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Lapham's Quarterly: Water
- GenresHistory
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
21 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 18, 2020
The three essays at the end earned the fourth star, otherwise this was just okay. I don't think the subject matter of "Water" is as interesting as lot of the others have been for this publication.
November 14, 2018
Ploughing through Water. I’m absorbed with this issue.
You can lead a horse to Water, but you can’t make him read… carefully. Such is the sum of my pedestrian effort to drink at the fount of knowledge and review/comment on Lapham’s Quarterly.
_______________________________________________
Origin of You can Lead a Horse to Water
This phrase comes from the 12th century and may be the single oldest distinctly English proverb that is still used today. This phrase originated in English and is one of the language’s earliest proverbs.
Its first recorded English use was in 1175 in Old English Homilies:
Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken
[who can give water to the horse that will not drink of its own accord?]
It appeared in John Heywood’s proverb collection of 1546:
“A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will. (https://writingexplained.org/idiom-di...)
And this:
It also appeared in literature over the centuries in a variety of forms; for example, in the play Narcissus, which was published in 1602, of unknown authorship, subtitled as A Twelfe Night merriment, played by youths of the parish at the College of Saint John the Baptist in Oxford:
Your parents have done what they coode,
They can but bringe horse to the water brinke,
But horse may choose whether that horse will drinke.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that ‘lead a horse to water…’ got a substantial rewrite, when Dorothy Parker reworked it from its proverbial form into the epigram ‘you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think‘.
(https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/y...)
_______________________________________________
To me it is curious that there is no reference in this issue to Dune, the science fiction classic by Frank Herbert which centers on an arid planet where water is so precious that people wear ‘stillsuits’ to capture and recycle sweat and urine, and cadavers are harvested for water. LQ’s 221 pages cannot be expected to cover everything I suppose, just whet the thought palate.
I found that the average adult male is 60% water. https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-of... “…fat tissue does not have as much water as lean tissue. In adult women, fat makes up more of the body than men, so they have about 55% of their bodies made of water.” https://water.usgs.gov/edu/propertyyo... Thus, I’ve read, an obese person could have as little as 45% water by weight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_water
Fortunately, no one is harvesting any of us for water, yet. That I know of. Excessive bleeding, virtual and literal, seems to suffice.
I was led to the thought that the vast blocks of Antarctic landscape ice that are calving into the ocean and raising sea levels are fresh water diluting into salt water. We’re not harvesting that water to drink or irrigate. WWF informs me:
“Water covers 70% of our planet, and it is easy to think that it will always be plentiful. However, freshwater—the stuff we drink, bathe in, irrigate our farm fields with—is incredibly rare. Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use.” https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats...
Onward… …to CHANGE. (The only constant.)
The hallowed, introductory, Preamble has a guest writer! This is the first guest author of the Preamble in the 10+ year/43 issue history of the Quarterly. We are informed:
“Lapham’s Quarterly inaugurates the second decade of its existence by occasionally
recruiting the introductory essay from writers blessed with a broad knowledge of the
topic at band. Donovan Hohn is the author of Moby-Duck: The True Story of
28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea. … Lewis H. Lapham will return to this space in the next issue.” (p. 13)
Mr. Lapham, age 83 1/2, is a life-long writer, author, and editor. He is deserving, and wise I suspect, to prepare to pass the baton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H...
Does Mr. Hohn do justice to his task? I think so.
“This is a thirsty issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, an exaltation of water and wetness.
The writers gathered in these pages walk the banks of rivers, from the Danube to the
Yangtze to the Nile. They embark. They put on waders and conduct sampling expeditions. They douse. They sound. They visit aqueducts and public baths and bottling
plants. They dive—sometimes without leaving their desks. Like the cub river pilot
Samuel Clemens, they read ripples, fathom depths, chart currents, decipher water’s
secrets (Mississippi River, page 28).” (p. 15)
By my count, in 11 pages (a substantial number for LQ preambles) Mr. Hohn makes 16 references to the contents. In the previous issue Rule Of Law, Mr. Lapham, on the other hand, wrote 9 pages of preamble (5 of them 1/2 pages, 4 full pages) with 6 content references. It seems he usually has more. By contrast, the Future issue of Fall 2011 has 7 pages, nearly all full, and 12 references. I suspect a trend or standard is inconsequential.
