Water History and the Anthropocene

Vipul Singh / Speakinghistory / November 2019 / 1236 words (5 minutes)

BOOK REVIEW

Jeremy J. Schmidt, Water: Abundance, Scarcity and Security in the Age of Humanity (New Delhi: Sage, 2018), pages 308.

Droughts have become recurrent now a days all around the world, and climate scientists look at these unruly behaviours of nature as the result of climate change. Jeremy Schmidt begins his book with 1977 California drought, when Luna Leopold, the first chief hydrologist of US was requested to address the issue, and he came up with solution – ‘reverence for rivers’ and ‘water management’. The book takes a diametrically opposite position, and argues that much of the water problems being faced by the world are the outcome of the ‘philosophy of water management’. Jeremy Schmidt central argument revolves around the twenty first century idea of Anthropocene popularised by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer. The core thesis of Anthropocene is that humans and their activities have affected nature over the last two centuries or so. While arguing about anthropogenic or human induced changes the Anthropocene theoretically emphasizes that individuals and states owe a collective responsibility for the future of the world. Conceptually, the implicit proposition is that the same force that previously brought about unintended changes in nature could be regulated to create a world for the generations to come. In the same vein, Jeremy Schmidt recounts how water also began to be seen as a resource. Since resources often were considered to be belonging to the state, so water like any other resources was also considered as a thing to be managed. But while we did so, it affected our ‘attitudes towards governing people’ (12).  In order to prove his point, he traces the idea of governance to early twentieth century when water management and conservation of W.J.McGee became very popular. McGee explicitly propagated that water is ‘a resource’ (79). Gradually, people of the United States were convinced about the need to bring resources under the watch of the state. It all started from the governance of land and forest, and gradually water too began to be quantified and controlled. A general formula for governing water became ‘explicit in global water governance a century later’ (88). So as opposed to the globally accepted idea among the hydrologists about managing water, this book shows that many of the water problems are the outcome of a philosophy of water management. Schmidt traces the origin of the philosophy of water management to 1885 when it was initially articulated through Charles Lyell’s identification of a planetary condition since the last Ice age as the Holocene (p.8). He argues that although Anthropocene came into existence to analogize a period in which humans also significantly alter geological process, but gradually there were efforts to conceptualize the quantitative impacts of human activity on the Earth system. Thus, the conceptualizations of Anthropocene had set a narrative from which the nature scholars could not escape. It winded its way into ‘interdisciplinary scientific networks’ that understood water also as part of the Earth system (p.12). The narrative of ‘normal water’ first addressed that water was ‘once abundant’, has now ‘become scarce’ because of mismanagement, and that water is now become essential to be managed to avoid interstate conflict, for human development and health (p.41).

The book draws on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State to suggest that ‘high modernism’ transformed nature into natural resources. Pre-modern understanding of water came under the calculating eye of bureaucracy, which instituted ‘new forms of accounting based on scientific rationality’ (p.28). Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was the watershed moment of ‘high modernism’ when construction of dams and the generation of electricity were seen as significant, and ‘science of water supply was increasingly aligned with the science of money’ (p.114). Jeremy Schmidt shows how TVA became a model for adoption in terms of water management all around the world. The model was so influential that it began to be regarded as the blueprint for all the international watershed programmes. James Scott has cautioned at such adoptions and says that it is ‘a desire with a fatal flaw’.

Jeremy Schmidt also writes how TVA presented a model before the world, specially the developing world, that their abundant water could be used as an asset. Its main thrust was on supply-side water management because it would ‘provide material corollary’ and opportunity to ‘international financial backers to extract rents from the loans needed to build them’ (p.114). He says that David Lilienthal travelled to different developing nations to promote this new ‘American liberalism’. (p.114). That is why among many other travels in 1951, ‘Mr. TVA’, as Lilienthal was nicknamed, also visited the Indus Basin that was a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, and he proposed that the TVA model could be applied ‘to prevent political crisis’ (p.111). It may be noted that during cold war years, ‘the United States and the Soviet Union saw themselves locked in an economic and public relations struggle for which dams seemed most fruitful’ (John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, (New York: W.W.Norton, 2000). The United States promoted TVA model and funded many dam constructions of Asian and South American countries through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Thus, dams not only allowed international financial backers to extract interests from the loans given to build them, through it attempts were also made to ‘outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists’ (p.108). Very soon economists, engineers, agronomists, and planners, who had served in the TVA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or the Department of the Treasury moved to the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, or US aid, bringing their experience and ideas with them. Techne were deployed by the state to suppress metis i.e. the skills and knowledge acquired through many years of practice. The ill effects of dams began to be felt all around the world very soon.

Another significant personality who transformed the understanding of water management in the United States and later other parts of the world is Gilbert F. White, who believed that other than supply side management of water, demand dynamics are also important. In 1992, at the UN Conference on Environment and Development Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) was ‘linked to water scarcity’ (p.155). Very soon hydrology, climate and management of water resource began to be studied together.  In that sense water became an economic product. Many scholars like Gilbert White began to push the idea that there has been acceleration in ’human appropriation of freshwater since the industrial revolution’(156). In 1993, Gleick’s edited volume Water in Crisis openly linked hydrologic and climate data to water management and development. Glibert White too believed that ‘with sane realistic recognition of the physical and social characteristics of water’ one can work out a sound water policy (156).

As part of his concluding chapter Jeremy Schmidt stresses again on the issue of Anthropocene. Although he agrees that globally the United States has been followed as a model of progress, but at the same time he thinks that the proposition of abundance and scarcity are basically the colonial effects.  He suggests that social scientists should at least refuse to see water as a resource. The reason why he is arguing so is that by refusing to think of water as only a resource one would also be keeping oneself away from pushing judgements about how to govern water resources in the Anthropocene (229). Schmidt cites the example of Aldo Leopold, who viewed resources, conservation and human relationships to the environment in a varied way. To him, the ‘land’ was not just land in literal sense of the term, but included ‘waters, plants and animals’, and ‘everything assembled within the category of ‘‘land’” (p.216). Leopold was of the view that we could manage all these systems, but it was also essential that every part of the ecological system from weeds to plants was conserved. Schmidt advocates for Leopold’s ecological thinking in which all the species and fauna were ‘entitled to share the land with us’ (p.218). Schmidt argues that Anthropocene as such is a novel concept, but it is not right to view water as a resource which humans have spoiled. Telling the story in terms of ‘water and man’ often holds us hostage forcing in turn to think in terms of water engineering and management.

Schmidt has used huge variety of source materials and his book is thus very engaging. It will be of interest to scholars working in the area of environmental history, specially water history.