Posted by Marie Brennan
https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-irrigation-and-flood-control/
https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18947
How important is the control of water to society?
Let me put it this way. There’s a prominent theory in archaeology, called the hydraulic hypothesis, which posits that the need to build and maintain irrigation works for agriculture is the reason states came into existence. We basically invented complex government to make the water go.
Irrigation involves a lot more than just watering plants. These days, of course, we have a lot of technology to back it up: if you have sprinklers in your yard, or a drip system, you’re engaging with the same problem as a farmer thousands of years ago, just by different means. They generally went with the much simpler surface irrigation, where you make a controlled release of water into a field and then let it soak into the soil.
But where does that water come from? Often the answer is “a river” — it’s no accident that early states in arid regions tended to form along major waterways. Limiting yourself solely to the river’s banks, though, will sharply constrain how much you can do, and so irrigation works expand outward through a complex network of canals, ranging from huge central arteries to minor ditches meant to serve one field. In areas where you have a smaller or less reliable river, you might also build storage tanks meant to capture rainfall or the excess of the river when it’s running high, then release that water when it’s needed later on. (One neat modern elaboration on this is that we’re starting to place solar arrays on top of our reservoirs and irrigation canals. It’s flat, open space you can’t build on anyway, and the solar cells help reduce evaporation loss from the surface of the water.)
The reason this may have spurred the development of complex government is not just that it takes a ton of work — though that’s definitely part of it! Digging all those canals and ditches, building those storage tanks, and creating dikes to hold back the water until it’s time for its release requires large groups of people working in a planned, coordinated fashion, the kind of thing for which you might organize corvée labor. More elaborate systems will also involve pumps or other devices to raise water to a higher altitude, since after all, it’s not going to flow uphill of its own accord.
And then all those things require maintenance, too: over time the ditches will silt up, the water will chew away at the dikes, and armies trampling through the fields can inflict massive damage on the whole arrangement. The networked nature of the setup means that if somebody closer to the river than you neglects their maintenance duties, then you might be screwed over, through no fault of your own.
That’s only the start of the potential disputes, though. Even today, the question of who’s allowed to take how much water from a shared source is a contentious one: here in the western United States, the Colorado River holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most litigated water systems in the world, with its waters being allocated among six U.S. states according to a compact signed a hundred years ago. Part of the problem is that the drafters of that compact based their estimates on streamflow records taken during a few decades that turn out to have been the wettest in the last thousand years — meaning they agreed to distribute more water than the river can usually provide — but it’s also a political issue, as California uses its senior status as a state to lay priority claim to the waters during times of drought. Like, oh, the megadrought that’s been going on for the last twenty-five years . . .
While that’s a problem brought on by the scale of population growth and water usage in modern times, these disputes are not new. In Valencia, Spain, the Tribunal of the Waters is one of the oldest European legal institutions still in operation, having been founded by Islamic rulers in the tenth century. This customary court still meets most Thursdays to settle disputes over the distribution of water in the plain of Valencia. Similar institutions have existed or still exist anywhere you need official rulings on who’s taken more than their share of the water or failed to uphold their end of the maintenance bargain.
The flip side to this coin is flood control, keeping river or sea waters out of where you don’t want them to go. Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands — an area sometimes referred to as “the Low Countries” — have always had to contend with the presence of water, through an extensive series of not only ditches but sluice gates, canal locks, and dykes meant to keep the river from overflowing and the sea from just wandering in whenever it feels like it. Of course, these systems are hardly foolproof, and the history of that region is full of flooding disasters. Similar perils threaten cities like New Orleans and Venice, especially as climate change both melts the polar ice caps, raising the average sea level, and fosters stronger storms that can quickly overwhelm the land’s ability to soak up the rain.
Although these two missions work in opposite directions, they share a lot of similarities. Both require broad social cooperation to function; no single person can manage everything on their own, and if too many people or the central organizing institution drop the ball, you can wind up with uninhabitable land. And, of course, they’re not quite as different as they seem, since the same public works that hold back the floodwaters of the river may be used to capture that water and distribute it to the fields later on. But both sea inundations and repeated irrigation can pose the same threat to the soil, which is salinization.
In areas that rely on rainfall for keeping crops watered, you have a better chance of washing away the salts from the soil. But where you flood the fields with water and then leave it to soak in — or where the sea has broken through a dike and overrun the land — evaporation increases the buildup of residues in the soil. In some areas, intensive irrigation can even raise the water table and carry minerals dissolved deeper in the ground up to the surface. In the short run it’s unlikely to be a problem, but when you’re farming the same fields for years, decades, centuries . . . ? The same thing that’s vital to your success at the outset can screw you over later on.
You don’t need to be writing climate-focused fiction to make use of these concepts and problems. They can provide background fodder for political disputes or the poverty that drives your protagonist off the once-fertile land of their ancestors. And an army commander who gives specific orders to destroy the irrigation infrastructure of the region he’s invading? You know that guy’s an unmitigated asshole.
https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-irrigation-and-flood-control/
https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18947
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ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-05-23 02:12 am
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You’ve heard the expression that “truth is stranger than fiction,” haven’t you? The story of how Queen Victoria came to be born a little over two hundred years ago (that’s Victoria at right as a toddler with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, in 1821, by W. Beechey) is one of the more improbable stories in history. Read this and let me know if you don’t think so too.
Welcome back everyone!
