in California, created by a mistake and now allowed to become a festering, drying blister in the Sonora desert, and the Dead Sea, which is receding visibly every year. How does the image best support the text? The image shows what a sugar plantation looked like and what brutal work enslaved people endured.This is another one of those depressing books that catalogs in grim detail just how badly humans are screwing up the environment, on a cataclysmic scale, how greed, desperation, and short-sightedness have destroyed entire ecosystems, devastated nations, and displaced millions, and how even though we have the scientific and technological know-how to do better, we're not going to, because short-term thinking always wins. So the British owners looked to another part of the empire-India-and recruited thousands of men and women, who were given five-year contracts and a passage back. But even after they freed their slaves, the sugar plantation owners were desperate to find cheap labor to cut cane and process sugar. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. Even the poorest of London shopgirls took sugar in their tea. The demand was huge, for sugar had gone from being a luxury that only kings could afford to a necessity. Sugar was the backbone of the British Empire at that time. Caption: Enslaved people working in a sugar plantation (illustration by William Clark) My great-grandparents had come from India to Guyana-then British Guiana-in the late nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. Read the passage and review the image from Sugar Changed the World.
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