Erica
Gies is an award-winning independent journalist who
writes about water, climate change, plants and critters
for Scientific American, The New York Times, Nature,
The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, The
Economist and Washington Post.
Editor’s
note: This is an edited excerpt from Water
Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge
by Erica Gies, copyright © University of Chicago
Press, 2022.
_____________________________________________
Epic
flooding has killed hundreds of people across Pakistan,
India, South Africa, Germany, New York, Kentucky and British
Columbia, Canada, in the last year. Intense droughts are
parching landscapes and wilting crops across Texas, the
U.S. West and the Horn of Africa. As these water extremes
hit more and more people where they live, there’s
a growing awareness that climate change is water change.
People
usually respond to these disasters by calling for higher
levees, bigger drains and longer aqueducts. But such interventions
are increasingly failing. As we grapple with climate extremes,
a hard truth is emerging: Our development choices —
urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and even the concrete
infrastructure designed to control water — are actually
exacerbating our problems and raising the stakes for failure.
Because sooner or later, water always wins.
The
dominant culture views water as either a commodity or
a threat, which is why we seek to control it. But the
way we relate to water is not inevitable.
Today,
“water detectives” — ghost-stream hunters,
ecologists, biologists, landscape architects, urban planners,
environmental engineers — around the world are instead
working from a philosophy rooted in curiosity, respect
and humility, rather than a too-common arrogance. They
start with a radical question: “What does water
want?”
To
find out, the detectives are uncovering what water did
before generations of humans so radically transformed
our landscape and waterways. How did water interact with
local rocks and soils, ecosystems and climates before
we scrambled them? With their discoveries, we begin to
understand why certain areas flood repeatedly, or how
our tendency to speed water off the land deprives us of
urgently needed local rainfall that — if allowed
to move underground — could supply streams in summer.
Then we begin to think creatively about how we can solve
these problems by making space for water within our human
habitat.
So what does water want? Many modern humans have forgotten
that water’s true nature is to flex with the rhythms
of the Earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance
upon the land. In its liquid state, with sufficient quantity
or gravity, water can rush across the land in torrential
rivers or tumble in awe-inspiring waterfalls. But it is
also inclined to linger to a degree that would shock most
of us because our conventional infrastructure has erased
so many of its slow phases, instead confining water and
speeding it away. Slow stages are particularly prone to
our disturbance because they tend to be in the flatter
places — once floodplains and wetlands — where
we like to settle.
But
when water stalls on land, that’s when the magic
happens, cycling water underground and providing habitat
and food for many forms of life, including us. The key
to greater resilience, say the water detectives, is to
find ways to let water be water. They all aim to slow
water on land in some approximation of natural patterns.
For that reason, I’ve come to think of this movement
as “Slow Water.”
Like
the Slow Food movement founded in Italy in the late 20th
century in opposition to fast food and all its ills, Slow
Water approaches are unique to each place: They work with
local landscapes, climates and cultures rather than try
to control or change them. Slow Water seeks to call out
the ways in which speeding water off the land causes problems.
Its goal is to restore natural slow phases to support
local water availability, flood control, carbon storage
and myriad forms of life.
Some people say that Slow Water approaches can’t
cope with today’s water extremes. But it’s
a question of scale. The majority of projects to date
are miniscule: a little vegetated ditch to absorb some
stormwater runoff, or a small stretch of creek brought
to the surface from an underground pipe. Those tiny interventions
can’t counteract the degree to which we’ve
altered the natural water cycle. We’ve built or
planted upon 87 percent of the world’s wetlands.
We have intervened on two-thirds of the world’s
great rivers. The paved areas of our cities have doubled
just since 1992, causing a sharp rise in urban flooding
and water scarcity in cities.
To
repair the global water cycle and reduce our risk from
flood and drought, we need to return many small areas
for water to stall throughout a region. It’s akin
to how solar on many roofs can add up to a lot of electricity.
And
just as Slow Food is local, supporting local farmers and
thereby protecting a region’s rural land from industrial
development and reducing food’s shipping miles and
carbon footprint, ideally, Slow Water is too. The engineered
response to scarcity has been to bring in more water from
somewhere else. But desalinating water or transporting
it long distances consumes a lot of energy. Moving water
is also an environmental justice issue. Over a 40-year
period, interventions on big rivers, including dams, brought
more water to 20% of the world’s people —
while taking it from 24%.
Ultimately,
big water transfers can harm the receivers, too. When
we live long distances from our water, we don’t
understand the limits of that supply, so we’re less
likely to conserve. Bringing in water from somewhere else
encourages overexpansion of human population and activities
where there isn’t enough local water. It’s
similar to when a city builds extra lanes to reduce traffic,
which then attracts more cars, causing gridlock again.
In places such as in the U.S. Southwest, Southern California
or the Middle East, we have made people and activities
vulnerable to the water cycle, rather than resilient.
Today’s
dominant culture is rooted in an ideology of human supremacy:
Humans’ needs and wants — particularly privileged
humans — are considered more important than nature’s
right to exist.
Slow
Water’s philosophical embrace of collaboration finds
a guiding perspective from cultures around the world that
remain more connected to nature. Kelsey Leonard is a Shinnecock
citizen and assistant professor in the School of Environment,
Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo
in Ontario. As she explained to me and an audience of
river researchers in an online talk in 2020, many Indigenous
traditions don’t consider water to be a “what”—
a commodity — but a “who.” They not
only believe that water is alive, but that it’s
kin. “That type of orientation transforms the way
in which we make decisions about how we might protect
water,” she said. “Protect it in the way that
you would protect your grandmother, your mother, your
sister, your aunties.”
In
contrast, today’s dominant culture is rooted in
an ideology of human supremacy: Humans’ needs and
wants — particularly privileged humans — are
considered more important than nature’s right to
exist. But this us-first stance hasn’t done humanity
any favors. By focusing on single-minded problem-solving
to service human needs, we ignore interconnected entities
in the systems we change, causing myriad unintended consequences,
from climate change to the extinction of other species
to water woes.
The
water detectives are a diverse bunch and don’t all
hold these beliefs. But they share an openness to moving
from a control mindset to one of respect. Admitting that
water always wins is not weakness. Instead, it’s
the foundation for strength because it opens us up to
innovative solutions. At a time when climate change can
feel overwhelming because nations are failing to reduce
emissions, Slow Water projects empower people to take
action in their own communities. By working with water,
we can protect ourselves from water extremes, help to
slow climate change by storing carbon in wetlands and
forests, and enjoy the myriad benefits that cooperation
can bring.
This article is republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