Mr. Hohn’s preamble is autobiographical, as is Lewis Lapham’s usually. He entwines references to pieces in the issue with his personal experiences of global travel.
“Several summers ago, I found myself taking a walk under the midnight sun along the shores of the Northwest Passage accompanied by an Inuit kid named Puglik.” …
“The road was muddy. The Arctic in summer’s thaw is a muddy place, muddier and muddier as the planet warms. For underdressed pilgrims on a hike, however, the weather was still plenty cold. A wind refrigerated by sea ice was giving us all the shivers, and Puglik kept wiping his nose with his sleeve, carrying on about his favorite video games and pointing out local landmarks. In a graveyard atop a hill, wooden crosses had begun to topple and tilt. His ancestors were all buried there, at least the ones he knew about, Puglik said, but now the entire hill was thawing, the graveyard slowly sliding toward the sea.”
“To windward flowed a glassy stream in which you could see a weir, a funnel of rocks with which locals corralled fish for easy harvesting, as people had been doing since the ice sheets retreated. The stream was popular with migrating waterfowl as well as fish. Geese that had wintered in Biloxi nested here on the tundra. We know that migrating birds follow spring. They’re chasing sunlight, of course, but they’re also chasing wetlands; they, too, make pilgrimages to water. We came to a bend in the road that conformed to a bend in the stream, and in the stream’s bend was an eddy that conformed to some invisible bend in the cosmos, deep enough for a swimming hole. “We call this part of the river,” Puglik said, “an ‘Inuit Jacuzzi.’ ”” (p. 18)
He writes well, IMO. “A wind refrigerated by sea ice… ” “To windward flowed a glassy stream…”
The bits of information woven throughout are tantalizing and thought-provoking:
“I’d joined a cryologist with the Canadian Ice Service on a survey conducted by helicopter. The cryologist—or “ice pick,” as people in her line of work are colloquially known—had to chart and classify the puzzling ice pack visible below. Although it had thawed and thinned earlier than it had in any previous year on record, there remained a multitude of ice to see and classify. The names for its varieties, I learned, are as numerous and lovely as those for clouds: frazil, pancake, nilas, grease, agglomerated brash. The language of ice describes more than dimensions and shapes. It names subtle gradations in the phase changes water undergoes as it solidifies and expands or liquefies and condenses.” (p. 18)
“These days I live in southeast Michigan, which is to say I dwell in a watershed of paradox. Here we are, at the edge of the Great Lakes, which together contain 84 percent of North America’s and 20 percent of the world’s accessible freshwater. The Great Lakes are puddles of glacial melt. Rainfall and tributaries contribute only 1 percent of their total volume. Much of the rest is “fossil water,” sequestered from the water cycle since the last ice age. Under a recently issued state permit, the Nestlé corporation, a major purveyor of bottled water, can now draw up to four hundred gallons of Michigan groundwater per minute for just two hundred dollars a year. And yet in Flint, people now regard their faucets with warranted suspicion, and in Detroit, whose water treatment plant would have spared the people of Flint from mass poisoning, the water company has been turning the spigots off, letting their delinquent customers go thirsty or purchase bottled water from Nestlé.” (p. 19)
“We forget the value and scarcity of potable water. Most of the planet’s 332 million cubic miles of water is salty. “Only 2 percent is fresh,” Rose George reports in her 2008 study of human-waste management, The Big Necessity, “and two-thirds of that is unavailable for human use, locked in snow, ice, and permafrost.” We forget how much of it we waste—we Americans especially. While about a billion people get by on five liters of water a day, Americans use more than twice that in a single toilet flush. We forget the people—some 30 percent of the global population—who do not have easy access to safe drinking water. We forget what life was like prior to the advent of chlorination.” (p. 19)
As always, LQ presents new vocabulary for me to experience, if not remember. Within a few paragraphs, Mr. Hohn has me searching for:
. caesura – an interruption or break
. batture – an elevated river bed; the alluvial land between a river at low-water stage and a levee —used especially of such land along the lower Mississippi river
. roseate – rose-colored; cheerful or bright; optimistic; promising good fortune
. startlement – the state of being startled; to disturb or agitate suddenly as by surprise or alarm
It’s a good preamble, available in it’s entirety at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
“If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.” —Margaret Atwood, 2005
In discussions with a good friend I often used water as an analogy for economics. In my opinion they are both forces of nature. Man’s efforts to control them are limited and the consequences unnatural.
