Cover photo : Roman engineers of Antiquity built highly developed water supply systems. The Pont du Gard (c.

19 BC) in southern France, below, is only a small section of a 40-kilometre-long conduit, mostly underground, which carried water to the city of Nimes. Its 3 tiers of arches rise to over 47 metres. The highest tier, carrying the conduit, consists of 35 4.6-metre arches." http://www.unesco.org.uy/phi/libros/histwater/frame.html

INDEX
Introduction I. History: understanding the water cycle II. Paradise: water as friend - a gift of the gods III. Paradise lost: water as a danger and source of conflict A) Water as foe: waterborne diseases and natural disasters B) Water as power: "water" civilizations C)Water as an ecological and legal challenge: the public and private domains D) Water as victim: forms of pollution Conclusion References

INTRODUCTION

Alain GIODA Hydrologist, ORSTOM (Institut franais de recherche scientifique pour le dveloppement en coopration) and SENAMHI (Servicio Nacional de Meteorolga e Hidrologa)br> Casilla 2352, Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel.: (591-42) 47033, Fax: (591-42) 56321, e-mail: gioda@bo.net This article is dedicated to the memory of two European botanists who took a keen interest in the history of science and the flora of Latin America: Dr Marcel Kroenlein, director for many years of Monaco's Jardin Exotique; and Pierre Fontanel, a young engineer from Montpellier specializing in weeds After a historical evocation of the concept of the water cycle, water is presented in its various aspects: as friend and foe of humankind, a source of power, an apple of discord, a common heritage and a victim. The purpose is to illustrate in a historical and global context the diversity, and hence wealth, of the connections between people and water.

I) HISTORY:
understanding the water cycle
Only in the late seventeenth century did European scientists reach a clear understanding of the origin of water and its natural cycle. This cycle has three components: (a) the sea, and to a very small extent, vegetation (evaporation and evapotranspiration driven by solar energy); (b) the clouds (transfer, condensation, precipitation); and (c) continental surface water (springs, rivers, lakes) and groundwater which, with the exception of fossil water, run into the sea after a certain period of time. The first book on scientific hydrology in the Western world was De l'origine des fontaines (On the origin of springs), written by Pierre Perrault and published in 1674 in Paris by Pierre Le Petit. Perrault created a water balance in a basin located in the upper section of the Seine River. In 1687 the Englishman Edmond Halley calculated the evaporation rate of the Mediterranean and then compared that figure with the contributions of the rivers flowing into the sea. To measure the evapotranspiration of plants the French mathematician de la Hire built three lysimeters in 1688. Outside Europe, however, the Chinese had understood the water cycle 500 years before the birth of Christ, and in India, Kautilya, a minister of the Maurya dynasty (321-185 BC), had rain measured in pails placed in front of rural stores. In terms of public services, the first flood-warning system, set up by the Chinese in 1574 on the Yellow River, used horseback riders who travelled faster than the water. Owing nothing to the West, the Koreans started

taking regular, systematic rainfall measurements in 1441 and have continued doing so ever since. The principal mystery of the water cycle was why the sea level did not rise despite the continuous inflow from the rivers. To solve this, it would have been necessary to estimate the large quantity of sea water evaporated by the heat of the sun. However, that was not possible since it was assumed that the seas covered only a limited surface area in a flat and disc-shaped world. This notion, inherited from Ptolemy (90-168 AD), faded out in the West, especially under the influence of Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642). Egypt presented another paradox for the ancient world. The Nile flooded at the height of the dry season and those living along its banks did not know where the source of the river was. That discovery was only made in the late nineteenth century by Europeans. In ancient Egypt the lower castes thought that the Nile was just a branch of the Mediterranean and believed that the sea water rose in the river, in much the same way as in a bay in Brittany. The educated classes, however, measured the floods with the first scales to be set in the bed of the river, the famous nilometers. Further questions arose from the observation that the rivers continued to flow even after the rain had stopped. What was feeding the rivers? In contrast to more plausible hypotheses, Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed the fanciful notion that river flow resulted in part from the condensation of vapour of groundwater, itself produced by the flux and desalinization of sea water in the ground.

