Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
liquid. Often, it has been possible through a change in the supply system, involving
the use of surface water from lakes or rivers, or groundwater related to the river. In
a country like France, after the Second World War, an inquiry stated that in 38,014
“
(the smallest administrative division), only approximately one third
had functioning water supply systems.
6
In many rural districts, villages and scat-
tered farms were linked to a public water system only in the late 1960s. Before that
time, each farm relied on harnessed springs or on its own well. When studying the
history of the relationship between humanity and water resources for the last
150 years, it is necessary to deal with issues of scarcity and water allocation. The
modern period, with its demographic increase (from less than 2 billion people by
1910 to approximately 6.8 billion one century later) brought a twofold problem: the
inadequate provision of water and the puri
communes
”
cation of water once it had been used.
To quench thirst, water has always been in competition with other
—
beverages, since the Ancient times: beer, wine, various types of alcohol, and
nowadays sodas. Was it only a question of taste, or a question of accessibility and/
or conservation of safe water? Waterborne diseases, like cholera or typhoid fever,
struck Western cities until the
—
tasty
rst half of the twentieth century (for instance, the
population of Hamburg was decimated by a cholera epidemics in 1892; Russian and
Italian cities suffered from the same disease as late as in 1910
1911). Nowadays,
waterborne illnesses are still considered as the second highest cause of mortality.
Thus, the World Health Organization continues to foster the ght against the
consumption of polluted water. Today, approximately two billion people still do not
have any domestic access to public water (and much more cannot drink bacterio-
logical safe water). While some Western suburban neighborhoods consume more
than 400 l per capita per day, millions of African or Asian inhabitants live with less
than 10 l per capita per day. In Latin America, a continent where
-
”
have developed since the 1980s, a substantial proportion of the citizens of Mexico
City and S
“
Mega-Cities
o Paulo do not have access to the public water supply network. Some
inter basin water transfers, initially planned to satisfy agricultural irrigation have
now become a vital source of water for agglomerations like Los Angeles and
Phoenix (Colorado watershed) or Johannesburg and its surrounding area in South
Africa.
Water resources are not only useful for the consumption of food and beverages;
at the other end of the domestic cycle, they serve to carry away all wastes produced
by human bodies and by cooking and housekeeping. Environmental history is
concerned with was Joel Tarr has called the
ã
.
7
At least
since the Roman Times, urban authorities had to think about a water-carriage
system to deal with sewage problems. But for centuries, the problem has been
dif
“
search for the ultimate sink
”
cult to solve in many cities: either the canalizations were too small, or water
was insuf
ush the sewers. Sometimes, there were even no underground
pipes, but only small gutters or narrow drains between buildings; wastes stagnated
cient to
6
``Distribution d'eau et assainissement'',L
Eau, January 1946, p. 4.
'
7
Tarr, Joel. The search for the ultimate sink, op.cit.