As the pop-up on LaphamsQuarterly.org often reminds me, in an attempt to sell me the publication, “…everyone has issues…”. Water certainly qualifies as a primary issue for Man (and Woman).
The three main sections of this quarterly’s Voices In Time are:
Wellspring
Ebb and Flow
Deluge
Speaking of providing and conserving water, as I did in the Pt. 1 comments, the Ebb and Flow section begins with a noteworthy 4 page extract by Jonathan Watts, circa 2015 Mexico City. It is not reproduced on the LQ website, as some extracts are, but the full, 24-page, and hugely informative original can be viewed on The Guardian newspaper website at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/20....
It’s a good example of why pieces are abbreviated and extracted, as paragraphs have been taken from throughout the 24 to make a short, coherent, piece. Following is my further abbreviation. The facts ma’am, just the facts:
“When a tormenta sweeps in to Mexico City, the rain does not just fall, it insists.”
“The floods are a reminder of the natural order of things: water belongs here.”
“This geological, historical fact is a reason why the Aztecs built a city of floating gardens here 700 years ago that became known as “the Venice of the New World”. The vast lakes that once filled the plain were, however, steadily drained by settlers. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadores rapidly accelerated the process, and modern engineers have almost finished the task, replacing the lacustrine marshes with a grey sea of concrete, tarmac and steel that, in the central city alone, is now home to almost nine million residents.”
“Getting the required billions of litres up to this megalopolis – 2,400m (7,900 ft) above sea level – is one of the world’s great feats of hydro-engineering.”
“Yet, from the point of view of sustainability and social equality, it is also among the more absurd failures. Discharging a resource that falls freely from the heavens and replacing it with exactly the same H2O from far away is expensive, inefficient, energy intensive and ultimately inadequate for the population’s needs. It also creates a paradox: although Mexico City has more rainy days than London, it suffers shortages more in keeping with a desert, making the price of each litre among the highest in the world – despite its often dire quality.”
“The engineers tell me Mexico City has the greatest demand for water of any city in the world – 300 litres (80 gal.) for each of the 8.8m inhabitants, plus millions of others who work here during the day.”
“About 70% of the city has fewer than 12 hours of running water per day. In the hardest-hit areas, 18% of the population have to wait several days for just an hour or two of supply.”
The extract/article goes on to explain how rain and water continue to flow to areas of the former lakes. Lake Chalco has started to re-form and can be found on Google Maps, though Wikipedia still refers to it in the past tense.
““This should be the heart of the solution,” said Elena Burns, an activist with the Water for People, Water for Life campaign, as she looks out across the reeds and marshes. “Lakes are a really cheap way of dealing with this problem. If we made this lake eight metres deep, we’d have enough water for 1.5m people.””
“Marco Alfredo, president of the Mexican Association of Hydro-engineers, also advocates a return to the city’s lacustrine origins.
“Mexico City’s situation is chaotic and absurd. We could have natural pure water, but for hundreds of years we have been draining it away so we have created an artificial scarcity,” he says “This is not an engineering problem: we have the expertise and the experience. It is also not a problem of economics: we have the financial resources to do what needs to be done. It’s a problem of governance.””
