The June canoe rides on the Verde River were a great success. Approximately thirty-five people enjoyed a beautiful day either paddling their own canoes or being paddled by VRCA's skilled volunteer paddlers. One of the major reasons for this event is to enable first time canoeists to experience the beauty of the Verde personally. VRCA seeks to add to the number of people who treasure the Verde, thereby increasing the number of advocates for the River's protection.

Thanks to Bob Rothrock for organizing this event and to Max Castillo and his staff at Dead Horse Ranch State Park and all the volunteers that worked to make it happen. VRCA has high hopes that this annual event will encourage acquaintance with preservation issues and will attract greater numbers of young adults.

WHEN RIVERS RUN DRY

Water - the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

By Fred Pearce - 2006 - Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts; pp 324

Book Report and Book Review by Paul A Handverger - 24 July 2006

Book Report: The book "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce uses major rivers of the world as models to describe the critical fresh water problems occurring on our planet. Some of the rivers described are the Colorado, Rio Grande, Yellow, Mekong, Indus, Jordan, Nile, Tigris, and the Eupharates. He also describes the cultural and economic disasters caused by the shrinking of Lake Chad in central Africa and the Aral Sea in central Asia. Hundreds of millions of people are being affected by the man-caused destruction of the world's rivers. Major sources of food and especially fish protein, have already been lost. (PAH comment: The Gila River between Phoenix and Yuma once had a thriving fisheries industry.)

Because of current failures of water policies worldwide, irreplaceable groundwater that is as old as hundreds of thousands of years is being mined. For example in Libya, $27,000,000,000 collected over decades of petroleum production have been paid to the Halliburton Corporation in the United States to mine ground waters as old as one million years by drilling and pumping water up from an interior desert and transporting it by a six-hundred mile "pipe river" to the coastal area for irrigation and personal use. The crops that are grown from this project will never repay the huge capital investment and the amount of water is not sufficient to meet their current irrigation needs. The project itself may end up a total failure.

Both human use and industrial pollution are building up in fatal amounts of deadly poisons, especially in the non-western world. Fluorides from industrial sources and arsenic from natural causes are seriously affecting the health of millions of people in Asia. Irrigation with salt buildups in the soil from evaporation is poisoning millions of acres making them no longer arable. The increased human intake of salt from these irrigation waters is destroying the health of women and children who become anemic. The world's most populous nation, China, is losing significant agricultural acreage because of the building salt concentrations caused by the irrigation systems. Many countries are now using half their fresh irrigation water just to flush enough of the salt out of the soil to grow a crop.

The book describes the great amount of water needed to produce agricultural products. For example, 1 lb. of sugar needs 400 gallons of water, 1 lb. of wheat requires 130 gallons, 1 quart of milk requires 500 to 2000 gallons of water to nourish the cow, and our glass of beer or wine needed 65 gallons of water. Irrigation of water-demanding crops such as cotton has drained rivers down to a trickle in many places.

International water wars have started. Israel has used force to cut Palestinians off from century old water sources within the Jordan River basin. The Kashmir area is the headwaters of the Indus River and is contested between the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. Potential future conflicts could develop between China who controls the headwaters of the Mekong River and the down river countries that depend on the river economically: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. The Helmand River crosses Afghanistan from east to west ending in a large body of water that straddles the Iranian border, water that is important to Iran's population. Afghanistan is letting less of that water reach the border. Rivers are international. The Nile crosses ten countries in a continent that is politically instable. Twenty nations in the world obtain at least half their water from a neighboring country creating the potential for geopolitical problems. One half of the world's population lives in international river basins.

The author points out that each of us drinks about 250 gallons of water per year. We use about 12,000-25,000 gallons water per year at home and require about 350,000 to 500,000 gallons of water per year to feed each of us. We are all involved.

Book Review: The book "When the Rivers Run Dry" documents that the serious fresh water depletion being experienced in Arizona is a micro-event within the world's current and developing fresh water problems. Decreasing ground water, lost rivers, pollution, disease, political battles, evaporation losses, wasted billions of dollars, lack of conservation, silting problems, both behind and below dams are a world-wide problem at the beginning of the 21st century. Blue gold (water) will become the geopolitical and economic issue that the black gold (petroleum) was in the 20th century.

It would have helped to have a few tables and some footnotes in Pearce's presentation of data. The lack of references makes the book less threatening to the reader, but this same lack of references to his source data and the lack of a bibliography are a weakness to the overall message in the book. The mixing of the water terms such as gallons, tons, and acre-feet for water amounts, sometimes on the same page, force the reader either to stop and make a conversion calculation to compare oranges to oranges and apples to apples or read on without obtaining the full message.

Overall, the information is presented in an easy readable non-technical manner. In places, it reads almost like a historical novel. Even the most informed water person will learn much from the book. The relationship of water to agricultural needs is stressed. The author makes important observations regarding the proper application of ground water irrigation, a most significant use of this precious resource, based upon the total economic costs, not the subsidized costs. The examples of the misuse of irrigation of water-demanding crops in arid regions must be faced up to before all of a region's ground water is lost forever.

The importance of rivers to humanity through the ages is documented on all continents. Look at a map to see that most of the world's population and cities are located upon rivers for water, power, fish, irrigation, transportation and recreation. Humanity needs rivers to survive. All students of history and geography know the significance of rivers on all continents to humankind. Rivers provide a locus for history making events. Rivers must be saved for the common good.

The book poses ideas for creating sustainable water supplies including using old discontinued methods that had supplied sustainable water for centuries, but have been replaced by the deeply drilled wells and dams of the last decades. Conservation principles could turn around the present disastrous trend. The author makes a case for water being a human rights issue.

The reading of this book is recommended to all citizens as we all have water responsibilities. The book is available in Yavapai County at the Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Prescott, Prescott college, and Yavapai College (Prescott) libraries.

BOOK REPORTS

Editors Note: VRCA Newsletter's subsequent editions will include a report on current books dealing with water issues. Suggestions of possible titles from our readers will be appreciated. Also, any comments on our selections will be printed, space permitting.