Keepers of the Spring

Reclaiming Our Water In An Age Of Globalization

Fred Pearce

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781559636810
• eBook ISBN: 9781597268936
• Subtopic: Ecology

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.

PART I

Riding the Water Cycle

Introduction

Buried beneath the hills west of Jerusalem, there is a secret that many Palestinians have forgotten and many Jews never knew but that unites the two communities in a long history of water use in the Holy Land. Zvi Ron, a geographer from Tel Aviv, discovered that secret one day when he dropped his glasses down a chimneylike hole that he had noticed near some agricultural terraces he was mapping. It was a second or so before his glasses hit hard rock. Even though the lenses were smashed, he decided to go in after them.

Armed with a strong flashlight, he found not just a deep hole, but a long tunnel extending from it. It was big enough for him to walk along. It had neatly quarried sides and stone slabs for a roof. After several dozen yards, it ended in a large excavated cavern where water dripped slowly from the rock and trickled into a channel on the floor. The water, it seemed, found its way along the tunnels and came out on the terraces where vegetables and oranges were growing—the same ones he had been surveying.

What Ron had discovered that day was only one of many dozens of man-made tunnels in the dolomite hills near Jerusalem, west toward Tel Aviv, north onto the West Bank, and south toward the Dead Sea. Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land—whatever you choose to call it—is honeycombed with these tunnels tapping underground water sources to bring water to the arid surface. After discovering that few written records acknowledged the existence of these tunnels, and that few people even among the locals were aware they existed, Ron has laboriously mapped most of them in the 30 years since he lost his glasses.

The few historical records that exist suggest that most of these tunnels are an extraordinary engineering legacy that is at least 2,000 years old. They have watered the traditional terraces of Palestinians, Jews, and the many other communities that have lived in these lands during that time. The villages of Artus, Battir, Zova, Abu Ghosh, and dozens of others relied on them. More strangely, these indigenous water sources have often been replaced since the Israelis returned here in 1948, with water piped for tens of miles from distant boreholes and even the Sea of Galilee far to the north. In many places, the old terraces that the tunnels once watered are also long gone, replaced by the flat fields and mechanized farming of modern Israeli kibbutzim. But the tunnels remain, hidden underground. Some are empty now—deprived of supply as underground water levels across the area have fallen. Others are still directing water. But almost all lie abandoned. And their locations and purposes, and even existence, are known to an ever diminishing band.

I joined Ron on a day of discovery beneath the hills. We went first to a tunnel 4 miles west of Jerusalem close to Zova, a Palestinian village that was emptied in 1948 and replaced by an Israeli kibbutz of the same name. Switching on his miner’s lamp, Ron, who works at the University of Tel Aviv, led me down a shaft beneath the grass. We entered a dark, dank cavern, a collecting room for water, from which a series of tunnels headed off in different directions. Some burrowed ever deeper into the hills; others headed toward the surface, where until half a century ago Palestinians used the water to irrigate vegetable plots and water orange groves. Everywhere, expertly, the unknown excavators of the Zova tunnels had ensured that the water could flow along a shallow gradient beneath sloping hillsides, from the hidden water reserves to the fields.

The Zova cavern, like most of the tunnels beneath these hills, is largely unknown except to the dwindling bands of Palestinians who have farmed here and a few inquisitive souls like Ron. Ron calls them spring-flow tunnels. Their excavators made them by following the route of the spring waters back into the rocks. They found that by constructing these tunnels they could increase the flow of the springs and make sporadic seasonal sources of water into permanent streams. “These spring tunnels are technological masterpieces,” Ron says in awe.

Some Palestinians insist that the tunnels are an indigenous Arab technology. Many historians say the idea came from Persia. But Ron believes that many were dug by Jewish communities before his people were thrown out of the Holy Land by the Romans. Clearly, this is a politically charged debate. But archaeological evidence certainly seems to point to the excavation of the spring-flow tunnels perhaps around 2,000 years ago, when Jews fought Romans in these hills. One tunnel, for instance, lies beneath a monastery at Abu Ghosh, a bustling and picturesque Palestinian village overlooking Jerusalem. The monastery was a Crusader church in the twelfth century, and legend has it the Ark of the Covenant was once stored here. French surveyors renovating the monastery a century ago assumed that the tunnel had been an escape route to the surrounding fields for Crusaders in case of a siege. But the tunnel is clearly older than that. And further excavation shows that it supplies water to a crypt that was used as a water reservoir by the Romans.

