(March 27, 2001) The world’s rivers are drying up. Fred Pearce has been on a five-year journey across the planet to find out why.

(Excerpt)

Britain is a modest user of water. We consume a sixth as much per head as Egyptians, for instance. This is mainly because our moderate temperatures, reasonable rainfall and cloudy skies ensure that our crops mostly grow without artificial irrigation. But our water engineers share with their colleagues the world over an obsession with dams and pipes and concrete. They want to supply ever more water, and are deaf to calls for investment in demand management. And, as I have discovered in a five-year investigation of the world’s water, this supply-side fixation is creating a global hydrological crisis that threatens the survival of some of the world’s largest rivers. … In my travels, I found massive waste and misuse and misappropriation of water, but I also found huge potential to manage things better. I visited inspiring villages across India and China where they are reviving ancient methods of capturing the rain as it falls. I met farmers who use perforated bicycle inner tubes as a cheap method of irrigating their crops from meagre water supplies. And I went to communities in Syria that still rely on thousand-year-old tunnels, known as qanats, that deliver underground water by gravity. I met engineers who want to tear down the dams and give the water back to wetlands and fisheries. And I met citizens demanding a “new water ethic”, based on ecology and sustainability and sharing. I took to using the phrase wherever I went, and it seemed to strike a common chord from Spain to India and China to the US.

The Guardian, March 27, 2001