Notably, the extract does NOT include a rebuttal to this solution in the original article:
“The head of Sacmex is unimpressed: “This sounds intelligent, but it’s not. It’s cheaper to bring water from outside than to capture rainwater. There is not one city in the world that uses rainwater collection,” says Ramón Aguirre. “Where do we keep it and supply it? It needs to be huge so there is enough for months when there is no rain. It will need to be cleaned if it comes off the streets. Would you drink from a puddle? No…”
The extract and article both conclude:
“For Alfredo, the key is to work with, rather than against, the element that first attracted settlers to this high-altitude lakeland. “Water is not just remarkable, it’s miraculous,” he says. “It has a memory, an intelligence, it’s extremely strong. And it will always return. No matter whether it takes five, 50 or 500 years. It will come back.”
Man loves to (try to) control Nature. Is that Man’s nature? Is the barbed wire in the picture above meant to keep the ocean from trespassing? Perhaps we should let Nature have it’s way more often. Nature is having its annual summer ‘burn’ in the U.S. Lives are being lost, and water can do little to stop it.
It seems like water is always in the news. As I write, the Sunday New York Times of 29 July 2018 has an informative article on using solar and wind power to pump water back to Hoover Dam/Lake Meade, for additional hydro-electric power. It is a nicely photographed article with animated graphic explanations. I never know how long NYT links will be available. Those seeking to quench their thirst for knowledge can check here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...
Another intriguing, contemporary essay (one of the full ones at the end of LQ) is A New Ark by Nicholas Pelham. He explores the Ahwar Marshes of southern Iraq, in the cradle of civilization Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, with Arabs who postulate that Noah’s Ark was a construction of numerous ‘guffas’ (round, reed-constructed boats). They are working on a reproduction. The historical facts and reasoning are quite plausible. The full essay is available free at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate.... Google ‘guffa’ and ‘mudhif’ (the reed houses) for further info.
Every issue leads me to Google and Wikipedia, this one was definitely no exception. Who are these authors?
You likely have heard of Marco Polo, Emile Zola, Aristotle, William Butler Yeats, Francis Bacon, Virgil, and Gustave Flaubert.
Louise Erdrich – of Chippewa Indian descent, and author of more than a dozen books, contributes the first extract in this issue, about the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standin..., the Dakota Access Pipeline (part of the Bakken oil pipline), and the protest against ecological and spiritual trespass by attempts to drill under the Missouri River. This occurred in 2016 and 2017.
Mark Twain needed no introduction. His lessons in life, real and imagined, explore Man’s nature. He is navigating the river this issue. It is free online: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
The late 20th century, frequent usual suspects, are here. Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion.
Ms. Carson, too, is familiar. The author of Silent Spring, which influenced the banning of DDT, she is alternately, and debatably, praised or damned for that contribution. Some say millions have died of malaria because of DDT bans. Others, that spraying too much allows spray-resistant mosquitos to survive and multiply. Wikipedia enlightens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_...
Joan Didion speaks of water CONTROL in her native California. Release the water, nourish the farmers. Shut if off, CONTROL. It is sensible.
“It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently. In my memory California summers where characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees and flooding on the first floor.” (p. 171)
For you non-subscribers, I found her essay online: http://www.pbs.org/pov/thirst/holy-wa...
23 extracts, 3 full essays, and the Preamble are available free online at LaphamsQuarterly.org. I found these especially noteworthy:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
Immersion Therapy is Emile Zola’s account of the attempted water cures at Lourdes. Sadly amusing (but not horribly funny?), the attendants try to revive a dead man, with the anticipated result.
This is another great issue, and as usual I’ve barely touched the surface.
As noted, in RULE #4, I encourage all to READ this fine publication. Don’t do it to appease me. Do it to appease your hidden rivulets of inquiry, seeking to be released to join a larger stream. Until 14 August back issues can be purchased for 15 instead of 26 $ using code SUN15 at checkout. 10 years for 600. A bargain. Bequeath them to a library, a senior center, or anywhere people will read. I’m considering it myself. I thought a prison might be appropriate, but a friend and former prison librarian says they get tons of books. Hmm, perhaps the new senior center proposed near me.
See you next issue, I trust.
