Factually! with Adam Conover - How Water Shaped Humanity with Giulio Boccaletti

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

As humans, we like to believe that we shape the natural world. But in reality, its laws and patterns have deeply structured our own society. To tell the story of how water has shaped humanity, on the show this week is Giulio Boccaletti, author of Water: A Biography. Check it out at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, but okay I don't know anything Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. As always, it's a delight to have you here and it's a delight to be able to speak with you. It's a delight to be able to speak with the amazing expert that I'm going to have on the show today. Before we get started, I want to send a shout out to our producer, Sam Rodman, who recently broke his foot. Very painfully, it looked like. And Sam, hope you're feeling better and rest up. Get well soon. Now, let's talk about the show this week. You know, we generally tend to think of ourselves as this big, tough species, you know, that we can terraform the planet however we want, that we create our own environment. We create our own reality. Whatever we need, we can we can arrest out of the grasping hands of nature. Right.

But you don't have to live on Earth very long before you realize that that's a somewhat optimistic way of looking at ourselves. In reality, we are still at the planet's mercy. Take water, for example. We need water to live. We're mostly made of water. If we don't get water very often, we die. And there are now a lot of us, so our needs for water are very great. Now, here in LA, where I live, you know, there was a huge need for water in the first half of the 20th century. There were a lot of people, not enough water for the city to keep growing. And so the city underwent a massive civic engineering project to bring water hundreds of miles away via an aqueduct, stealing it, in effect, from the place it originally was and bringing it to Los Angeles so Los Angeles could drink water. So you'd think, OK, great. Humans are incredible. Oh, my gosh,

we can terraform the earth, move water around willy nilly. Right. Well, unfortunately, now, close to a century later, we find ourselves with not enough water again. We are currently in the middle of a historic drought, which is taking place just a year or two after our previous historic drought. And this is not a drought that can be alleviated through us, you know, moving water from one place to another. The problem is that not enough water is falling on the area to begin with. Now, some of that is due to human impacts, due to climate change caused

by our emissions. But we have no easy way to control where and how much the rain falls. The natural systems of geography, meteorology, and physics that cause water to be distributed in some places, but not in others on Earth, are too big for us to control in a real way. We are still subservient to mother nature at the end of the day. And that means that mother nature has had an incredible power to shape our civilization itself, to determine where we live, what our cities look like, which nations rise and fall. And once again, nowhere is that clearer than with water. The history of water is actually the history of human civilization. And here on the show to reveal just how fascinating that history is, is Giulio Boccoletti. He's a scientist, the former chief strategy officer of

Nature Conservancy, and the author of Water, a History, a book about all the incredible ways in which water has shaped human civilization. Please welcome Giulio Boccoletti. Giulio, thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure. Great to be with you. So you've written a book called Water. What is this book about? Well, it's about water, obviously, and it's about the relationship between water and society. You know, I've spent the last two decades working on water around the world, and those two decades produced an enormous number of questions in my mind about why society dealt with water in certain ways. And so this was my attempt to answer all those questions. And I ended up writing a history of the relationship between water and society from

essentially never to forever, right? It's like a whole history of civilization, but seen through lens of water. So, you know, it strikes me there's a fair number of nonfiction books that are sort of, you know, they have a big noun for the title. I remember one that came out years ago called Cod. And it was like the story of the fish that changed the world. It's like, here's a story of world history through the lens of a cod. And there's a little bit of a trend for a while of books like that. But a book about water actually strikes me as having the fairest claim to be able to say that because water is clearly so essential to human society. It's completely reasonable that our societies would be built around it. But surely

you must have found some surprising things when you were studying it to make you want to write the book. Yeah, you're right. I mean, at some level, you can say the obvious things, which is, you know, we're made of water, right? I mean, 70% of our body is made of water. So in that sense, it's essential to our life. But what I wanted to do was something that hasn't really been done before, certainly not in a sort of book for the general public, which is try to reveal how our relationship with the substance has shaped the institutions that we live with, right? So our government institutions, our legal institutions,

our political institutions. One of the things that surprised me the most was, you know, I engaged in what you might call an archaeology of ideas. So scratching the surface of what's around us, going back in time and trying to find the origin of some of the foundations, you know, foundational institutions of society, from democracy to the legal system. And at the heart of the origin of those institutions, I always found water. You could say I dug for water and I found them. Yeah. And in hindsight,

