Drinking Water (6 page)

What about beauty? Over one-quarter of bottled water drinkers believe it improves the appearance of their hair or skin. Despite lots of websites claiming that drinking lots of water will make your skin smoother and more youthful, there is no evidence that drinking water offers dermatological benefits or prevents wrinkling.

And weight loss? We often hear that drinking throughout the day will make us feel less hungry. If you drink regularly, the pounds will melt away. If only …

In fact, as Pennsylvania State University nutritionist Barbara Rolls explains, “hunger and thirst are controlled by separate systems in the body. People are unlikely to mistake thirst for hunger.” Filling your belly with water, in other words, doesn’t make you less hungry. Nor, she found, does drinking water before or during a meal affect appetite. Eating water-rich foods, however, does make a difference. Subjects who ate soups were less hungry and consumed fewer calories. Better to eat chicken soup than chicken casserole and a glass of water.

But does it have to be water? Doesn’t drinking some liquids, like soda or coffee, cause us to lose more in urine than we take in? Some beverages are diuretics, but only alcohol comes close to being a net loss in hydration and that’s if you consume several servings. Researchers have found that the body retains about two-thirds of a cup of coffee if you’re not a regular java junkie. If your body is accustomed to caffeine, though, then your body retains almost all of what you drink.

Nutritionists counsel that thirst is one of the body’s strongest signals. If you are from Maine and hiking in the Arizona desert, of course, you may not recognize the symptoms of dehydration. For everyday living, though, if you are thirsty, your body will let you know it.

2

Who Gets to Drink?

T
HE EPIC
1962
MOVIE
Lawrence of Arabia
DOMINATED THAT
year’s Academy Awards, winning Best Picture and six other Oscars. One classic scene features Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) first meeting his future Arab brother-in-arms, Ali ibn el Kharish (played by Omar Sharif). Lawrence, parched after his travels through the desert, has reached an oasis and is greedily drinking from the well with his guide, who is from the Hazimi tribe. His guide tells Lawrence they are drinking from a well belonging to the Harif tribe, a “dirty” people. From the distance, slowly becoming visible in the shimmering waves of the desert sun, approaches the armed and dangerous-looking Ali ibn el Kharish. Panicking, Lawrence’s guide pulls a gun but is shot down by Ali ibn el Karish. A wonderfully terse dialogue follows.

As a scarce resource, safe drinking water has been governed by rules from the earliest times. Indeed, rules establishing access to water in arid regions may very well have predated property rules for
land. As the shooting from
Lawrence of Arabia
amply demonstrates, in the desert, control of an oasis is far more important than control of the dry desert around it.

Water is one of the few essential requirements for life. Without water, plants wilt, shrivel, and die. Even viruses, which may not even be alive, go dormant and “turn off” without water. Throughout history, societies have been predicated on ready access to sources of drinking water, whether in the cisterns of Masada high above the Dead Sea, the graceful aqueducts carrying water into Rome, or the sacred Aboriginal water holes in Australia’s outback. While not an obvious issue to us in twenty-first-century America, management of drinking water as a resource—who gets it, when they get it, and how much they get—has been a life-and-death matter for much of human history.

While we tend not to think much about who gets to drink, drinking water is a dauntingly complex resource to manage. For millennia, human societies have faced the challenge of supplying adequate quality and quantities of drinking water. Whether limited by arid environments or urbanization, provision of clean drinking water is a prerequisite of any enduring society, but it is a multifaceted task, in large part because water is a multifaceted resource.

Drinking water is most obviously a
physical resource
, one of the few truly essential requirements for life. Regardless of the god you worship or the color of your skin, if you go without water for three days in an arid environment your life is in danger. And water’s physical characteristics confound easy management. Water is heavy—it is difficult to move uphill. Water is unwieldy—it cannot be packed or contained easily. And drinking water is fragile—it easily becomes contaminated and unfit for consumption. That much seems obvious.

Less apparent, though, is that drinking water can also be regarded as a
cultural resource
, of religious significance in many societies. It can also be a
social resource
, for in some societies access to water reveals much about relative status, and a
political resource
, as the provision of water to citizens can help justify a regime. And finally, when scarce, water can become an
economic resource
. Taking
these facets together, one can ask how different societies, from ancient times to the present, have thought about drinking water, and how they have determined access. These questions are, of course, interrelated. How we think of water, whether as a sacred gift or a good for sale, both influences and is influenced by how we manage access to drinking water.

On July 28, 2010, for example, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution proclaiming a human right to “safe and clean drinking water.” Maude Barlow, a famed international campaigner on this issue, declared that “when the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written, no one could foresee a day when water would be a contested area. But in 2010, it is not an exaggeration to say that the lack of access to clean water is the greatest human rights violation in the world.” And making this struggle harder, she argued, has been the commodification of water: “Instead of allowing this vital resource to become a commodity sold to the highest bidder, we believe that access to clean water for basic needs is a fundamental human right.” The public interest group Food & Water Watch describes the conflict more starkly: “Around the world, multinational corporations are seizing control of public water resources and prioritizing profits for their stockholders and executives over the needs of the communities they serve.” Should water be a basic right or a marketable good?

As we shall see later in this book, this conflict is right now playing out in stark and often violent encounters in water privatization debates around the world. While much ink and, unfortunately, blood, has been shed over this debate, it has been remarkably lacking in any sense of history or what we have learned over time. After all, it’s not as if access to water is somehow a new issue or concern.