You can lead a horse to Water, but you can’t make him read… carefully. Such is the sum of my pedestrian effort to drink at the fount of knowledge and review/comment on Lapham’s Quarterly.
_______________________________________________
Origin of You can Lead a Horse to Water
This phrase comes from the 12th century and may be the single oldest distinctly English proverb that is still used today. This phrase originated in English and is one of the language’s earliest proverbs.
Its first recorded English use was in 1175 in Old English Homilies:
Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken
[who can give water to the horse that will not drink of its own accord?]
It appeared in John Heywood’s proverb collection of 1546:
“A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will. (https://writingexplained.org/idiom-di...)
And this:
It also appeared in literature over the centuries in a variety of forms; for example, in the play Narcissus, which was published in 1602, of unknown authorship, subtitled as A Twelfe Night merriment, played by youths of the parish at the College of Saint John the Baptist in Oxford:
Your parents have done what they coode,
They can but bringe horse to the water brinke,
But horse may choose whether that horse will drinke.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that ‘lead a horse to water…’ got a substantial rewrite, when Dorothy Parker reworked it from its proverbial form into the epigram ‘you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think‘.
(https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/y...)
_______________________________________________
To me it is curious that there is no reference in this issue to Dune, the science fiction classic by Frank Herbert which centers on an arid planet where water is so precious that people wear ‘stillsuits’ to capture and recycle sweat and urine, and cadavers are harvested for water. LQ’s 221 pages cannot be expected to cover everything I suppose, just whet the thought palate.
I found that the average adult male is 60% water. https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-of... “…fat tissue does not have as much water as lean tissue. In adult women, fat makes up more of the body than men, so they have about 55% of their bodies made of water.” https://water.usgs.gov/edu/propertyyo... Thus, I’ve read, an obese person could have as little as 45% water by weight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_water
Fortunately, no one is harvesting any of us for water, yet. That I know of. Excessive bleeding, virtual and literal, seems to suffice.
I was led to the thought that the vast blocks of Antarctic landscape ice that are calving into the ocean and raising sea levels are fresh water diluting into salt water. We’re not harvesting that water to drink or irrigate. WWF informs me:
“Water covers 70% of our planet, and it is easy to think that it will always be plentiful. However, freshwater—the stuff we drink, bathe in, irrigate our farm fields with—is incredibly rare. Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use.” https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats...
Onward… …to CHANGE. (The only constant.)
The hallowed, introductory, Preamble has a guest writer! This is the first guest author of the Preamble in the 10+ year/43 issue history of the Quarterly. We are informed:
“Lapham’s Quarterly inaugurates the second decade of its existence by occasionally
recruiting the introductory essay from writers blessed with a broad knowledge of the
topic at band. Donovan Hohn is the author of Moby-Duck: The True Story of
28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea. … Lewis H. Lapham will return to this space in the next issue.” (p. 13)
Mr. Lapham, age 83 1/2, is a life-long writer, author, and editor. He is deserving, and wise I suspect, to prepare to pass the baton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H...
Does Mr. Hohn do justice to his task? I think so.
“This is a thirsty issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, an exaltation of water and wetness.
The writers gathered in these pages walk the banks of rivers, from the Danube to the
Yangtze to the Nile. They embark. They put on waders and conduct sampling expeditions. They douse. They sound. They visit aqueducts and public baths and bottling
plants. They dive—sometimes without leaving their desks. Like the cub river pilot
Samuel Clemens, they read ripples, fathom depths, chart currents, decipher water’s
secrets (Mississippi River, page 28).” (p. 15)
By my count, in 11 pages (a substantial number for LQ preambles) Mr. Hohn makes 16 references to the contents. In the previous issue Rule Of Law, Mr. Lapham, on the other hand, wrote 9 pages of preamble (5 of them 1/2 pages, 4 full pages) with 6 content references. It seems he usually has more. By contrast, the Future issue of Fall 2011 has 7 pages, nearly all full, and 12 references. I suspect a trend or standard is inconsequential.
