Water has long been the object of political ambition and conflict.
Recent history is full of leaders who tried to harness water to
realize national dreams. Yet the people who most need
water-farmers, rural villages, impoverished communities-are too
often left, paradoxically, with desiccated fields, unfulfilled
promises, and refugee status. It doesn't have to be this way,
according to Fred Pearce. A veteran science news correspondent,
Pearce has for over fifteen years chronicled the development of
large-scale water projects like China's vast Three Gorges dam and
India's Sardar Sarovar. But, as he and numerous other authors have
pointed out, far from solving our water problems, these industrial
scale projects, and others now in the planning, are bringing us to
the brink of a global water crisis. Pearce decided there had to be
a better way. To find it, he traveled the globe in search of
alternatives to mega-engineering projects. In Keepers of the
Spring, he brings back intriguing stories from people like Yannis
Mitsis, an ethnic Greek Cypriot, who is the last in his line to
know the ways and whereabouts of a network of underground tunnels
that have for centuries delivered to farming communities the water
they need to survive on an arid landscape. He recounts the
inspiring experiences of small-scale water stewards like Kenyan
Jane Ngei, who reclaimed for her people a land abandoned by her
government as a wasteland. And he tells of many others who are
developing new techniques and rediscovering ancient ones to capture
water for themselves. In so doing, Pearce documents that these
"keepers" are not merely isolated examples, but collectively
constitute an entire alternative tradition of working with natural
flows rather than trying to reengineer nature to provide water for
human needs. The solution to our water problems, he finds, may not
lie in new technologies-though they will play a role-but in
recovering ancient traditions, using water more efficiently, and
better understanding local hydrology. Are these approaches adequate
to serve the world's growing populations? The answer remains
unclear. But we ignore them at our own peril.
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