Oh goddess! How well I remember those words from a poem I studied - get ready for this - in HIGH SCHOOL. Darlings! I graduated in 1969. Oy. It's from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and one of the reasons it is still studied today is because of that haunting refrain.
Once again, so, I was reminded of that powerful language when I read this article a few days ago in The Wall Street Journal. Everyone should read WSJ - it give you insight into what the enemy is thinking.
At least three years ago the investment club of which I am a part took heed of the continuing droughts and horrid water pollution in China and India, and we invested accordingly. Our investments are paying a modest return at present - but in the next 10, 20, 30 years...well, we hope to cash out of the club very very rich...
Want to Reign Supreme? Control the Water
From ancient Egypt to imperial China, those who could best manage great rivers have ruled.
April 30, 2011
By STEVEN SOLOMON
It is a testament to the power of rivers that Yu the Great, the founding hero of ancient China's Yellow River civilization, was a water engineer. In the 23rd century B.C., as the legend goes, he tamed the deadly floods that gave the river the nickname "China's sorrow" by diverting its muddy waters into irrigation channels for nourishing fields of millet and wheat.
Confucius later extolled Yu as an exemplar for China's elite governing technocrats. To this day, river management and governance are so closely correlated in China that the character for "politics" is derived from roots meaning "flood control." [See note below.]
Only a minuscule six-thousandths of 1% of the world's freshwater runs through rivers, and societies everywhere must use this scarce resource for everything from drinking and bathing to irrigation and producing energy. Effective water management offers the prospect of life and prosperity, but water's more extreme manifestations are great destroyers, in the form of floods, storms and droughts. Managing this uneasy life-and-death relationship has been a priority for every civilization.
Since ancient times, rivers have been seen as the link between the temporal world and the eternal cycles of death, fertility and rebirth. In the Bible, the Garden of Eden gives rise to four great rivers. Purification of the deceased in the holy Ganges is paralleled by the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Mesopotamia's flood story centered on a single, forewarned family that survived by building an ark (possibly inspired by an actual flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak in 3100 B.C.) and is strikingly similar to the later stories of Noah and Hindu mythology.
Political leadership has often been grounded in water's mystical authority. Sargon, who usurped power in Akkadia in 2334 B.C., was said to have been an abandoned baby, drawn from the river, who grew up to lead his people—a tale recounted about Moses and ancient Rome's founding twins, Romulus and Remus. Chinese emperors ruled through a "mandate from Heaven" that was validated in part by sufficient rain and successful waterworks. The Babylonian King Hammurabi proclaimed himself the divine "provider of abundant waters" who "heaps the granaries full of grain." He worked hard to make good on this claim, overseeing irrigation projects and incorporating water management into the laws of his famous code.
In modern times, we have Franklin Roosevelt's dedication in 1935 of the giant Hoover Dam, which transformed America's arid Southwest by providing irrigation, flood control and electricity. Prime Minister Nehru called the massive Bhakra Dam "the new temple of resurgent India," and Egypt's Gamal Nasser compared the Aswan Dam to a modern pyramid. Globally, some 45,000 large dams have been built (half of them in China), and they have been linchpins of the Green Revolution in agriculture, allowing much of the world to be fed reliably for the first time.
The Aswan Dam transformed the Nile beyond pharaonic imagining. Until Aswan, the long but shallow Nile stood apart among great rivers as the only natural irrigation system in world history. Its regular annual floods came and went in miraculous synchronization with the planting and harvesting seasons, flushed out poisonous salts that afflict artificial irrigation, and left behind fresh silt that rendered man-made fertilizers unnecessary.
Pharaohs reigned with supreme authoritarian power on the strength of the food surpluses generated with the assistance of their priestly water managers, who knew the esoteric secrets of the river and mobilized crews of forced peasant labor. But there was one key factor that the pharaohs could not control: the size of the Nile floods. To an astonishing degree, robust flows corresponded to food surpluses and periods of political unity; low flood periods to famine and dynastic collapse.
For 5,000 years, until the arrival of modern irrigation in the 19th century, the population of Egypt oscillated between 2.5 million and 5 million, depending on the size of the Nile floods. With the building of the Aswan Dam, its population reached 80 million—and is still soaring.
But the Nile also became a glorified irrigation ditch, dependent on artificial fertilizer and drainage like so many other river systems. Today, it is among the 70 major rivers—including the Yellow, Indus, Euphrates and Colorado—that is so heavily tapped that its flow barely trickles to the sea.
Two giant river systems that so far have defied human control are the Ganges-Brahmaputra and the Amazon (with two times and 10 times the flow of the Mississippi, respectively). Some half a billion of the world's poorest people depend on the waters of the Ganges, but the river has little storage capacity for resisting the ravages of extreme monsoon seasons. Moreover, the holy river is perilously polluted with human and man-made waste.
Until the 1970s, the supergiant Amazon, which alone accounts for one-fifth of the world's river runoff to the oceans, was scarcely developed by the nations through which it runs. As a result, it is still home to 60% of the world's remaining rain forests and remains the planet's largest store of biodiversity.
Today, however, logging, mining, ranching and the aggressive building of hydroelectric dams by Brazil are transforming the Amazon, sometimes for the worse. And so continues the quest to harness the most indispensable of the planet's resources.
—Mr. Solomon is the author of "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization."
Note:
Dr. David Lee in his "The Genealogy of Chess," directly tied the control of water and disastrous flooding to the creation of the ancient board games of Go and the later game of Xiang Qi, which features the Celestial River a/k/a the Milky Way, as a divider between two opposing forces and became popular just before the Han Dynasty and through it's reign (c. 220 BCE - 220 CE).