it's not maybe surprising, but I suppose that I, you know, as I did discover this, I was quite surprised. Well, yeah. So I could imagine, you know, if you're writing a history of how humans have interacted with our environment or human technology, that water would come up again and again. But for it to be at the core of our politics does sound surprising to me. Can you why? Why is that? Or can you give me some examples of that? Well, yeah. First of all, I mean, I should start by saying, you know, so we appear, we Homo sapiens, right? So our species appears some 300,000 years ago. And for the vast majority of our history on the planet, we were hunter-gatherers and nomads, for the most part. And we sort of moved around. We were part of the ecosystem, right? So if we run out of water, we should move somewhere else where water is available. If the flood comes

through, we sort of just move along, right? And then at some point, about 10,000 years ago, which is just after the last Glacial Maximum, something important happens, which is we become sedentary. We decide to stand still. And we decide to stand still in a world of moving water. Now, you have to understand that water is essentially the agent of the climate system on the landscape. It's the way in which the climate system changes the landscape, right? The floods, the droughts, the storms, these are all ways in which the planet exercises force on the landscape. So we stand still, and we're suddenly surrounded by this incredibly powerful force that can change the landscape around us, that can move things around us. We need to move water to us if we're going to stay put. We're going to have to protect ourselves from excessive

water when there's too much. And because of just the sheer size and force of water phenomena on the planet, it is not a problem that any individual can solve, right? It requires collective action. And that's the heart of the beginning, right? The has to, it requires collective action. And that's the heart of the beginning, right? The moment you have to exercise collective action, you need to organize, right? You need to find ways of giving yourself rules as a society, as a community, to orchestrate your collective force

to confront this other agent on the landscape. And that's really the starting point for all of these institutions and all of these different developments. Okay, that's making sense to me. Because if you're, for instance, you know, around the beginning of agriculture, if you're just farming and relying on the rain or relying on the natural stream that you're near, you don't really, you know, you can sort of do it by yourself. But once you're trying to expand outwards into an area where there isn't enough water and you need to dig a channel and irrigate and, you know, divide up the amount of water that's coming in. Now you're talking about labor that involves a lot of people

and you're talking about having to decide who gets which water, which is like an immense political issue in California where I live is like who, It's like who should get the very limited amount of water that we have? That's right. That's right. And in fact, I mean, one of the things that's interesting about water is that one of the main points I make is that water is not really a technological issue. It's a political issue fundamentally because it's about sharing scarce resources. It's about dealing with destructive forces. dealing with destructive forces. And so in that sense, the issues that we face today in places like California or the issues that you face in the Mississippi Valley, any times that it floods, those issues are exactly the same that, you know, the first Mesopotamian cities in 5000 BC faced,

right? And the response is also kind of the same, which is somebody has to decide to mobilize the resources of society. Somebody has to orchestrate labor in order to build embankments or put dams in place or try and manage the river so that it provides water when you need it and not when you don't. And that's really what happened with the first city-states 5,000 years ago, and that's, in a sense, what happens still today. in a sense, what happens still today. Do you have any specific examples of that, of a particular water challenge resulting in the birth of a state or influencing a political system? Many. I mean, so the first and most famous is probably the case of Uruk, which was the first large city-state.

We know it today, for those of you who read sort of ancient literature, as it were, there's a famous epic called the Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah, I know Gilgamesh. Yeah, yeah. I know. I've never read it, but I've heard of Gilgamesh. Yeah, it's actually a relatively easy read, and it's a fascinating epic.

And it's the story of Gilgamesh, obviously, the king of Uruk, the great builder of the walls of Uruk. And Uruk is really the first example of a state that has to organize to manage water. It sits on the Euphrates or close to the Euphrates. The Euphrates is a complicated river. It tended to flood at the wrong time for agriculture. So it's fed by mountains in the north, in the Taurus Mountains and the Cyrus Mountains in North Mesopotamia. And by the time the meltwater reaches the southern plains of Mesopotamia, where Uruk was, it arrived at the wrong time.

