Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in the army taught young people the importance of showering and washing hands.
40
Water resources have indirectly been a factor of the birth of a new culture of leisure
and new places of sociability,
rst in the West, and now spreading out to the rest of
the world. From the eighteenth century onwards, two sorts of new residential and
seasonal resorts appeared,
rstly for the European aristocracy: seaside towns and
spas. The
rst category is linked with a change of perception towards the coastal
areas: once perceived as dangerous, used only by local populations either for
shing
or shells, kelp or algae picking, they became both aesthetic landscapes and a form
of treatment (cold baths) prescribed by physicians.
41
Dozens of seaside resorts
experienced the birth of tourism thanks to their
. Inland, the
development of hydrotherapy and the progress of transportation (railroad) led to the
same phenomenon in
“
water resources
”
(from the Belgian town of this name). The proximity
of water, either from sea or coming out of the earth (hot springs), gave rise to a new
type of urbanism and the settling of urban amenities even in very small resorts.
Environmental history of touristic development has yet to be developed. Since the
1930s, with the development of public swimming pools and swimming lessons in
cities, and after the Second World War, the sea
“
spas
”
became a
major popular attraction. People also experienced the sand, whereas the elites had
once been separated from it by boardwalk promenades. Environmental history of
beaches is a promising
—
associated with sun
—
eld of research, necessitating cultural history as well as
geographical investigation.
42
Islands, once seen as the paradise of mosquitoes and
considered as under-developed areas, are now oriented towards tourism and
activities like boating and diving (particularly in the Mediterranean and Caribbean
Seas, the Indian Ocean). Inland, arti
cial lakes created upstream from dams and
hydroelectricity plants were also used for bathing,
shing or boating purposes, as
well as for new sports like windsur
ng or water skiing bringing seasonal activities
to rural regions confronted with human deserti
cation. Other places with water or
landscapes sculpted by water have attracted millions of tourists: the Niagara Falls
and the Grand Canyon are well-known for this aspect.
4.6 Conclusion
As was written in the
rst issue of the new environmental history journal Water
History,
water has been and is likely to continue to be one of the most pressing
environmental resource concerns
“
. Water resources appeal both to archaeology and
to contemporary history, because
”
rst settlements,
rst cities, were developed
thanks to
rst hydraulic works, and because the struggle towards universal access to
water entailed
erce competition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: to
40
Goubert (
1989
).
41
Corbin (
1994
).
42
Devienne (
2011
).
