Book Reviews, Summer 2002

Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
By Vandana Shiva
Published by South End Press, 7 Brookline St. #1, Cambridge, MA 02139-4146
www.southendpress.org
Paperback, 156 pages, $14.00, published in 2002
reviewed by Jack Kittredge

By now the name Vandana Shiva is familiar to most readers of this publication. She is a physicist, environmentalist, and leading thinker guiding resistance to globalization. In this book she breaks new ground discussing the most precious fluid of all – the one the vice president of the World Bank said would play the role in the 21st century which oil played in the 20th – water.

Water is key to the tragic confrontation between Israel and Palestine on the West Bank. But less known are other hot spots where water rights may precipitate major conflict. Turkey is planning a series of dams which, when completed, will divert 80% to 90% of the water now reaching Iraq along the Euphrates River. A series of completed and proposed dams along the Nile threaten stability between Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. Projects in India and China displacing hundreds of thousands of people and disrupting centuries-old water use systems are threatening domestic peace.

A country is said to face a serious water crisis when available water falls below 1000 cubic meters per person. In 1990 there were 131 million people in this situation. By 2025 that number will be 817 million. In Shiva's country of India, the water per person in 1951 was 3450 cubic meters. Now it is 1250, and it is expected to fall to 760 by the year 2050. Given the investment we have put into managing this resource, how can we be falling so short?

Shiva's basic contention is that the old indigenous cultural attitude about water, its value and management is clashing with a modern approach. In the older view, water is a gift of the heavens, to be shared among all life, and not a commodity to be sold. This is expressed in many traditions. According to the law of Justinian, water and natural resources are public goods: "By the law of nature these things are common to mankind – the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shore of the sea." Under Islam the Sharia or "path to water" establishes the right of all to it. In Urdu the word "ab" or water is the root of the word "abadi" or human settlement, suggesting that the natural right of dwellers along a river system to use that water predates any legal system. Even the jurist William Blackstone recognized that "Water is a moving, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue to be common by the law of nature, so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary property therein."

The modern view contrasts directly with this older attitude. Shiva traces it to the settlement of the American West, originating in the mining camps where diversion and use of water was directly associated with opportunity and wealth. This "cowboy" doctrine of "prior appropriation" held, essentially, that "he who is first in time is first in right" and allowed absolute property rights in water, including the right to transport and sell or pollute it.

"Water Wars" traces the impact of these diverse views through various aspects of water use and associated activity: forestry, paper and pulp making, mining, agriculture, dams, water pumping and extraction systems, climate change — floods, drought, and cyclones – and corporate efforts to privatize and profiteer from control of water.

Most of Shiva's experience, and thus examples, flow from the Indian subcontinent. and thus are not familiar to many western readers. But it is enlightening to hear her many stories of people struggling to retain traditions going back thousands of years, and how sensitive those traditions were to the basic ecological reality of the resource they evolved to manage.

Perhaps the most heartening thing to read about is the Indian tradition of local care. In the desert region of Rajasthan, for instance, there is little rainfall and it is quite hot. But human management has blessed Rajasthan with water abundance. A culture of conservation — born of careful observation of rainfall and water patterns – has led to a system of linked reservoirs, containment tanks, and irrigation systems which provide precious water to both people and crops. It was not until the British arrived, with their abject failure to understand dryland conditions, that this several thousand year-old system was allowed to deteriorate.

Similar pre-historic systems were developed throughout the subcontinent under local management. In South India, for instance, under a system of kudimaramath (self-repair) a peasant paid 300 out of every 1000 units of grain earned into a common fund. Two hundred and fifty of them stayed in the village for maintenance of commons and public works. When the British arrived they incrementally upped this tax until it was 650 units out of a thousand, with 590 going to the East India Company. Predictably, 300,000 water tanks were slowly allowed to fall into disrepair.

Anyone concerned about the state of world affairs and serious about anticipating problems would do well to read Water Wars. We in the northeastern U.S. are blessed with abundant rainfall, but we are likely in the years to come to be drawn into struggles in other parts of the world over control of this vital resource, just as we have been over oil in the century we are leaving behind.

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