In the earliest days, attempts to control the ravaging floods and the incredible water shortages that occurred during droughts even way back then were part divination, part engineering, part feng shui, part pure magic, and a lot of actual science!
Once again, so, I was reminded of that powerful language when I read this article a few days ago in The Wall Street Journal. Everyone should read WSJ - it give you insight into what the enemy is thinking.
At least three years ago the investment club of which I am a part took heed of the continuing droughts and horrid water pollution in China and India, and we invested accordingly. Our investments are paying a modest return at present - but in the next 10, 20, 30 years...well, we hope to cash out of the club very very rich...
Want to Reign Supreme? Control the Water
From ancient Egypt to imperial China, those who could best manage great rivers have ruled.
April 30, 2011
By STEVEN SOLOMON
It is a testament to the power of rivers that Yu the Great, the founding hero of ancient China's Yellow River civilization, was a water engineer. In the 23rd century B.C., as the legend goes, he tamed the deadly floods that gave the river the nickname "China's sorrow" by diverting its muddy waters into irrigation channels for nourishing fields of millet and wheat.
Confucius later extolled Yu as an exemplar for China's elite governing technocrats. To this day, river management and governance are so closely correlated in China that the character for "politics" is derived from roots meaning "flood control." [See note below.]
Only a minuscule six-thousandths of 1% of the world's freshwater runs through rivers, and societies everywhere must use this scarce resource for everything from drinking and bathing to irrigation and producing energy. Effective water management offers the prospect of life and prosperity, but water's more extreme manifestations are great destroyers, in the form of floods, storms and droughts. Managing this uneasy life-and-death relationship has been a priority for every civilization.
Since ancient times, rivers have been seen as the link between the temporal world and the eternal cycles of death, fertility and rebirth. In the Bible, the Garden of Eden gives rise to four great rivers. Purification of the deceased in the holy Ganges is paralleled by the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Mesopotamia's flood story centered on a single, forewarned family that survived by building an ark (possibly inspired by an actual flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak in 3100 B.C.) and is strikingly similar to the later stories of Noah and Hindu mythology.
Political leadership has often been grounded in water's mystical authority. Sargon, who usurped power in Akkadia in 2334 B.C., was said to have been an abandoned baby, drawn from the river, who grew up to lead his people—a tale recounted about Moses and ancient Rome's founding twins, Romulus and Remus. Chinese emperors ruled through a "mandate from Heaven" that was validated in part by sufficient rain and successful waterworks. The Babylonian King Hammurabi proclaimed himself the divine "provider of abundant waters" who "heaps the granaries full of grain." He worked hard to make good on this claim, overseeing irrigation projects and incorporating water management into the laws of his famous code.
In modern times, we have Franklin Roosevelt's dedication in 1935 of the giant Hoover Dam, which transformed America's arid Southwest by providing irrigation, flood control and electricity. Prime Minister Nehru called the massive Bhakra Dam "the new temple of resurgent India," and Egypt's Gamal Nasser compared the Aswan Dam to a modern pyramid. Globally, some 45,000 large dams have been built (half of them in China), and they have been linchpins of the Green Revolution in agriculture, allowing much of the world to be fed reliably for the first time.
 |
| Egypt and the Nile, late 19th century CE, before the Aswan Dam Imagine 6000 years of this... |
Pharaohs reigned with supreme authoritarian power on the strength of the food surpluses generated with the assistance of their priestly water managers, who knew the esoteric secrets of the river and mobilized crews of forced peasant labor. But there was one key factor that the pharaohs could not control: the size of the Nile floods. To an astonishing degree, robust flows corresponded to food surpluses and periods of political unity; low flood periods to famine and dynastic collapse.
For 5,000 years, until the arrival of modern irrigation in the 19th century, the population of Egypt oscillated between 2.5 million and 5 million, depending on the size of the Nile floods. With the building of the Aswan Dam, its population reached 80 million—and is still soaring.
But the Nile also became a glorified irrigation ditch, dependent on artificial fertilizer and drainage like so many other river systems. Today, it is among the 70 major rivers—including the Yellow, Indus, Euphrates and Colorado—that is so heavily tapped that its flow barely trickles to the sea.
Two giant river systems that so far have defied human control are the Ganges-Brahmaputra and the Amazon (with two times and 10 times the flow of the Mississippi, respectively). Some half a billion of the world's poorest people depend on the waters of the Ganges, but the river has little storage capacity for resisting the ravages of extreme monsoon seasons. Moreover, the holy river is perilously polluted with human and man-made waste.
Until the 1970s, the supergiant Amazon, which alone accounts for one-fifth of the world's river runoff to the oceans, was scarcely developed by the nations through which it runs. As a result, it is still home to 60% of the world's remaining rain forests and remains the planet's largest store of biodiversity.
Today, however, logging, mining, ranching and the aggressive building of hydroelectric dams by Brazil are transforming the Amazon, sometimes for the worse. And so continues the quest to harness the most indispensable of the planet's resources.
—Mr. Solomon is the author of "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization."
Note:
Dr. David Lee in his "The Genealogy of Chess," directly tied the control of water and disastrous flooding to the creation of the ancient board games of Go and the later game of Xiang Qi, which features the Celestial River a/k/a the Milky Way, as a divider between two opposing forces and became popular just before the Han Dynasty and through it's reign (c. 220 BCE - 220 CE).
In the earliest days, attempts to control the ravaging floods and the incredible water shortages that occurred during droughts even way back then were part divination, part engineering, part feng shui, part pure magic, and a lot of actual science!
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