II) Paradise:
water as friend - a gift of the Gods
For thousands of years water was considered to be a fixed element of the globe, like air. In a basically rural world water had virtually no connection with commerce since water from springs, rivers and river branches, wells and cisterns was available at little or no cost depending on whether or not it was supplied by slave labour. Water was a gift from the gods. There was a general aversion to interfering with nature's cycle, the ancient Romans and urban-dwellers in particular being no exception. Mills turned day and night to provide water for fountains and gigantic hot baths. Special amphitheatres, known as naumachiae, were constructed for water sports. The historian Pierre Grimal calls Rome the `city of water' - by the end of the imperial epoch 11 major aqueducts were transporting water to the city. Nevertheless, by around 144 BC the inverted siphon technique had been mastered with the use of pipes made from lead, a metal in abundant

supply in the area that later became Spain. According to bibliographical sources, under the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD) the daily amount of water supplied to each Roman was approximately 1,000 litres. This estimate does not, however, allow for leaks and enormous water losses from the ancient system. After the fall of Rome and then Constantinople, the Arabs and the Persians pursued and refined the tradition of fountains, water sports and hot baths. The fashion then reappeared in Europe during the baroque period. But it was not until the eighteenth and, even more so, the nineteenth century, with the rediscovery of the body and the health cult, that the popularity of spas reached its height. Marienbad, Vichy, Baden-Baden, Spa, Bath and Montecatini flourished. In France the Empress Eugnie set the style by going to spas. In Mont-Oriol, written in 1887, Guy de Maupassant provided a realistic description of the opening of a rural spa. Water was a gift from the gods like the fountain tree or holy tree of the Canary Islands which, until the year 1610, transformed mist into water for the early inhabitants of the island of Hierro. The Incas believed that Lake Titicaca was the centre of the original world. In Aztec Mexico, the peasants worshipped Tlloc, the god of rain, symbolized by a frog or a toad. In fact, water was the essential factor in the stability and organization of the preColumbian peoples of Mexico. Around 1730 in the new world, Bartolomeo Arzns, chronicler of the life of Potos, the largest city in the Americas of the seventeenth century, still considered rain a divine phenomenon.

III) Paradise lost:

water as a danger and source of conflict
A) Water as foe: waterborne diseases and natural disasters
Nevertheless, humankind very soon lost the key to paradise. Waterborne diseases of parasitic, bacterial or viral origin are widespread, propagated by human beings as a result of poor hygiene or mismanagement of water. At the end of the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur and his students demonstrated the role played by germs in infectious diseases and the consequent importance of good hygiene. Waterborne parasites are predominantly responsible for diseases in the developing world. These include malaria (1 million deaths annually, 100 to 150 million new cases each year, 90 per cent of which are in Africa, 300 million parasite carriers); bilharziasis (300 million people at risk); and filariasis. Among the bacterial disorders, cholera continues to be the most notorious in Europe as a result of the 1854 epidemic which left nearly 150,000 dead in France. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seven world pandemics have killed hundreds of thousands. Among virus-caused diseases, hepatitis A, like cholera, is spread by dirty hands and contaminated water. To this group should be added severe parasitic, bacterial and viral dysenteries in new-born babies.

Among the major rains and floods of history, eight years of massive rainfall and record flooding in the period 1313-1320 affected the whole of Europe and, in 1315-1316, produced one of the worst famines of the Middle Ages. In the Winchester area of England the hay would not dry, harvests were pitifully small, oxen became unshoed and ells propagated outside ponds. The price of grain was three times the average for the period 1270-1350. More people died than in the great plague of 1349. In addition to these natural disasters, improper land use aggravated flooding and triggered erosion, especially in arid and semi-arid mountain regions. In France, anarchic land use and the permanent occupation of large river beds, a frequent feature in the Mediterranean region, led to the Guil tragedy in June 1957 in the upper Durance, described by the hydrologist Maurice Pard, and more recently those of Nmes, Vaison-la-Romaine and the Maritime Alps.

