Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Many major water projects have been the occasion of a lot of water waste because
of the lack of ecological knowledge or a will to ignore the regional conditions: in
Egypt like in Central Asia, about half the water of reservoirs and canals evaporated
or seeped into the earth before being usable for people. Some estimations state that
by the 1990s, salinization seriously affected about 10 % of the world
s irrigated
lands. In Southeast Asia, and other places, the drainage of wetlands for rice growing
and shrimp farming went along with the disappearance of the mangrove, and a
subsequent loss of biodiversity.
Integrating social and environmental history leads to studying con
'
icts provoked
by lack of water resources, or big scale water projects. Various scales of analysis
can be used, from the local one (inside a community, for example), to the catchment
area (between upstream and downstream communities),
the State or even the
international level.
12
Categories like
are dis-
cussed by various scholars. Barca has argued that in the Italian Liri Valley the
cultural and political changes from the Enlightenment led to the remaking of a river
as enclosed property, used by a rural bourgeoisie with no consideration of social
and environmental costs.
13
In addition this new economy of water disrupted the
river ecosystem; as early as the mid-nineteenth century,
“
public
”
/
“
private
”
,
“
rights of use
”
sh species were disap-
pearing from the river due to both excessive canalization and industrial pollution.
Riverine environments have been very inspirating for environmental historians,
because of the complex entanglement between social, natural and cultural factors of
change.
4.3 The River
'
s Attraction to Historiography
Environmental history of water resources has developed, during the past decades, a
particular focus on rivers. Studies have moved from the narrative of the capitalistic
exploitation of nature to the assessment of socio-natural evolutions, showing how
natural forces and human actions are entangled.
14
Some scholars have thus pro-
posed to see rivers as
landscapes.
15
Science and technology
studies (STS) on the one hand, interdisciplinary projects on the other hand, inspired
an increasing amount of essays emphasizing the hybridity of rivers
“
envirotechnical
”
—
as other
waterscapes. At the local scale, well before the invention of the
, the
water mills illustrate the human reshaping of rivers for economic and social pur-
pose. Playing the role of mediators between human societies and natural resources,
they were central to the agricultural and industrial economy and also important in
“
white coal
”
12
For a case study about the USA: Paavola (
2006
).
13
Barca (
2010
).
14
To measure the evolution between some past and present environmental history approaches:
Worster (
1985
), White (
1995
) and Cioc (
2002
).
15
Pritchard (
2011
).