Mr. Hohn’s preamble is autobiographical, as is Lewis Lapham’s usually. He entwines references to pieces in the issue with his personal experiences of global travel.
“Several summers ago, I found myself taking a walk under the midnight sun along the shores of the Northwest Passage accompanied by an Inuit kid named Puglik.” …
“The road was muddy. The Arctic in summer’s thaw is a muddy place, muddier and muddier as the planet warms. For underdressed pilgrims on a hike, however, the weather was still plenty cold. A wind refrigerated by sea ice was giving us all the shivers, and Puglik kept wiping his nose with his sleeve, carrying on about his favorite video games and pointing out local landmarks. In a graveyard atop a hill, wooden crosses had begun to topple and tilt. His ancestors were all buried there, at least the ones he knew about, Puglik said, but now the entire hill was thawing, the graveyard slowly sliding toward the sea.”
“To windward flowed a glassy stream in which you could see a weir, a funnel of rocks with which locals corralled fish for easy harvesting, as people had been doing since the ice sheets retreated. The stream was popular with migrating waterfowl as well as fish. Geese that had wintered in Biloxi nested here on the tundra. We know that migrating birds follow spring. They’re chasing sunlight, of course, but they’re also chasing wetlands; they, too, make pilgrimages to water. We came to a bend in the road that conformed to a bend in the stream, and in the stream’s bend was an eddy that conformed to some invisible bend in the cosmos, deep enough for a swimming hole. “We call this part of the river,” Puglik said, “an ‘Inuit Jacuzzi.’ ”” (p. 18)
He writes well, IMO. “A wind refrigerated by sea ice… ” “To windward flowed a glassy stream…”
The bits of information woven throughout are tantalizing and thought-provoking:
“I’d joined a cryologist with the Canadian Ice Service on a survey conducted by helicopter. The cryologist—or “ice pick,” as people in her line of work are colloquially known—had to chart and classify the puzzling ice pack visible below. Although it had thawed and thinned earlier than it had in any previous year on record, there remained a multitude of ice to see and classify. The names for its varieties, I learned, are as numerous and lovely as those for clouds: frazil, pancake, nilas, grease, agglomerated brash. The language of ice describes more than dimensions and shapes. It names subtle gradations in the phase changes water undergoes as it solidifies and expands or liquefies and condenses.” (p. 18)
“These days I live in southeast Michigan, which is to say I dwell in a watershed of paradox. Here we are, at the edge of the Great Lakes, which together contain 84 percent of North America’s and 20 percent of the world’s accessible freshwater. The Great Lakes are puddles of glacial melt. Rainfall and tributaries contribute only 1 percent of their total volume. Much of the rest is “fossil water,” sequestered from the water cycle since the last ice age. Under a recently issued state permit, the Nestlé corporation, a major purveyor of bottled water, can now draw up to four hundred gallons of Michigan groundwater per minute for just two hundred dollars a year. And yet in Flint, people now regard their faucets with warranted suspicion, and in Detroit, whose water treatment plant would have spared the people of Flint from mass poisoning, the water company has been turning the spigots off, letting their delinquent customers go thirsty or purchase bottled water from Nestlé.” (p. 19)
“We forget the value and scarcity of potable water. Most of the planet’s 332 million cubic miles of water is salty. “Only 2 percent is fresh,” Rose George reports in her 2008 study of human-waste management, The Big Necessity, “and two-thirds of that is unavailable for human use, locked in snow, ice, and permafrost.” We forget how much of it we waste—we Americans especially. While about a billion people get by on five liters of water a day, Americans use more than twice that in a single toilet flush. We forget the people—some 30 percent of the global population—who do not have easy access to safe drinking water. We forget what life was like prior to the advent of chlorination.” (p. 19)
As always, LQ presents new vocabulary for me to experience, if not remember. Within a few paragraphs, Mr. Hohn has me searching for:
. caesura – an interruption or break
. batture – an elevated river bed; the alluvial land between a river at low-water stage and a levee —used especially of such land along the lower Mississippi river
. roseate – rose-colored; cheerful or bright; optimistic; promising good fortune
. startlement – the state of being startled; to disturb or agitate suddenly as by surprise or alarm
It’s a good preamble, available in it’s entirety at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
“If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.” —Margaret Atwood, 2005
In discussions with a good friend I often used water as an analogy for economics. In my opinion they are both forces of nature. Man’s efforts to control them are limited and the consequences unnatural.