B) Water as power: "water" civilizations

Since ancient times the control of water has symbolized power in the Middle East, where water is in particularly short supply. The historian Wittfogel referred to `water' civilizations, that is, civilizations based on the ownership and control of water. Clear examples are the civilizations of Egypt, Assyria and the kingdom of Saba', which flourished in environments that then became just about as arid as they are at present. Qanaats - artificial underground tunnels transporting water over great distances - were invented by the inhabitants of Urartu, in what is now Turkey, in the eighth century BC. This type of system, generally using water from aquifer drainage, was to be applied in Persia, Egypt, India, Greece, the Magreb, where such conduits were called `foggaras', and the Canary Islands, where the equivalent term is `galeras'. Working from Old Testament evidence, D. Gill developed the theory that King David had been able to take Jerusalem by using the city's underground conduits, which supplied water from the spring of Gihon. However, the clearest example involving the power of water was the fall of the kingdom of Saba', symbolized by the destruction of the only dam in Ma'rib around 300 AD. According to the Ant sura in the Koran, it was owing to the impiety of its subjects that the kingdom disappeared because of water, just as it had prospered from it. To this day Israel carefully monitors its water supply; it requires a powerful, interconnected network to meet its needs. The Palestinian entity will soon be faced with water shortages and consequent dependency on the state of Israel. Other well-known contemporary cases involve rivers that cross international boundaries: countries located upstream can control the amount of water available to the countries lying further downstream. Egypt is dependent on the political situation in Ethiopia, a veritable water tower of the Nile, whose future reservoirs and intake structures could make the Aswan dam and its irrigated farming obsolete. Jordan and Israel have recently concluded an agreement concerning their utilization of the waters of the Jordan.

C) Water as en ecological and legal challenge: the public and private domains

Under Roman law flowing water was considered to be public property, which meant that rivers and their branches could not be commercialized. The political and military power of the feudal system was limited by rural communities for which water, by virtue of being continually renewed, was a public property and could not be appropriated by feudal right. By the 1566 Edit of Moulins the royal authority in France decreed that all rivers and their tributaries carrying boats belonged to the crown; previously acquired individual rights, however, which included fishing and the use of mills and barges, were still honoured. According to modern French law, public waters consist of navigable lakes, dams constructed on territory within the public domain, navigation canals, their buildings and fixtures, and watercourses from the point of navigability to the mouth, including nonnavigable branches. The state may grant private parties personal water use rights or the right temporarily to occupy the public domain. It may also surrender its fishing right. Nonpublic watercourses constitute a complex legal domain. Article 2 of the act of 8 April 1898, which was incorporated into the act of 3 January 1992, provides that riparians may use waters bordering or crossing their property solely within the limits determined by law. Under Article 106 of the Rural Code, no damming or work to establish a water intake system, water mill or factory may be undertaken on any such watercourse without official authority. Article 642 of the Civil Code provides that persons possessing a spring on their land may use the springwater at will within the limits and the needs of their property. Furthermore, in practice the law grants landowners unlimited use of the water flowing from a spring on their property. This property right also implies the right to conduct excavation work regardless of any repercussions downstream. Throughout history water rights have been largely subsumed under property rights, making the amount or volume of water a relatively insignificant issue. Moreover as a counterweight to the conflicts between public and private rights, recent French legislation (the acts of 3 January 1992 and 2 February 1995) has reinforced the concept of a common heritage.