Whoever first developed it, the tunneling technology used in these hills clearly has great antiquity. One of the ancient world’s oldest hard-rock tunnels is the Siloam Tunnel, on the outskirts of old Jerusalem. It took water from a secret spring outside the city walls, known as the Gihon Spring, through a 500-yard tunnel to a reservoir in the heart of the ancient City of David. Long-standing Jewish claims hold that it was the tunnel mentioned in the Bible as being built around 700 BC by King Hezekiah as a protection against siege. Those claims were confirmed in 2003 through radiocarbon dating.

Though the evidence suggests that Jews first excavated at least some of the spring-flow tunnels, it is the Palestinians who in more recent times have used and maintained them. A few dozen still irrigate fields or supplement village water supplies. In the West Bank village of Madama, near Nablus, I met Ahmad Qot, a poor Palestinian who every day walks his donkey to collect water from a spring tunnel that delivers water from the hills above to the heart of the village.

At Battir, a village of 3,000 Palestinians in a gorge near Bethlehem, eight Palestinian clans continued to take water from a spring-flow tunnel until the 1980s, using it to irrigate vegetables and fill pitchers for their homes. Each clan could take water in turn, once every eight days, according to an ancient tradition of water sharing. An elder of the village measured the daily ration by putting a notched stick into the tunnel’s reservoir and opening a sluice gate to divert water until the water level had fallen by one notch on the stick.

This ritual may have been carried on by Jew and Palestinian alike since the second century, when Battir was the last Jewish fortress to fall to Roman conquerors. Today the village is in the shadow of two huge Jewish settlements and as a result has been in the front line of the intifada. The villagers fight what they see as a settlers’ invasion of their land. The spring tunnel still discharges water, but the ancient clan sharing system has broken down, and the water is now conveyed to a storage pond through a metal pipe.

Most of the tunnels near Jerusalem were abandoned when half a million Palestinians fled their fields and orchards in 1948 after the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. Ron calls his people’s ignorance of this water-collecting system a tragedy, and it certainly proved a hydrological step backward for many areas. The new occupants at Zova, for instance, brought in tractors to build a kibbutz. In the process, they unknowingly destroyed parts of the ancient spring tunnels. And, unaware of the resource on its doorstep, the kibbutz ended up taking its irrigation water from springs 20 miles away. Such stories have been repeated all across the former Palestinian lands.

Across the hills of the West Bank, Ron has mapped more than 250 abandoned spring-flow tunnels. “The majority are hidden, with only small, dark openings. Perhaps if any researchers knew about them, they didn’t mention them because they were afraid to enter them,” he muses.

Close to the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, beneath a ridge where thousands of factory hens let out a constant screech, Ron took me to visit the village of Ein Khandaq, which Palestinians describe as having been “ethnically cleansed” in 1948. Here there is a spring-flow tunnel from which water bubbles up into a small reservoir and then pours down a series of channels and waterfalls to irrigate stone-walled fields arranged in a shallow flight down the valley. This immaculately designed irrigation system still pours its water into the fields, even though the fields have not been cultivated for more than half a century. The system’s only visitors are curious schoolchildren and a part-time caretaker.

“Ein Khandaq shows real hydrological knowledge,” says Ron, who was the first Israeli to explore it. “It was designed as an entire system.” The reservoir overflows into channels at a point some 6 feet above the level at which water enters it from the tunnel behind. This allows it to irrigate the topmost terraces without reducing the flow from the spring. Its designers had exquisite knowledge of what they were doing, or they could not have come up with this configuration as the optimum solution to irrigating the terraces below. They knew, says Ron, the mathematical relationship between water height and the flow it would produce. “Modern hydrologists know this relationship as Darcy’s law,” he says, after the French engineer Henri Darcy, who discovered it in 1856. It is one of the cornerstones of modern hydrology. “But whoever built this system, however many centuries ago, obviously figured out the law long before Darcy. They didn’t make this up as they went along. They had to design the whole thing before they could begin digging.” Even now, after visiting the site many times, Ron stands open-mouthed, with a scientist’s sense of wonder at the achievement.

