By James Salzman
Humanity's complex relationship with water
Subject
Themes
Drinking water is the most essential substance for human survival, yet how societies have understood, managed, and fought over it has changed dramatically across millennia. The story begins with myth. Cultures worldwide, from ancient Mesopotamia to Norse Scandinavia to Judeo-Christian tradition, invested water with supernatural significance. Ishtar descended into the Underworld seeking the Water of Life. Odin sacrificed an eye for a sip from a sacred spring. Holy wells in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were believed to cure everything from insanity to infertility. Lourdes, France, still draws five million pilgrims annually to drink from a spring discovered by a fourteen-year-old girl in 1858. Even modern bottled water marketing taps into these ancient associations, promising purity and renewal through "natural" sources.
Drinking water is the most essential substance for human survival, yet how societies have understood, managed, and fought over it has changed dramatically across millennia. The story begins with myth. Cultures worldwide, from ancient Mesopotamia to Norse Scandinavia to Judeo-Christian tradition,…
Drinking Water arrived at a moment when public attention to water issues was intensifying but remained fragmented. Books about bottled water, water conflicts, and water scarcity had appeared individually, but no single work had attempted to weave these threads into a comprehensive popular history.…
Every recorded civilisation has invested drinking water with spiritual and supernatural significance. This is not a coincidence or a quirk of a few isolated cultures. It is a near-universal feature of human belief systems, stretching from the oldest written legends to modern pilgrimage sites and…
In 1776, Adam Smith posed what became known as the diamond-water paradox: why are diamonds, mere fashion baubles, more expensive than water, which is essential for life? His answer lay in supply and demand. Water was plentiful and therefore cheap; diamonds were scarce and therefore dear. For most of…
Determining what constitutes "safe" drinking water is not a purely scientific question. It is shaped by politics, economics, and the relative power of those who must drink the water. The gap between what science recommends and what governments enforce reveals uncomfortable truths about how societies…
The history of drinking water is inseparable from the history of engineering. Every great civilisation has been defined, in part, by its approach to securing and distributing clean water. The technologies vary enormously, from Venetian cisterns to Roman aqueducts to modern chlorination plants, but…
The UN estimates that by 2030, more than half the world's population will live in water-scarce areas. Climate change is worsening droughts. Aquifers are being depleted faster than they can recharge. Pollution renders ever more surface water undrinkable. The comfortable assumption that clean drinking…
Juan Ponce de Leon never searched for the Fountain of Youth. The tale was invented by the Spanish court historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, writing fourteen years after the conquistador's death in 1521. Oviedo even claimed the explorer sought the waters to cure his sexual impotence, conveniently…
In a famous scene from Lawrence of Arabia, Ali ibn el Kharish shoots Lawrence's guide dead for drinking from another tribe's well. "The well is everything," he explains. "The Hazimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that." Rules governing access to drinking water may be among the oldest forms of…
At Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island, tourists once queued to drink from a shared bamboo ladle chained to a public fountain. Such communal cups were common in Asia and once widespread in the United States, until a 1908 article in Technical World Magazine titled "Death in School Drinking Cups"…
Arsenic has long been the murderer's poison of choice: clear when dissolved, odourless, tasteless, and devastatingly effective. The classic play and film Arsenic and Old Lace turned the compound into dark comedy, with two elderly women dispatching lonely widowers via poisoned elderberry wine. Modern…
On the night of 28 March 2006, intruders broke into Blackstone, Massachusetts's water tower. They climbed a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, pried open a steel door, smashed an electrical panel, scaled the tower, and kicked in its fiberglass cover. The next morning, officials found a bucket with an…
On 15 September 2007, the University of Central Florida opened its new $54 million football stadium. Security guards confiscated water bottles at the entrance. Inside, there was not a single drinking fountain. In ninety-degree heat and stifling humidity, eighteen people were hospitalised with…
In Cochabamba, Bolivia, more than 40 percent of residents lack access to a water faucet. Those without connections to the city's mains buy water from private street vendors, paying up to ten times more than wealthier citizens with piped service. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and…
A Canadian television drama called H2O imagined American troops invading Canada to seize its water supply. The premise earned high ratings because Canada was genuinely embroiled in a contentious national debate. The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world's accessible freshwater, and in the late…
Drinking water is the most essential substance for human survival, yet how societies have understood, managed, and fought over it has changed dramatically across millennia. The story begins with myth. Cultures worldwide, from ancient Mesopotamia to Norse Scandinavia to Judeo-Christian tradition, invested water with supernatural significance. Ishtar descended into the Underworld seeking the Water of Life. Odin sacrificed an eye for a sip from a sacred spring. Holy wells in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were believed to cure everything from insanity to infertility. Lourdes, France, still draws five million pilgrims annually to drink from a spring discovered by a fourteen-year-old girl in 1858. Even modern bottled water marketing taps into these ancient associations, promising purity and renewal through "natural" sources.