D) Water as victim: forms of pollution

In the past most pollution caused by human activity was chemical. Today organic and thermal pollution have become significant factors. Thermal pollution usually occurs downstream of nuclear power stations. Heavy metals, widely used since antiquity, are the main chemical contaminants. The first pesticide, which appeared in 1885, was the Bordeaux mixtur (1) ,used on grapevines. However, pesticides were not widely used until Muller discovered the properties of DDT in 1940. The abundance of nitrates in our waters is also a recent phenomenon due to intensified livestock farming and excessive soil fertilization in the rich countries and a lack of proper latrines in Third World cities. Phosphorus has likewise recently impaired the quality of standing water through over-enrichment or deoxygenation, with over-fertilization of the soil and the general practice of direct drainage of household waste. Advances in personal hygiene and the use of phosphate-based detergents have, paradoxically, produced

a contaminant which also affects the seas, such as the Adriatic, causing spectacular and foul-smelling green tides. The use of heavy metals is carefully monitored - the higher their concentration in the food chain is, the more dangerous are the illnesses they cause. Lead poisoning was very common in ancient Rome when water pipes were made of lead; under current European norms, the lead content in water may not exceed 0.05 milligrams per litre. Mercury, with a maximum acceptable threshold of 0.001 milligrams per litre, can cause Minamata disease, named after the Japanese town where, since the Second World War, this affliction has ravaged people and cats eating contaminated fish. Since the sixteenth century there has been continuous mercury contamination of the rivers and waters of upper Peru especially around the city of Potos. The introduction of mercury in the silver making process in 1572 brought great economic wealth to Potos. An isolated town 4,000 metres up in the Andes, Potos had a population of more than 150,000 in the period between 1610 and 1650, about the same as Paris at the time. In the early seventeenth century, dozens of mills and factories along the banks of the Vera Cruz river ground silver ore and alloyed it with mercury. Today streams from the higher altitudes down to the Pilcomayo still lap against old and new silver ore slag heaps, and mercury contamination has increased downstream of the gold deposits in rivers flowing towards Bolivian, Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonia. (1) A copper-sulphate based liquid used to protect grapevines.

Conclusion
Knowing what we do about the history and crucial value of water, can we say that we are thrifty enough with it? Are we helping to preserve its quality? The answer, generally speaking, is no. We take too many baths - one a day - which requires about 200 litres of water, while a quick shower uses only 20 litres. Although an examination of European history may reveal the source of mistakes made, it offers virtually no models or lessons for our contemporaries or for us. Yet, if we started saving energy, for example, we would also be indirectly saving water since it is indispensable in hydroelectric, thermal and nuclear power stations. Our farming sector, which has had record crops and is moving into the export market, needs to turn its attention to managing water resources and improving their quality. The world will be cleaner and water clearer when we dispense with the cult of whiteness and stop advertising detergents, when we lower the dazzling light of our lamps and, inspired by the Japanese writer Tanizaki Junichiro, we learn to `praise the darkness'. And in conclusion, a clin d'oeil from ancient Greece: realizing that water flows, runs through our fingers and then hides itself, disappears and evaporates, Aristophanes, in his play `The Clouds', reaches the logical conclusion that writing about the water cycle is the height of futility. I wish to thank, in France, in particular, Grard Grosclaude (INRA, Nantes), Yann L'Hte, Eugenio Rabbia (ORSTOM, Montpellier), and also

Pierre Morlon (INRA, Dijon), Charles Riou (INRA, Bordeaux), Pierre Chevallier (ORSTOM, Montpellier), Alain Misset and Jean Mouchet (ORSTOM, Paris), in Bolivia Ren Arze (ABNB, Sucre), Bernard Pouyaud, Mara Cecilia Gonzlez (ORSTOM, La Paz), Carlos Serrano (UATF, Potosi), in Argentina Rosario Prieto (CRICYT, Mendoza), in Spain Andrs Acosta (ex-OMM, Salamanca) and in Israel, Jan Szeminski (University of Jerusalem).

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