Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Using Water To Understand Human Society


Using Water To Understand Human Society

Some of the greatest societies would not have lasted as long as they did without water and the use of it in their infrastructures, agriculture, and traditions. The one that first comes to my mind is Ancient Rome. Their intricate and brilliant aqueduct system (though built through plundering Gaul and Britain) was an engineering marvel that rivaled and even surpassed water systems of today. Even the Roman baths were well known historically for their influence on social mores.

The Great Pyramids of Egypt would not have been built without the access to the Nile River. The Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges, even the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers here in the US have all had an influence on life as we now know it. Trade would also not have been possible from early centuries to current times had it not been for the access to water. Water has been instrumental in the economic and environmental lives of people for many centuries.

It is then about time that water is being included in the histories of these great civilizations in trying to understand human society. Water is really the one element that binds all humans together. It is the one resource that can spark war and yet also bring peace. It can bring sustenence and also unfortunately tragedy as in floods. However, it cannot be denied that water has shaped human civilization as we know it, and today as it has been for centuries remains the only liquid on Earth that gives us life and shapes our destinies.
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From the article:

Water shapes societies, but it is a factor only just beginning to be appreciated by social scientists. The Norwegian professor, writer and film maker Terje Tvedt, of the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, argues that water has played a unique and fundamental role in shaping societies throughout human history.
Speaking at a European Science Foundation and COST conference in Sicily in October, Tvedt proposed that social scientists and historians have long made a serious error by not taking natural resources into account in their attempts to understand social structures.

Water, according to Tvedt, is a unique natural resource for two reasons. First, it is absolutely essential for all societies, because we cannot live without it. Secondly, it is always the same. Whatever you do with water on the surface of the Earth, it reemerges. "You can destroy or create rivers and lakes," he says, "but you cannot destroy water itself."

How rivers shaped industry
Tvedt used the example of the industrial revolution to show how water can help to understand human history. Historians have proposed two contrasting theories to explain why the industrial revolution started in Europe, specifically in Britain, and not in China, India or Australia.

They debate about whether it is because of specific political ideologies and social structures in Europe at the time, or due to the unequal relationship that already existed between Europe and the rest of the world, through slavery and colonialism. The two theories can be termed exceptionalism and exploitation, respectively.

But according to Tvedt, the structure of the water system can adequately explain why the industrial revolution began in Britain. The early industrial revolution was enabled by the power of water mills, and bulk transport of goods by canal. Britain's rivers were perfect for both things.

They provided a good network across the country. All are fairly close to the sea, with good flows throughout the year and not too much silt. Elsewhere in the world, rivers were too silty, too large and uncontrollable, all flowing in the same direction or had flows that were too seasonally variable.

The exclusion of nature from our understanding of society is not a benign, academic problem. "Since World War II, the dominant theories relating to the international aid system have, without exception, disregarded the role of nature," Tvedt says.

"Modernisation theory has told us that all societies could develop modernism in the same way, if they just find the right economic instruments." This, he argues, is simply not right.


This is a great site to read about the history of water in society from ancient times until now:

Water History

Monday, December 01, 2008

Access to water must be high on climate agenda















Access to water must be high on climate agenda

Access to water is a basic human right and should be high on the agenda of climate change talks in Poland next week, the head of an Italian advocacy group said on Friday.

With more than 1 billion people having no access to safe water, the World Water Contract group for years has sought to make availability of water a basic right and add it to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"Given that water is threatened by climate change, it is time to include the human right to water in (the new climate) protocol," Emilio Molinari, chairman of the group's Italian branch, told Reuters on the margins of a water conference.

Molinari said his group would lobby the United Nations to add water access rights to the climate change debate next week in Poznan, Poland.

About 190 countries will meet there to lay the groundwork for a global deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012.

Molinari said his non-profit organisation would try to ensure guarantee rights to water access are included in the final climate deal, widely expected in December 2009.
"One of our strategic objectives is to insert the right to water in the climate change protocol as a fundamental element," he said.

The battle for access to water has never been easy and would become more difficult with the global credit crunch, because the lion's share of public funds would be channelled to rescue banks and big corporations, he said.

"They (authorities) will play a recession card. They will say: 'There is no money for public interventions, all should go to help companies to recover... We need to scrap environmental target'," he said.

Previous efforts by human rights and environmental activists to improve water access largely have run aground due to lack of public funds and the resistance of multinational water companies which want to control water resources, he said.

Molinari said about $10 billion a year is needed to meet the UN Millennium Goal Campaign's target of halving the proportion of people with no access to safe drinking water by 2015, but only about five percent of required funds has been raised.
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Today begins the second round of climate talks by the UN in Poznan, Poland in an attempt to come to an agreement regarding limits on greenhouse gas emissions on the road to Copenhagen in December 2009. Last year, the talks in Bali had people hopeful with actually little to anything of substance happening, and nothing concerning water as a human right or as part of the climate agenda was addressed.

Now, once again the opportunity exists to bring forth water and safe access to potable water as a chief concern in Poznan. However, reports claim that due to a worldwide financial crunch there is not much hope for the outcome of these talks to produce much of substance regarding the environment as a whole, let alone place water as the priority it must now be.

This is what happens when you place the fate of the planet in the hands of a few politicians and corporate benefactors who only see profit coming from the climate and water crises. When the melting of the Arctic is only seen as another opportunity to plunder the very oil that has exacerbated the melting in the first place over doing what is morally right to preserve our planet for all, it speaks volumes about what these governments really consider important.

Around the globe we see millions of people suffering from the effects of unnecessary diseases due to unpotable toxic water. We see girls being deprived of an education because they must spend hours everyday in dangerous conditions fetching water for their families, many times water that is polluted and in short supply. We see glaciers worldwide melting at an unprecedented pace breaking all scientists' predictions, thus placing billions of people worldwide at risk of dwindling water supplies which bring with it famine, disease, privitization of water by multinationals, and the poverty that keeps those in third world countries at the mercy of those very multinationals and the governments that cater to them.

How this current global crisis regarding water and water access could not be a top priority of such a meeting only proves that these meetings are not for the benefit of the environment or the people as a whole. They are for the benefit of the governments looking to gain profit from the misery of others. It is all well and good that organizations such as the one mentioned in this article wish to bring the water crisis to the attention of these meetings. However, I believe it is only through citizen activism that this will be given the attention it deserves. Leaving it only in the hands of those who precipitated the financial crisis to begin with and the climate change we now see causing repurcussions worldwide will not do anything for the over one billion people who need access to clean water now.

It must be us who brings this to fruition. Through our words, our actions, our activism, our caring, and our standing up to the governments seeking to ignore this the most crucial environmental issue of the 21st century.

Another World Water Day Gone

We see another World Water Day pass us by. The theme, Water For All, signifies that though some progress has been made we are woefully behin...