It arrived essentially when the seeds had to be sown. And so the cities had to organize labor in order to control that water, right? And so you need somebody powerful who can mobilize labor and pay people to do that rather than cultivate their own fields. And so that's really what happens, you know, more or less at the time of Gilgamesh in the fourth millennium B.C. And so it turns out that the whole of society is organized around water because it's such a prominent sort of set of phenomena that kind of organize the calendar for people. And we know this because in the story, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in fact, is the first mention of the great myth of the deluge. In fact, all of us who are familiar with the Old Testament will have heard the story of Noah and the great flood. Now, the Old Testament was written around the 7th century BCE, but in fact, the

Epiglott-Gillenmesh, which probably dates to at least 1500 years before that, or maybe even two millennia before that, also has a story of a great deluge, a story of a fellow by the name of Utnapishtim, a great Mesopotamian patriarch. And he is spoken to by a god who tells him to build a vessel because a great deluge will come and he should put all his animals on it. And the day comes and he floats for days and days and days and nights and nights and nights. And eventually he sends out a dove to find land. And eventually he lands on this mount, Mount Urartu.

The floodwaters drain away and life begins away. Now, this is a central myth of origin for Uruk and for the Sumerian society, and it's exactly the same. Hold on a second. When I was learning this in the Bible, when I was at church, when I was eight years old, you're telling me all of this was biting from what the civilization of uruk and from from that wasn't from the the judeo-christian monotheistic is a they stole it all they stole this story they they inherited uh yeah adam let's say they inherited i mean you know the fact is when i started writing this book one of the things i wanted to do is to kind of really go and scratch at the origin of most human societies and civilizations, wherever we have evidence. And one of the things I found is that almost all societies have at their

origin some myth that sounds like the story of Napishtim or the story of Noah. So, for example, you know, the Lenape tribe, you know, the original inhabitants of Manahatta, well, they thought they were the descendants of the survivors of a great flood, or the, you know, the Inca. I know all these names now, you know, the Unupachacuti flood. It's the great flood of the origin of the Inca tradition. You know, and then if you go over to China, you know, the Chinese tradition, for example, the Jade Emperor, you know, who trapped four dragons in a mountain and they escaped in the form of four rivers, including the Yangtze and the Pearl and the Yellow. So this idea that those early societies had to wrestle with water and that struggle is captured in their myths of origin suggests that water is really central to identity and to everything that comes after.

to identity and to everything that comes after. Well, and also the thing that strikes me is that it's the most natural thing to have myths about because it is a fundamental requirement of human life, animal life, of all life, frankly, water. And we were, for most of our history, completely at the mercy of it. That, you know, we don't control where the water goes the water simply falls on mountains and the mountain you know the the watershed determines where the water goes but then sometimes a whole bunch more water comes and then we're ready for and it causes a big flood i mean the you know the very clearly the reason there'd be that many myths is because people got flooded all the dang time you know um and even today today, we still don't have, like, a flood is one of the most difficult natural disasters

for us to protect ourselves against, by far. That's right. That's right. And, you know, we saw this also in very recently, right? Both in the tragic events in British Columbia, as well as when Ida came through New York City. We are actually at the mercy of these forces far more than we like to remember. I mean, you know, that was actually one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, is because the vast majority of people don't really think about water all that much, right? I mean, for most people, the story of water ends at the tap that comes out of the wall.

That's kind of the extent of water ends at the tap that comes out of the wall. That's kind of the extent of the experience. And in reality, you know, and they think, presumably they think that that's possible because somebody else takes care of it. We've sort of, you know, the great achievement of the 20th century in terms of the lives of most people is that we somehow emancipated ourselves from having to worry about floods and droughts and the likes. But in reality, you know, the recent events in particular show that that's just an illusion, right? And it's increasingly cracking. We have always been susceptible to floods and droughts,

and they've always hit at the heart of our economy and society, and they still do in the most technological and most advanced society in history. They still do. We're still vulnerable to the same forces that shaped Uruk 7,000 years ago. Yeah, and on top of just disasters, our own ability to move water from one place to another where we – when I moved to Los Angeles, one of the first things I learned about was William Mulholland and the giant effort to move water from one part of California to feed Los Angeles. Los Angeles is just in this place where there wasn't enough water. It was like a growth constraint on the city.

So built this gigantic aqueduct to move water from an entirely different part of the state, stealing it from that state in the view of some people. And it was like a marvel of the time. And, you know, I imagine newsreels and whatnot. But today, you know, we are still in a world where, you know, every year they're like, oh, not enough snow fell in the mountains this year. And we might have a drought because at the end of the day, where do we get our water? It's still snow falling on the mountains. Like no matter how many aqueducts we build, we are still sort of at the mercy of geography and the climate. Yeah. You know, one of the things I wanted to reveal is the fact that the relationship between us and the landscape and the water landscape is very dialectic. It's a sort of back and forth, right?

