WATER COURSES
(Reprinted from Equinox magazine, 1990)
by Silver Donald Cameron
"I saw a graveyard of ships rotting in the dried-up seabed," writes Sandra Postel in Pillar of Sand, her new book on the world's water problems. "I stood on a seaside bluff outside the old port town of Mynak, but I saw no water - the coastline and the sea were 40 kilometers away. But to my eyes, the strangest and eeriest sight of all was the salt: vast areas of the land glisten white, like new-fallen snow."
This is the shore - or was - of the Aral Sea in formerly Soviet Asia, once the fourth-largest lake in the world. The Aral Sea was the climatic anchor of this largely-desert region; it moderated extremes of heat and cold, supported a thriving fishery, and sustained small agricultural districts at the deltas of the two Himalayan rivers which fed it. In 1956, Soviet planners opened the first of several upstream canals, designed to irrigate the deserts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Before 1956, 50 cubic kilometers of water reached the sea; by the early 1980s, none did.
As the rivers shrank, they became more salty. Fresh water is never entirely fresh; as it flows over earth and stone it picks up various trace chemicals, chiefly salts. When the water arrives at its destination and can flow no further it evaporates, leaving the salts behind. That is why the ocean is salty, and why landlocked basins like the Aral Sea, the Dead Sea and Great Salt Lake are extremely salty. The same mechanism is at work in a big reservoir behind a dam, or in an irrigated field.
As the two rivers descended through a series of dams, turbines and irrigated fields, they became loaded not only with salt, but also with pesticide and fertilizer residues from the huge irrigated farms which had been established upstream. The receding waters of the Aral Sea exposed a wasteland of salty, polluted silt which was picked up by the wind and blown as far as Belorus, 2000 kilometres away. Locally, the concentration of toxins created an epidemic of throat cancer, made it dangerous for mothers to breast-feed their babies and killed one newborn child out of every ten.
I write these lines, walk into the kitchen and turn on the tap. Spring water from my well flows into my tumbler: clear, sweet, cold. And there is the Canadian dilemma, right there in my hand. I have plenty of good water, and people in Mynak might well kill for it. Ismail Serageldin, vice president of the World Bank, says flatly that "the wars of the next century will be about water."