An age-old concern, the story of how societies have managed the complex resource of drinking water goes back well over five thousand years. Through a voyage across ancient cultures in the Middle East, Europe, Australia, and Asia, we will find that a society’s management of something as seemingly simple as drinking water is actually no simple matter.

G
IVEN THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF DRINKING WATER TO SURVIVAL
, it should come as no surprise that human settlements have always depended on ready access to sources of drinking water. As societies developed from hunter-gatherer economies to more advanced grazing and agriculture, the need for secure, abundant supplies of water became even more important. Archaeological excavations have found that settlements since the Neolithic time go hand in hand with water engineering. As settled populations grew, access to and control over water sources needed to grow at the same time. Cisterns and wells carved from rock have been found in excavations at Ebla, in Syria, dating from 2350 BC. Even earlier water storage sites have been found in northeastern Jordan, dating from the fourth millennium BC. Though half a world away, water storage basins with storage capacities of 10,000 to 25,000 gallons of water have been excavated in the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest, and large collection and storage structures have been uncovered throughout the Maya lowlands.

The Minoan civilization in Crete had flushing toilets and domestic water as early as 1700 BC, while tunnels directing water from reservoirs and plumbing have been identified at ancient sites in Iran, Palestine, and Greece. Perhaps the most impressive ancient water engineering in the Americas was constructed at Machu Picchu by the Incas, who faced the challenge of moving water from a distant spring to their capital, located at an elevation of more than seven thousand feet. Sloping canals delivered water through agricultural terraces to the emperor’s residence and then, through a series of sixteen fountains, down the mountain slope to the city’s residents.

The Old Testament is filled with references to springs and wells, their importance clearly evident from the fact that each was given a special name. A desert people, the ancient Jews understood all too well the importance of access to water. As the Book of Jeremiah plaintively recounts, failure to bring water was calamitous.

The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the drought: “Judah mourns, and her gates languish; her people lament on the
ground, and the cry of Jerusalem goes up. Her nobles send their servants for water; they come to the cisterns; they find no water; they return with their vessels empty; they are ashamed and confounded and cover their heads.”

When water was scarce, who had access to it, and how was this determined? Jewish law regarding drinking water has been traced as far back as 3000 BC, when Semitic tribes settled in Ur in the land of Mesopotamia. The basic rule was one of common property. As reflected in the later writings of the Talmud: “Rivers and streams forming springs, these belong to every man.” Because water from natural sources was provided by God, sale of these waters would be tantamount to desecration—selling divine gifts.

Not all sources of water were natural, however. Many important sources of water came from wells, where human labor was necessary to gain access to the groundwater. In these cases, drinking water was managed as a community resource, though not free for the taking. Within each community, Jewish law prioritized access according to use, with high priority given to drinking water, followed by irrigation and grazing. Importantly, however, the highest priority for access was granted to those in need, regardless of whether or not they belonged to the well’s community of owners.

In practice, this amounted to a Right of Thirst, and this type of rule makes perfect sense. Any traveler in an arid region could foresee a situation where he or she might need water from strangers for survival. A rule that gave water to those in need might very well one day benefit them or their tribal members.

Islamic water law is quite similar to Jewish water law in both substance and significance. Indeed, the Arabic word for Islamic law, “Sharia,” literally means “the way to water.” Priority was given for drinking, then domestic needs, then agriculture and grazing, favoring needs in the community over outside users. There was also a Right of Thirst. The Koran clearly instructs, “Anyone who gives water to a living creature will be rewarded. … To the man who refuses his surplus water, Allah will say: ‘Today I refuse thee
my favor, just as thou refused the surplus of something that thou hadst not made thyself.’” Since water is a gift from God to all people, sharing water was regarded as a holy duty. Access to water for basic survival was a right common to those inside and outside the community.

Islamic water law was largely adopted into the legal code of the Ottoman Empire, the vast kingdom spanning much of southern Europe and northern Africa. It is still followed by the Bedouin in the Negev and the Berbers in Morocco. As a scholar of the region has described, drinking water is “sacrosanct and neither may be denied anyone for any reason at any time.” While it makes for riveting cinema, the scene at the well in
Lawrence of Arabia
was likely the invention of the British screenwriter. It certainly does not reflect the Right of Thirst.

In Australia, the driest inhabited continent, the need for rules over access to drinking water is self-evident. Given the scarcity of water, all uses are carefully managed and Aborigines draw no distinction between water for drinking and other purposes. Most water sources are sacred parts of the landscape, and knowledge of their location is vital to a group’s survival (a truly critical example of intellectual property). Given the variability of rainfall, sharing has played a key role in water management. Researchers have described the system as “always ask.” While water is a closely protected community resource, in practice those requesting water are given permission to drink. As with the Bedouin and Berbers, it is widely understood that those with water today may find themselves needing water in the future. The golden rule applies: give and you shall receive.

In rural Africa, too, one can find clear parallels to the Right of Thirst. A study of communal lands in Zimbabwe, for example, reported that private wells and boreholes are still made available for communal drinking. The authors concluded that “cutting across all the different tenurial systems is the notion that no one should be denied access to safe drinking water.” This is not to say, however, that it is free for the taking. In times of scarcity, communities may restrict the amount of water gathered, banning, for example, the
filling of large drums. Moreover, people must ask permission from the owner prior to using the well. As one person described, “You go to someone you are in good books with.” If someone gathers too much water, uses it for a different purpose than requested, or is unhygienic near the well, then his access rights are limited or even denied.