DAMNATIONS

When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water. ~ Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac  1733

Water is perhaps the most essential ingredient for life on Earth. Nevertheless, we humans have never learned how to share it. Although the Earth is literally bathed in water, only 0.5% of the planet’s water is accessible fresh water; hence the challenges of apportioning it.
     Shared riparian water-rights are rarely non-disputed, especially when it comes to dams. This website lists over 700 individual water-related disputes of various sorts around the world, including military ones, since the end of WWII. The website’s beginning dispute happened around 3000 BCE.

Beavers have been building dams for millions of years, humans for a much shorter, but substantial period. A dam, whether built by beavers or humans, restricts and retains the flow of riparian water and forms a reservoir behind it. The stored water in dams’ reservoirs can be used to contain floods, as well as provide water for irrigation, navigability, human consumption and power production. The world’s first hydroelectric power plant began generating electricity in Wisconsin in 1882.

One of the earliest human-built dams is the Sadd el-Kafara (the Dam of the Infidels). It was built by ancient Egyptians for flood control on Wadi al-Garawi – south of Cairo – around 2950-2750 BCE. Alas, it was destroyed by a flood before it could be completed. Settled-agriculture, which was already well established in and around Mesopotamia by then, augmented humanity’s needs for water management and storage.

We haven’t let that initial tragedy at Sadd el-Kafara blunt our building as there are now about 57,000 large dams worldwide. Virtually every country is a damnation. These dams’ reservoirs cover more than 154,000 square miles – roughly the area of California. Speaking of which, there are over 1,400 named dams and 1,300 named reservoirs just in the Golden State. The largest dam in California, the Oroville Dam, is the 8th biggest dam in the world (by volume of fill/structure) and the tallest in the US (770ft.).

An African dam now being built has captured the media’s attention, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Ethiopia started construction nine years ago of its GERD on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile river. About 85% of the Nile’s water is sourced in Ethiopia. The dam’s site is situated just 9 miles east of the Ethiopia-Sudan border.

When operating with a full reservoir, its 6.45-gigawatt electricity capacity means this dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, as well as the eight largest in the world (by capacity), right behind the US Grand Coulee Dam. It will more than double Ethiopia’s electricity output and make a significant contribution to Ethiopia’s further development. The majority of Ethiopians do not have any access to electricity.

The GERD represents case #797 (and counting) of fluid, multi-society water-usage antagonism. The dam is now producing some power, although it’s only about 70% complete. Nevertheless the GERD has already generated a great deal of rancor between Ethiopia and its two neighboring, Nile River basin nations; Sudan and its far more powerful downstream neighbor, Egypt. Thus, the GERD’s three damnations are Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. Each has an unsurprisingly distinct position regarding the dam.

Ethiopia ($858 GDP/capita[1]) wants to fill the reservoir as fast as practical so the nation can start earning a return on its nearly $5 billion investment. Its government hopes the GERD will raise Ethiopia out of poverty.

Egypt ($3,202 GDP/capita) argues the dam represents an indisputable national threat because it relies on the Nile for 90% of its heavily-subsidized fresh water. It fears the GERDs restrictions on downstream water, especially during droughts, will reduce its water availability and waterflow into its Aswan High Dam, 900 miles downstream. Egypt wants Ethiopia to fill the GERDs reservoir gradually and release water so the river’s flow isn’t much altered. Because the Nile and Egypt have been closely-intertwined throughout its multi-millennia history, Egyptians believe the Nile and its water is their birthright.

Sudan ($442 GDP/capita), although it supports the GERD and will receive some of its inexpensive electricity, it is concerned that any of the GERD’s un-coordinated water releases could overwhelm its own Roseires Dam, 140 miles downstream. Sudan demands predictable GERD water flows so it can grow more food for its starving, vulnerable population.

According to reports, these three damnations have reached agreement for 90% of a deal; that remaining 10% will likely take labored conciliations on each nation’s part. Water is sometimes thicker than political blood. Meanwhile Ethiopia is soon scheduled to start filling the GERD’s reservoir.

     Much closer to home, one long-standing domestic and international water dispute involves Mexico and the seven (7) US states that comprise the heavily-dammed Colorado River basin. California’s “water wars” have been on-going for over a century. A commission was established in 1884 between Mexico and the US to oversee the flow of the river’s water from the United States through Mexico into the Gulf of California. Sixty (60) years later, the Commission negotiated a US-Mexico multi-river treaty for the two nations’ water usage.

     California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – the Colorado River basin’s US states – continue to negotiate among themselves because Southern California takes more water than it is entitled to under the Law of the River. One enduring, intra-California water dispute involves Southern California again making waves by demanding an ever-larger portion of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water. The Southies want water shipped to Los Angeles via the 700-mile California Aqueduct. Predictably, Northern Californians are unwilling to accede to such ultimatums.

And it started with the Dam of the Infidels five thousand years ago. Onward…

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[1] These nominal GDP per capita numbers are for 2019, according to the World Bank. 

