First of a series

“Rivers are the gutters down which run the ruins of continents.”

- Luna Leopold

The Colorado River provides water for 40 million people and is the lifeblood of some of this nation’s the most productive cropland. It stopped flowing regularly to the sea in 1960. Earlier this year, more than six decades later – and following 23 consecutive years of serious drought exacerbated by the increasing impacts of climate change – American Rivers designated the stretch of the Colorado that runs through the Grand Canyon as the most endangered river in the United States. For over two centuries, Americans have brought a variety of tools to exploit this majestic. Foresight has rarely been among them. Are we at finally waking up to the crises of our rivers?

Nor is it only a problem here. More than half the world’s rivers are seriously depleted and polluted. China’s Yellow River runs dry for two thirds of the year; the Ganges is befouled almost from its source; and the Volga annually transports 42 million tons of toxic waste to the Caspian Sea.

Streams and rivers provide the essentials of life – water and food – for all living beings. For humans, they have done much more. We have used rivers to bathe our bodies, wash our clothes and remove our waste. Rivers have irrigated our farmlands and carried in their waters the fertile sediments that create and replenish the soil itself. Rivers have made possible the inexpensive and efficient transportation of goods—and with them the social, cultural, and intellectual exchanges that have spurred the development of ideas and the spread of knowledge. Harnessing the flow and capturing the power of rivers was the source of the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it.

The earliest civilizations grew on rich alluvial plains that rivers created, and to a great extent rivers defined those early communities. People venerated their rivers as the source of life. Their earliest gods were river gods. But rivers could also be arbitrary forces of destruction, and people were often at their mercy, as floods obliterated their homes, droughts withered their crops, and contaminants poisoned their water. The river brought death as well as life.

Today, despite all humankind’s spectacular engineering feats, over a billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water – and three times that number suffer from inadequate sanitation. Diarrhea kills almost three million people each year, the majority of them infants and children. Two hundred million people suffer from schistosomiasis, an infection caused by drinking contaminated river water, and more than six million Africans have river blindness.

This series will take a wide-ranging look at rivers and their waters, examining their history, science, politics, and economics; marveling at their beauty; grappling with the issues they face; and seeking remedies at both the macro and micro levels. For if, as Luna Leopold wrote, “the health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land” (and it surely is), how then can we ignore Marq de Villiers’ lament that “a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water?”