■ How could such expertise, such scientific skill and engineering prowess be lost? There are, of course, special circumstances in the Middle East. When the state of Israel was established, the new bosses across these hills had new ideas about introducing modern mechanized farming. They preferred flat fields operated by mechanized equipment to tiny terraces. They preferred pumps and boreholes to the vagaries of the spring tunnels. And they acted on their beliefs, even if that meant ignoring local water sources and bringing water halfway across the country in the National Water Carrier, a distribution pipeline supplied mainly by the Sea of Galilee.

On the West Bank, the repercussions of that change are very clear. Most of the West Bank water ends up in Israeli hands. Israelis have the power to stop new wells being dug in Palestinian villages. Some 80 percent of the water that falls as rain onto the West Bank is now taken by Israeli pumps. The per capita water consumption of the Israeli community is four times greater than that of the Palestinians.

But Israel is not unique. What has happened here is an acute and politically charged version of what has been happening around the world as traditional water-gathering methods—many of which now seem to modern eyes almost like the mysteries of water divining—have given way to modern industrialized and centralized ways of water collection and distribution.

Such growing water inequality is typical even of areas without political and social disharmony. The cause of that inequality lies as much in the choice of technology for water capture and distribution as it does in power politics and ethnic division. Everywhere large projects—many of them hydrologically inefficient, inequitable, and ill-conceived—are swamping smaller, more efficient, more equitable, and more practical water supply systems.

Ironically, the most ambitious of these projects are being built to satisfy the demands of growing populations for clean, secure water sources. Those who oppose them cite their impacts on ecosystems and displacement of people. But perhaps the most compelling argument against the massive projects now under way is that they probably will not work. They may be built, but they are unlikely to produce the advertised benefits. As Part II of this book demonstrates, the recent history of these massive civil engineering projects reveals outcomes ranging from merely disappointing to catastrophic. In some places, the most tragic aspect of these projects is that they displace older, more efficient technologies that had served their inventors well for centuries.

And yet, in some places, almost at the moment of being extinguished, the small water technologies are reviving and offering an alternative way forward—a way that may prove more sustainable not just for the environment but also for those billions of people who still lack adequate water supplies to irrigate their crops and fill their domestic taps. Part III of this book will spend time seeking out those experiments and assessing their potential. We’ll visit places as arid as the Chihuahua desert, as impoverished as sub-Saharan Africa, and as crowded as the Indian subcontinent to explore these new and rediscovered technologies and the people, the keepers of the spring, who are making them work.

No one technology, or suite of technologies, can do the job alone, however. Ultimately, we may need to rethink our approach to water management. Among the hallmarks of the successful water projects of the past is that built into them is a water ethic, one that encourages the careful allocation and use of water as community property, property on which the survival of entire peoples depended. Ultimately, this book explores the possibility of drawing on these ancient traditions to create a new water ethic for the twenty-first century. In a very real sense, we must all become keepers of the spring if we are to survive the water crises that await us.

If the twentieth century was the era of the megadam and the canalization and ecological destruction of the world’s rivers, of emptying underground water reserves, and of the pollution of many of those that remain, then the twenty-first century could be different. It could. But will it? First, we look at the people who continue to believe that, in the world of water at least, big is beautiful.

CHAPTER ONE

Megawater

In a modest ceremony in Beijing in April 2003, a small bottle of water was presented to the city’s vice-mayor, Niu Youcheng. To an outsider it didn’t seem like much—a variant on some ancient Chinese tea ceremony, perhaps. But its significance for the future of a city of 14 million people, the capital of the world’s largest country, could be profound. The water had come from the Danjiangkou Reservoir, a huge man-made expanse of water more than 600 miles away to the south, on a tributary of the River Yangtze, the world’s fourth-largest river. Its arrival in Beijing symbolized the start of what China is calling the biggest engineering project ever undertaken anywhere on the planet. It is a scheme to divert part of the flow of the Yangtze, which drains most of southern China, to replenish the parched north, where rising demand for water for farms and cities is emptying the Yellow River, and where underground waters on which cities like Beijing increasingly rely are being pumped dry.