As the pop-up on LaphamsQuarterly.org often reminds me, in an attempt to sell me the publication, “…everyone has issues…”. Water certainly qualifies as a primary issue for Man (and Woman).
The three main sections of this quarterly’s Voices In Time are:
Wellspring
Ebb and Flow
Deluge
Speaking of providing and conserving water, as I did in the Pt. 1 comments, the Ebb and Flow section begins with a noteworthy 4 page extract by Jonathan Watts, circa 2015 Mexico City. It is not reproduced on the LQ website, as some extracts are, but the full, 24-page, and hugely informative original can be viewed on The Guardian newspaper website at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/20....
It’s a good example of why pieces are abbreviated and extracted, as paragraphs have been taken from throughout the 24 to make a short, coherent, piece. Following is my further abbreviation. The facts ma’am, just the facts:
“When a tormenta sweeps in to Mexico City, the rain does not just fall, it insists.”
“The floods are a reminder of the natural order of things: water belongs here.”
“This geological, historical fact is a reason why the Aztecs built a city of floating gardens here 700 years ago that became known as “the Venice of the New World”. The vast lakes that once filled the plain were, however, steadily drained by settlers. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadores rapidly accelerated the process, and modern engineers have almost finished the task, replacing the lacustrine marshes with a grey sea of concrete, tarmac and steel that, in the central city alone, is now home to almost nine million residents.”
“Getting the required billions of litres up to this megalopolis – 2,400m (7,900 ft) above sea level – is one of the world’s great feats of hydro-engineering.”
“Yet, from the point of view of sustainability and social equality, it is also among the more absurd failures. Discharging a resource that falls freely from the heavens and replacing it with exactly the same H2O from far away is expensive, inefficient, energy intensive and ultimately inadequate for the population’s needs. It also creates a paradox: although Mexico City has more rainy days than London, it suffers shortages more in keeping with a desert, making the price of each litre among the highest in the world – despite its often dire quality.”
“The engineers tell me Mexico City has the greatest demand for water of any city in the world – 300 litres (80 gal.) for each of the 8.8m inhabitants, plus millions of others who work here during the day.”
“About 70% of the city has fewer than 12 hours of running water per day. In the hardest-hit areas, 18% of the population have to wait several days for just an hour or two of supply.”
The extract/article goes on to explain how rain and water continue to flow to areas of the former lakes. Lake Chalco has started to re-form and can be found on Google Maps, though Wikipedia still refers to it in the past tense.
““This should be the heart of the solution,” said Elena Burns, an activist with the Water for People, Water for Life campaign, as she looks out across the reeds and marshes. “Lakes are a really cheap way of dealing with this problem. If we made this lake eight metres deep, we’d have enough water for 1.5m people.””
“Marco Alfredo, president of the Mexican Association of Hydro-engineers, also advocates a return to the city’s lacustrine origins.
“Mexico City’s situation is chaotic and absurd. We could have natural pure water, but for hundreds of years we have been draining it away so we have created an artificial scarcity,” he says “This is not an engineering problem: we have the expertise and the experience. It is also not a problem of economics: we have the financial resources to do what needs to be done. It’s a problem of governance.””
Notably, the extract does NOT include a rebuttal to this solution in the original article:
“The head of Sacmex is unimpressed: “This sounds intelligent, but it’s not. It’s cheaper to bring water from outside than to capture rainwater. There is not one city in the world that uses rainwater collection,” says Ramón Aguirre. “Where do we keep it and supply it? It needs to be huge so there is enough for months when there is no rain. It will need to be cleaned if it comes off the streets. Would you drink from a puddle? No…”
The extract and article both conclude:
“For Alfredo, the key is to work with, rather than against, the element that first attracted settlers to this high-altitude lakeland. “Water is not just remarkable, it’s miraculous,” he says. “It has a memory, an intelligence, it’s extremely strong. And it will always return. No matter whether it takes five, 50 or 500 years. It will come back.”
