Three books capture the complex politics of water, and in their very different ways, show how good science needs to call the shots

Water from mining run-off can be polluting (Image: Pete McBride/NGS)

THE Arvari river in India’s Rajasthan desert had been dry for decades. The fields along its banks were parched, the people were leaving. Then a local youth, Kanhaiya Lal Gurjar, began recruiting village women to dig small dams – johads – in the seasonal streams that once fed the river. The dams held back the monsoon rains, which percolated underground. Local wells began to return to life and, as if by magic, the river itself returned.

This simple story of local environmental intervention is the centrepiece of A River Runs Again, US journalist Meera Subramanian’s ode to her native India, to its natural world and those who want to protect the country from breakneck industrialisation under its premier, Narendra Modi.

Although its narrative is lyrical and heartfelt, the book is also an ode to science – good science that respects natural processes rather than seeking to subjugate them. The johads that revived the Arvari river are one element in a nationwide movement that is turning its back on Western water technologies like large dams, and focusing on traditional Indian practices, such as catching the rain locally and keeping it on the land. It is working: across Rajasthan, 12,000 johads and similar structures bring water to fields and communities left high and dry by big engineering.

Subramanian, whose fluid writing has appeared in everything from the journal Nature to The Wall Street Journal, shows a rare gift in her ability to combine personal but uncontrived field reporting with the cultural sensitivity of a returning daughter of India and the critical faculties of someone confident in the science.

When she reminds us that “the villagers have better knowledge about water conservation in their areas than most engineers, but the present system never seeks their views and government officers dismiss them as illiterates”, these words ring true because they describe the local knowledge, the hydrology and the politics with equal skill.

“Villagers know more about local water conservation than most engineers, but no one seeks their views”

She never lets the romantic trump realism. Harvesting rainfall in Rajasthan ticks many boxes for her, bringing local control over water to people previously reliant on government canals and tankers. But she knows that downstream dams have sometimes suffered when water is held back. “There is only so much water to be caught, after all.”

Daily wash in India (Image: Dieter Telemans/Panos)

Subramanian is open to being surprised by her interviewees. On one occasion, she discovers that many rural Indian women enjoy the apparently arduous journey out of their villages to collect firewood and water each morning. It is the one time that they are free of the men.

In five essays, painstakingly researched in long journeys to find “the small, the local, the indigenous at work across India”, Subramanian roams far beyond the issue of water. She explores the battle between organic farmers and proponents of intensive farming. Who can best feed a fast-growing population containing more undernourished people than any other nation? She interviews dozens of Indian women in their kitchens and exposes the scandal of how “clean” cooking stoves were mis-sold to billions of the world’s poorest people.

Her feminist politics shine through in her analysis of the power play behind India’s assault on population growth in places like Bihar, which she dubs “a dismal place to be a woman”. And her skills as a nature reporter combine with her love and knowledge of raptors in illuminating the strange story of India’s vanishing vultures.

Subramanian’s heart is in rural India and the continuing relevance of its traditions. She yearns for a future in which small remains beautiful. “India, home of the god of small things, is the perfect place for the model of the micro to emerge,” she says. But her optimism and idealism are rooted in rigour, science and a humanistic approach that drives her stories of day-to-day life across that country. This is reporting of the highest standard.

Sadly, The Last Drop is rather different. It is not, as the subtitle suggests, about “the politics of water”. Instead, it is a political template imposed on water.

Mike Gonzalez, a Trotskyite professor and biographer of Hugo Chavez, and his co-author, Venezuelan journalist Marianella Yanes, seem interested only in critiquing capitalism by blaming the “commodification” of water and the privatisation of its supply for the ills of an industry that – rather confounding their argument – is still largely in public hands.

Their thesis is not helped by factual inaccuracies. For example, in the space of two pages, the authors state that the Nile rises in Sudan, and that millions have been poisoned by arsenic in water along the Indus river, rather than the Ganges. There is a good book to be written about the collision between globalisation and water as a public “good”. But this ill-informed rant is not it.

After the high idealism of Subramanian and the low politics of Gonzalez, Karen Schneller-McDonald’s Connecting the Drops feels like a cold shower of American realism. This “citizens’ guide to protecting water resources” explains, in terms that suburbanites can grasp, why their local streams, ponds and wetlands matter, and how to defeat housing developers or fracking engineers who want to drain, pollute, culvert or cover them over.

The author provides this kind of advice for a living in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she is an environmental consultant working with community groups. Much of what she offers is specific to the US, but her style is inclusive. And her advice on how to call out officials, politicians and corporations who insist their decisions cannot be contested because they are “based on science” is of universal value. Science, she knows, is a tool and a weapon, but rarely a policy.

The Last Drop: The politics of water Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes Pluto Press

Connecting the Drops: A citizens’ guide to protecting water resources Karen Schneller-McDonald Cornell University Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “The stuff of life”