Water has always been key in the success of various human civilizations. To quench our thirst and for transportation, we humans have learned to make good use of – and even control – water to improve our lives.
In history classes we learned about the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and all the dynasties that depended on them. Today, millions of people still depend on these two rivers, although their quality is deteriorating. The Nile, the Yangtze, the Amazon and the Danube are not far behind in their popularity in books, movies and music. I am sure that you can also think of a river that has been important in your life. Rivers have shaped our cultures and economies. Rivers, every day, give us life.
Sometimes I like to imagine those moments when a “new” group of hominids arrived at a place previously only inhabited by all the other animals. Imagine walking in search of better resources, among forests or hot savannas, and suddenly that fresh source of water appears as if out of nowhere. What must they have felt?
There is no such thing as a pristine place in the world today. Everything we can appreciate today has been modified by those who were here before us. Everything is a mixture of modifications by our ancestors and natural phenomena. Cities, dams, agriculture, even wars (many of the wars active today): we do everything around this irreplaceable resource. What we do (and don’t do) will also have consequences on our future. Not only for distant generations – today we are already living all this accumulation of consequences. But we can still make things better.
The last Sunday of September is “World Rivers Day”, and today I wanted to share with you some personal thoughts
In 2012 I took part for the first time in the “Atitlán Expeditions” (a limnological project with several Guatemalan, North American, and European scientists). One day we were taking samples in the Panajachel River (a river that’s still in a really bad shape). While I was labeling the water sample vial, a colleague from the Czech Republic was standing beside me, looking thoughtfully at the lake. Suddenly she said: “You still have so many resources without irreversible alterations. I hope you can learn from the mistakes we made in Europe centuries ago and which we are paying for today…”. I’ve never forgotten those words.
I have had the privilege of working on other rivers of the world and similar situations have happened. There is always someone, usually from some country in the Global North, lamenting to feel a kind of time travel when realizing that in countries of the Global South, instead of learning from history, we repeat the mistakes as if we expected different results. In the years that I have been studying Limnology in Austria, in a University with students from all over the world, advice similar to the one I received that day in Atitlán has been quite frequent.
When WILL we learn?
Here I have had the opportunity to see some ecosystem restoration projects and their long and catastrophic story. It always leaves me thinking: if in Guatemala we barely have the resources for research and conservation, we are not going to have the resources to restore entire ecosystems. Especially if we barely know them. We still have time to manage our resources properly – we don’t have to get to that point. We must invest and make decisions based on science, and stop approving projects that threaten the resources we need for a better life quality.
0.03%
In Guatemala, we invest less than 0.03% of the GDP in research and development, but somehow there are those who expect us scientists to solve all the problems. That is not our role – not that we would not want to – but it is everyone’s responsibility.
At some point, one of the Mayors of the Atitlán Basin told us “why did we scientists do so much research instead of doing “something“. Not only does this reflect how little is known about what “doing science” entails, but he was also washing his hands off that “something” that is theoretically (and by law) part of the responsibility of the municipalities -> Taking “so much research” (which is not so much either) and using it to make better decisions.
Today, in Guatemala, an urbanization project appears to have the green light, somewhere where it is threatening one of the remaining forests in the city, which is also important for water recharge. A building in Izabal also seems to have been approved, which represents a great risk regarding natural disasters and local livelihoods. On the Ministry of Energy website they regret not taking advantage of the country’s full hydroelectric potential. There is more than enough evidence on how hydropower is not the best option. People in Petén woke up a few weeks ago to turn on the tap and drink water but instead received fuel. The media and government have not yet given this the coverage and importance it deserves. We are talking about people’s health!!!
And I could go on…(and those are just some of the past weeks’ news).
But not to leave you with a bitter taste and sense of guilt, let’s see what we can do for our rivers
Let’s imagine a project to implement “riparian buffer strips” in the rivers of Lake Atitlán, like the one you see in the image above. Riparian buffer strips are basically “strips” of native vegetation that stretch out for some meters wide to each side of the river (I mean, it’s not just one tree on each side, the denser the vegetation, the better). This buffer strip measure is the minimum that should be in place when a riverine forest is not restorable (for example, if agriculture or farmland is already too close to the river and can not be transformed back or given up). These strips of vegetation can function as filters for activities in the watershed, helping to decrease the amount of fertilizer, pesticides, and sediment we would prefer not to have in the river and lake water. They also have important functions for biodiversity, microclimate, and scenic beauty, among many others. But here, many people have among their main economic activities the extraction of gravel from the riverbed. This triggers another network of problems and is partly what would make this hypothetical project difficult to carry out. But I am not blaming these people directly, how else would they make an income? This is a problem throughout the country.
My only objective with this hypothetical scenario is to illustrate how science and decision-making based on science are linked to many other socio-economic problems in the country. Maybe these are things we don’t usually think about or connect this way. Another important example is that of wastewater. Just as we pay to get water in our homes, we should also pay for our wastewater to receive adequate treatment. And most of Guatemala is not being treated.
That’s why, as I said before, we scientists can’t solve environmental problems as an isolated group – we need you on board too. Many of the barriers we often encounter can be summed up as a lack of political will and lack of social pressure. Perhaps reaching the point of giving rights to the river as in New Zealand and India is far from what we could achieve right now, but we must definitely be a more active and demanding society. We all deserve beautiful rivers for the long run, let’s avoid repeating mistakes whose consequences we know and we won’t be able to manage.
Let me know your suggestions in the comments!
I wrote this with my country in mind, but tell me, how do you see this in your country?
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Recommended reads:
- Battistel, D. et al. 2018. Anthropogenic Impact in the Maya Lowlands of Petén, Guatemala, during the last 5500 years. Journal of Quaternary Science.
- Haidvogl, G. 2018. Historic Milestones of Human River Uses and Ecological Impacts. Riverine Ecosystem Management.
- Anderson, E.P. et al. 2019. Understanding Rivers and their Social Relations: A Critical Step to Advance Environmental Water MAnagement. WIREs Water.