Man loves to (try to) control Nature. Is that Man’s nature? Is the barbed wire in the picture above meant to keep the ocean from trespassing? Perhaps we should let Nature have it’s way more often. Nature is having its annual summer ‘burn’ in the U.S. Lives are being lost, and water can do little to stop it.
It seems like water is always in the news. As I write, the Sunday New York Times of 29 July 2018 has an informative article on using solar and wind power to pump water back to Hoover Dam/Lake Meade, for additional hydro-electric power. It is a nicely photographed article with animated graphic explanations. I never know how long NYT links will be available. Those seeking to quench their thirst for knowledge can check here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...
Another intriguing, contemporary essay (one of the full ones at the end of LQ) is A New Ark by Nicholas Pelham. He explores the Ahwar Marshes of southern Iraq, in the cradle of civilization Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, with Arabs who postulate that Noah’s Ark was a construction of numerous ‘guffas’ (round, reed-constructed boats). They are working on a reproduction. The historical facts and reasoning are quite plausible. The full essay is available free at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate.... Google ‘guffa’ and ‘mudhif’ (the reed houses) for further info.
Every issue leads me to Google and Wikipedia, this one was definitely no exception. Who are these authors?
You likely have heard of Marco Polo, Emile Zola, Aristotle, William Butler Yeats, Francis Bacon, Virgil, and Gustave Flaubert.
Louise Erdrich – of Chippewa Indian descent, and author of more than a dozen books, contributes the first extract in this issue, about the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standin..., the Dakota Access Pipeline (part of the Bakken oil pipline), and the protest against ecological and spiritual trespass by attempts to drill under the Missouri River. This occurred in 2016 and 2017.
Mark Twain needed no introduction. His lessons in life, real and imagined, explore Man’s nature. He is navigating the river this issue. It is free online: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
The late 20th century, frequent usual suspects, are here. Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion.
Ms. Carson, too, is familiar. The author of Silent Spring, which influenced the banning of DDT, she is alternately, and debatably, praised or damned for that contribution. Some say millions have died of malaria because of DDT bans. Others, that spraying too much allows spray-resistant mosquitos to survive and multiply. Wikipedia enlightens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_...
Joan Didion speaks of water CONTROL in her native California. Release the water, nourish the farmers. Shut if off, CONTROL. It is sensible.
“It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently. In my memory California summers where characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees and flooding on the first floor.” (p. 171)
For you non-subscribers, I found her essay online: http://www.pbs.org/pov/thirst/holy-wa...
23 extracts, 3 full essays, and the Preamble are available free online at LaphamsQuarterly.org. I found these especially noteworthy:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/wate...
Immersion Therapy is Emile Zola’s account of the attempted water cures at Lourdes. Sadly amusing (but not horribly funny?), the attendants try to revive a dead man, with the anticipated result.
This is another great issue, and as usual I’ve barely touched the surface.
As noted, in RULE #4, I encourage all to READ this fine publication. Don’t do it to appease me. Do it to appease your hidden rivulets of inquiry, seeking to be released to join a larger stream. Until 14 August back issues can be purchased for 15 instead of 26 $ using code SUN15 at checkout. 10 years for 600. A bargain. Bequeath them to a library, a senior center, or anywhere people will read. I’m considering it myself. I thought a prison might be appropriate, but a friend and former prison librarian says they get tons of books. Hmm, perhaps the new senior center proposed near me.
See you next issue, I trust.
March 26, 2022
Fascinating to dive into such detail and passion around water. The writing is beautiful and you will find yourself thinking about the relationship between humans, water, and the earth. Incredible. I love this publication and this is the first one I have finished.
August 3, 2024
One of the best; it's just a fascinating topic. Thanks as always to Tom Siebel.
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