Unlike other
authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.
In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely
associated with ritual, often considered sacred. Fagan’s interested in the human relationship
with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.
Fagan
describes three phases of the human relationship with water. In the first stage, water is an unreliable,
often scarce, and highly valued resource.
This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of
water. In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity,
little considered and treated as if it were superabundant. In the emerging stage, water is a finite
resource we need to conserve.
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Most of the
book is covers the first stage. He
discusses the historic relationship and management of water
from around the world. Some of these
were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally
extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans. Others are lesser known, like the highly
ritualistic and religious Balinese
system that is still operating. Some we
know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the
pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.
Because of
this approach, Elixir is also a work
of cultural and physical geography.
The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations
are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their
environment.
The commodity
stage is covered much more briefly. To
be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.
It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more
difficult and remote sources of water.
Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant
water. Fagan points to arid and semiarid
regions of Africa and Asia
as locations poised on exhausting their water.
This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest,
where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for
more than a century.
For the stage
we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.
Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is
regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our
practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have
sustainable water supplies.
When it comes
to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology
and human ingenuity. Even so, he implies
that we should look to our past.
In the early
stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it,
immensely. It is time to place a high
value on water again, even without religious aspects. Also, in the past water management was a very
local affair, and surprisingly democratic.
Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies,
they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the
community. Even in empires with powerful
central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based
water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of
these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.
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