Drinking Water by James Salzman Read Free Book Online Page A

all of what you drink.
Nutritionists counsel that thirst is one of the body’s strongest signals. If you are from Maine and hiking in the Arizona desert, of course, you may not recognize the symptoms of dehydration. For everyday living, though, if you are thirsty, your body will let you know it.

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    Who Gets to Drink?
    T HE EPIC 1962 MOVIE Lawrence of Arabia DOMINATED THAT year’s Academy Awards, winning Best Picture and six other Oscars. One classic scene features Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) first meeting his future Arab brother-in-arms, Ali ibn el Kharish (played by Omar Sharif). Lawrence, parched after his travels through the desert, has reached an oasis and is greedily drinking from the well with his guide, who is from the Hazimi tribe. His guide tells Lawrence they are drinking from a well belonging to the Harif tribe, a “dirty” people. From the distance, slowly becoming visible in the shimmering waves of the desert sun, approaches the armed and dangerous-looking Ali ibn el Kharish. Panicking, Lawrence’s guide pulls a gun but is shot down by Ali ibn el Karish. A wonderfully terse dialogue follows.
A LI IBN EL K HARISH :
What is your name?
LAWRENCE :
My name is for my friends. None of my friends is a murderer.
A LI IBN EL K HARISH :
You are angry, English. He was nothing. The well is everything. The Hazimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that. Salaam.
    As a scarce resource, safe drinking water has been governed by rules from the earliest times. Indeed, rules establishing access to water in arid regions may very well have predated property rules forland. As the shooting from Lawrence of Arabia amply demonstrates, in the desert, control of an oasis is far more important than control of the dry desert around it.
    Water is one of the few essential requirements for life. Without water, plants wilt, shrivel, and die. Even viruses, which may not even be alive, go dormant and “turn off” without water. Throughout history, societies have been predicated on ready access to sources of drinking water, whether in the cisterns of Masada high above the Dead Sea, the graceful aqueducts carrying water into Rome, or the sacred Aboriginal water holes in Australia’s outback. While not an obvious issue to us in twenty-first-century America, management of drinking water as a resource—who gets it, when they get it, and how much they get—has been a life-and-death matter for much of human history.
    While we tend not to think much about who gets to drink, drinking water is a dauntingly complex resource to manage. For millennia, human societies have faced the challenge of supplying adequate quality and quantities of drinking water. Whether limited by arid environments or urbanization, provision of clean drinking water is a prerequisite of any enduring society, but it is a multifaceted task, in large part because water is a multifaceted resource.
    Drinking water is most obviously a physical resource , one of the few truly essential requirements for life. Regardless of the god you worship or the color of your skin, if you go without water for three days in an arid environment your life is in danger. And water’s physical characteristics confound easy management. Water is heavy—it is difficult to move uphill. Water is unwieldy—it cannot be packed or contained easily. And drinking water is fragile—it easily becomes contaminated and unfit for consumption. That much seems obvious.
    Less apparent, though, is that drinking water can also be regarded as a cultural resource , of religious significance in many societies. It can also be a social resource , for in some societies access to water reveals much about relative status, and a political resource , as the provision of water to citizens can help justify a regime. And finally, when scarce, water can become an economic resource . Takingthese facets together, one can ask how different societies, from ancient times to the present, have thought about drinking water, and how