What a classic Kevin Kostner's "Water World" was: the weird helicopter made of string; the gills; the decaying oil tanker; the dark trip to the ocean floor with Jeanne Tripplehorn in tow inside a jellyfish to visit a drowned Manhattan; and, above all, that beautiful catamaran. It is not a great movie, but I loved its outsize scale. You get sucked in and the world really becomes one enormous ocean. Water dominates everything.
Steve Solomon's new book on "Water" is the real world prequel. No fiction here, but nonetheless a multitude of wonderful stories and insights brilliantly told. How, for example, the Persians were thwarted by water. On a the morning of September 23rd, 480 BC, Persian King Xerxes ascended a hilltop overlooking the straights of Salamis near Athens to watch his armada of over 700 50-oar pentecontes crush the smaller Athenian navy. But he had not figured on the tactical and technical superiority of his adversaries. Athens ruler, Themistocles, had spent the previous three years building his fleet of 370 of the 170-oar triremes and training his seamen to ram at the unheard-of speed of 9 knots and to turn rapidly at close quarters. Initially, Themistocles feigned retreat and lured the Persians further up the straights. And then, in an eyeblink, he turned on them and rammed the front lines of the Persian warships, stopping them dead. As successive lines behind them crushed in upon one another, the Greeks outmaneuvered the Persians and by the end of the day they had sunk over 300 Persians ships at a cost of just forty of their own. After Salamis, the Athenians become the predominant naval power of the Eastern Mediterranean for the next two centuries and incidentally gave birth to Western civilization.
The tale of water and civilization is also a tale of massive civil works. On the far side of the world, the fate of the Grand Canal in China seems to have changed the course of that civilization several times in its history. Stretching from Beijing in the North to Shanghai in the South -- almost the distance from New York to Miami -- it was built at the end of the tenth century AD by the Sung emperors. Locks lifted shipping over mountain ranges. Millions worked and died in its construction. In places 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep, it accommodated sailing ships and paddle boats in the thousands. It supported a huge internal trade moving manufactured goods, food and troops during times of prosperity and plenty.
Its state of repair was an infallible barometer of the health of the empire. Its fortunes had waxed and waned more than once by the time the Ming dynasty came to power during a period of disrepair in the early fifteenth century. At that time the Ming emperor built a formidable navy to protect the coastal trade from pirates as routes much as to develop foreign commercial opportunities. But under Admiral Cheng Ho Chinese ocean-going fleets sailed through the South East Asian archipelago and across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf, establish China as the preeminent naval power of the day. But within two decades, the Grand Canal had been restored, ship-builders were ordered to focus on canal transport and the great ocean-going treasure fleet was disbanded. The restoration of the Grand Canal may have thwarted the Western expansion of China's empire so that it was Europe that discovered China rather than the other way round.
There must be at least a hundred equally fascinating stories in this book. But there is a more serious purpose to Solomon's treatise. He sees a world where the rise and fall of civilizations is intimately connected to their use of water for transportation and trade and, more importantly, to support intensive agriculture and urbanization. And today, we face hydrological challenges in many parts of the world where there is too little water not only in and around Israel and the failing states of the Horn of Africa; but also in India and China with their burgeoning economies and population needs and in the American West; and if global warming causes sea levels to rise by even a few meters, far too much water for Bangladesh to survive as a place for human habitation. Our global civilization is at risk here.
What should we do? Solomon sees no magic bullets, alas. All this cautionary tale suggests is that we should think on a scale which is a couple of orders magnitude larger than the one we operate on now. Somehow, we need to figure out how to organize a world economy in which massive public works are migrations of peoples have to be planned and executed over decades under conditions of enormous uncertainty. Otherwise, our future may look uncomfortably like "Water World."