MONUMENTAL PROBLEMS

“Our monuments are representations of myth, not fact.” ~ Ken Burns 

 An early 20th-century European thinker wrote after WWI that “there is nothing as invisible as a monument.” During the past month, monuments have once again become not only visible, but lightning rods of attention.

Although our advancing, covid-based circumstances have brought out the humanity in many people, the media isn’t all that interested in such positivism. Far more prominent are the clashes and divergences.
     One of the latest of such clashes is what I liken to Monumental Problems. Especially those that are related in some folks’ view to events connected to the recent, unlawful and criminal deaths of Black people. The latest victims include George Floyd, Emmet Till, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Rayshaard Brooks and Ahmaud Arbery who themselves have become the now-justly-memorialized foundation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The bronze monuments of George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Robert Gould Shaw, Teddy Roosevelt and other leaders from the past have been sundered, toppled, defaced or removed by spirited crowds. Removing Mr. Lee and all of his Confederate cronies is completely warranted.

San Francisco protestors took down a statue of our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, whose military successes ended the Confederacy. But because he was given a slave whom he later freed before the Civil War, his sinful calumny was complete according to the activists. I don’t believe statues of President Grant should be destroyed. His personal fault is outweighed by his noteworthy and substantial public efforts to preserve the US and halt its disunion.

The protestors’ searing focus rests on specific facets of the bronzed leaders’ broad careers. The protestors, using their severe standards, want to demonstrably rectify these leaders’ past injustices. Meaning deposing these leaders’ no longer invisible statues. Thirteen (13) of our first 18 presidents were slave-holders. In retrospect, it’s a thoroughly ghastly record. The 1860 US Census documented that 12.6% of our national population – over 3.9 million people – were slaves. Should we now topple the Washington Monument because George (and Martha) had over 300 slaves at Mt. Vernon, or demolish the Jefferson Memorial because he had about 200 slaves?

The challenge is how we reconcile our distinctly-different, present-day moral judgments together with a recognition that our past describes an utterly differing nation. Can we the public resolve the protestors’ solitary focus on a single attribute of these leaders’ lives as a rationale for these statues’ destruction? Honestly, I find it difficult. Does that make me a racist?

Monument denouement is by no means new. On July 9, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was read aloud for the first time in Manhattan, NY to George Washington and his soldiers. Afterwards, his American patriots quickly went to a near-by park and toppled the statue of King George III of England, the colonies’ then-ruler. Soon thereafter the king’s lead sculpture was melted down to make musket ball-bullets for the muzzle-loading, flintlock rifles of Gen. Washington’s army. King George was thus converted into 42,088 bullets. This transmutation of the king’s statue into revolutionary ammunition has a certain exquisite irony. It was a-propos both of the patriots’ spirit of 1776, as well as the logistical realities of our war for Independence. The picture below shows a lead musket ball mold that my long-ago family ancestors used during the Revolutionary War and afterwards.

Monumental Problems are not limited to the present day nor to the US. Next year will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the toppling of Napoleon Bonaparte during the Paris Commune revolt. Not of Bonaparte’s rule or the man himself (he died 199 years ago), but of his memorial statue atop the Vendôme Column in Paris.

Similarly, three decades ago freedom-fighters in Ukraine and Hungary knocked down statues of their historic tyrants, Lenin and Stalin. A statue of Winston Churchill, who helped save the free world from massive Nazi brutality, was vandalized in London last weekend because of racist statements he once uttered.

Alas, there is no such thing as a pure past, or present. Like everyone, leaders are filled with human frailty, bias and defects. The past provides no untainted innocents. Utopian-minded protestors, understandably angered by present-day and past atrocities, demand retribution from bronzed likenesses of leaders who, despite other achievements, have strayed from the protestors’ thin, imagined lines of currently-defined purity.

I believe this movement offers yet another signal of refocused generational shifting. In many Millennials’ and Gen Z’s view, us Boomers’ facile dismissals of such egregious wrongs merits utter distain. How dare there be a statue of slave-holder President Grant prominently displayed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

We should recognize that inter-generational criticism is a timeless truism, present throughout the past and present. Perhaps the only certainty about the future is that some aspects of today’s life will be disparaged by generations to come.

Young people inevitably are accused of having insufficient respect for their elders, enjoying outrageous music and practicing increasingly strange rituals. Conversely, today’s younger folks disparage the ignorant beliefs and behaviors of their parents and earlier generations.

Really? What beliefs and behaviors of ours could possibly be belittled? Here’s a partial list: criminalizing homosexuality, not stopping or at the very least mitigating climate change, eating meat, prohibiting women and minorities from voting and not sufficiently combatting racial, economic and social inequities. Young people and others believe slavery, although legislatively outlawed in 1865 by the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, has continued to exist in other, not so sub-rosa forms ever since. Its continued presence now needs to be halted.

Hence, the inevitable Monumental Problems.