While water is often on our minds, it is during a busy fire season or a heat dome that having an adequate source of water becomes important.
Like many things in life, having too much water may not be a good thing as many in the Lower Mainland found out during the atmospheric river.
As is the case with many complex topic we have come to appreciate that to really understand the water cycle we have to have a global perspective.
Author Marq de Villiers’s book Water does a good job of describing the hydrological cycle of water along with how humans have discovered, diverted, accumulated, regulated, hoarded and misused water around the world.
First printed in 1999, the book is still an excellent source of information about building dams and drilling wells into aquifers and how it has impacted our use and misuse of the earths water sources.
As I was reading my 2000 version I was thinking it would be interesting to see what may have changed in some of the predictions after nearly a quarter of a century. Perhaps the author had produced a revised edition. After doing a search I found the following information.
According to a book review advertising a new 2003 edition which has been completely updated and has has become a standard book on a crucial subject makes for vitally important reading.
“First published in 1999, Water, Mar de Villiers’s brilliant look at the condition of water resources around the world, won a Governor General’s Literary Award and earned glowing praise from such respected figures as Maurice Strong, formerly of the Earth Council. In compelling and lucid prose, de Villiers describes the grim situations in arid regions — in the southwestern United States, southern Africa, Mexico, Egypt, Israel, India, and Asia — and makes it clear just how serious the ramifications can be. He outlines how water is being manipulated by technology, used as a political bargaining chip, or imperilled by ignorance — and what this could mean to us in the future and how it could shape the way we live.”
According to Wikipedia, the author was born in 1940 and lives in Lunenberg, N.S. No mention was made of his plans to some day do another updated version.
While books like Water are valuable, we must turn to the internet to obtain the latest information. The author has described the pros and cons of many mega projects with one of the largest on the Yangtze River in China. For example the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze was not finished until 2006 and not fully operational until 2012.
According to Britannica, the dam was tested in 2020 during one of the worst flood years. Skeptics still argue that several smaller dams would have been more successful. As the dam began to fill in 2003, 1,200 historical and archaeological sites were lost but a five-tier ship lock allowed vessels up to 10,000 tons to by pass the dam.
By mid 2012 all power generators were operating one of the largest hydroelectric projects in the world and more lifts were provided in 2015 allowing vessels up to 3,000 tons to quickly pass the dam. The author summarizes the 2000 book with three imperatives for all water policy. Water should be priced to mandate thrifty use ( it should be priced for conservation). Water users should be obliged to maintain the water that passes through their systems as in a pristine state as possible and should be penalized for not doing so. Unsustainable withdrawals from water systems should be prohibited.