The first Yangtze water should be flowing north along a canal from Danjiangkou in time for Beijing to fill swimming pools and festoon its stadiums with fountains during the Olympic Games, which it is scheduled to host in 2008. The canal will be 200 feet wide and as long as France, crossing 219 rivers, 500 roads, and 120 railway lines as it takes some 10 million acre-feet of water a year across the crowded plains en route to Beijing. To provide this extra water the Danjiangkou Reservoir, already Asia’s widest artificial expanse of freshwater, will be raised to 550 feet, displacing a quarter-million people.

But this is just one of three links planned to bring water from the Yangtze to the great cities and wheat fields of northern China. It will be complemented by two other equally large and complex diversions, one to the east and another far to the west in Tibet. By the time all three stages of what China calls the south-north diversion are completed in around 20 years, the project will be siphoning north around 40 million acre-feet of water a year. That is less than a tenth of the Yangtze’s typical annual flow, but almost equivalent to the current flow of the Yellow River in its middle reaches and approaching three times what it discharges into the sea in a typical year.

This is big engineering. Chinese engineers are still imbued with a sense of optimism about their ability to remake the landscape—an optimism that has largely been lost in the West. They are attempting nothing less than the replumbing of their nation by remaking two of the world’s greatest rivers. The south-to-north project follows hot on the heels of the Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is already being filled on the Yangtze. Three Gorges will be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and will create a lake some 250 miles long. But it suddenly seems like a warm-up act for the main event, whose three stages will each match the Three Gorges for size and cost. It is as if the United States decided to dam the Mississippi at Minneapolis, at St. Louis, and again at Memphis and to pipe its waters into the Rockies to refill the Colorado. The implications are immense.

The eastern arm of this vast undertaking will extract water from near the mouth of the Yangtze and pour it into the 1,500-year-old Grand Canal. This wonder of ancient China was the largest artificial river of the preindustrial world and the first to have lock gates. It was built primarily to transport rice from the wet south of the country to the north. At one stage, it carried 400,000 tons of rice a year, helping feed an army of more than a million soldiers camped in the north to repel barbarians. But today much of it is a foul-smelling sump for China’s rampant industrialization. The plan is to clean it and use the ancient waterway as a conduit to bring north the precious Yangtze water, take it beneath the bed of the Yellow River and onto the North China Plain, China’s breadbasket, where it will serve the 10 million inhabitants of the water-starved city of Tianjin.

The third, western, arm of the south-north diversion will also be the biggest and most complex. It will capture the headwaters of the Yangtze behind a 1,000-foot-high dam amid the melting glaciers of Tibet. It will then lift a volume of water equivalent to a quarter of the flow of the River Nile through a 70-mile tunnel into the upper reaches of the Yellow River. Construction of this final link is due to start around 2010. All told, the south-north transfer scheme will cost at least $60 billion.

Until now, the world has largely built its cities where the water is—close to big rivers. Even modern superdams like the Hoover Dam, the Aswan on the Nile, and the Soviet-built monstrosities perched in the quake-infested mountains of Central Asia usually do little more than control the flow of their rivers. They catch seasonal floods in the mountains and release them downstream in the dry season, or they divert water to irrigate the plains of the river’s own basin. But China’s south-north project is something different. It aims to move water on a huge scale to where the people are. Indeed, to where several hundred million people are.

According to the country’s water lords, China has no choice but to embark on such breathtaking plumbing. As Wang Hao of the China Institute of Water Resources in Beijing told me in early 2003, his country is suffering “a hydrological crisis that threatens the nation’s future.” Five times in the previous decade, the 3,000-mile-long Yellow River had failed to reach the sea for part of the year. In 1997, its lower reaches were dry for more than 200 days. Every last drop had been removed to fill irrigation channels and city taps. Parts of the river’s parched upper basin are turning to desert, unleashing dust storms of such ferocity that a yellowish haze is still in the air when the winds from China finally turn up a week later across the Pacific Ocean in western Canada. As Wang outlined his plans to me, the river had just recorde...

Table of contents

• ABOUT ISLAND PRESS
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PART I - Riding the Water Cycle
• PART II - Replumbing the Planet
• PART III - The Keepers
• Conclusion
• FURTHER READINGS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX
• BOARD OF DIRECTORS