And California is a very good example of that. You know, in 1900, San Diego could have only supported about 10,000 people, right? And California is a very good example of that. You know, in 1900, San Diego could have only supported about 10,000 people, right? And in a way, it's a testament to the, you know, engineering prowess of the progressive era and of the New Deal era, that millions of people were able to move to California. But of course, in moving there, and in fulfilling the promise of all that infrastructure and all those investments, they've inevitably sown the seeds of their next problem, which is now there's too many people and there's too much stress on the resource, on the resource base. And it's actually, and I should actually correct myself, it's not that there's too many people, but the way of life that people imagined is incompatible with the resource base that that, you know,

that part of the country has. And that's actually, you know, it's actually quite a profound moment in water, because, you know, those of you who live in California may not realize this, but you guys shaped the entire planet, right? Because in reality, the model that developed in California for a variety of historical reasons, became the model for the rest of the world. And so the infrastructure that the U.S. developed, particularly in the West, between, let's say, the 1910s and the 1940s, became the archetype for how you develop water infrastructure anywhere in the world. And then when Truman became the president, he essentially instituted this policy that was about using American experience as a diplomatic tool. And so as a result, as America was expanding, it was expanding its influence on the whole world,

it brought with it the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. And so if you go around the world, I traveled the world working on water issues, and you find traces of the American experience everywhere. That's why, you know, you and I can travel to California or to Japan or to Italy or to London, where I'm calling from. And all these places kind of look the same from a water perspective because we all adopted this kind of modernist theory of how you deal with water, which was born in the west of the United States. And what is that modernist theory? I mean, I know the version of the story I've heard, but you know a lot more about it than me. What characterizes that modernist approach? Total control, right?

So the promise of total control. The climate system is extremely variable. And for the vast majority of human history, sedentary human history, first of all, acceptance was a big part of adaptation, right? You just knew that there were times of plenty and times of drought. And there was a sense in which the human society still had to roll along with what nature provided. And then the progressive era came along, and it was a very sort of socioeconomic promise. It was a promise of prosperity. It was a promise of wealth.

This one wasn't about water. It was about making people's lives better, making people's lives better in the context of a consuming and productive economy. So you need people to be able to leave home and not have to wade a river so that they can get to work. They have to have, you know, nature simply cannot disrupt the rhythm of a productive economy. And so the answer is total control. And so, you know, if you look at the amount of storage capacity, for infrastructure on a river on the planet

was Lower Aswan Dam, which is a masonry dam that the Brits built on the Nile, right? That was the biggest piece of kind of reservoir infrastructure. Fast forward to the 1970s, we catch a fifth of anything that comes down from the sky, right? We completely replumbed the planet in order to never experience a drought or a flood. Drought and flood happened, of course, but they just happened behind the embankments and behind the dams and behind the walls. So we don't see them, which is why then we are eminently surprised when we're caught off guard.

Right. And some catastrophe happened. That's just nature pushing through the protections of the security infrastructure that we built for ourselves. But so we've created this idea that we can perfectly control water rather than it controlling us. I mean, again, I hate to always bring it back to the place I live, but I happen to have learned a little bit about this, that people say that, people say that Los Angeles is a desert and it's not a desert. It was originally like wetlands. And there was like this very variable river that sort of, you know, changed its course constantly because it was like a very marshy area and people were constantly getting flooded. You'd build a house and then a couple

of years later, the river would change course and it would flood. And so they channelized it. They built a channel and we have freeways over it you almost never see it a lot of people don't even know where it is um uh but in so doing we like completely changed the makeup of the entire vast region where now it feels like a desert it's like oh it's so dry there's so little plant the plants you do see are all desert varieties as opposed to like there were fucking cattails all over the place. You know what I mean? Like it was a marsh.

And so that's what we've done globally. Is that what you're saying? Well, we've done it globally and we've always done it. I mean I think there's a – it's always been the case that human society has constructed its ecosystem in order to serve its purposes, right? We become sedentary. We have to grow things. Water is not where we need it. It doesn't come down when we need it.

And so we just orchestrate and engineer our environment. You know, the Greeks did it. The Romans did it. So that's not… That's one of the things that characterizes human society as opposed to animals. Yeah, we are a species capable of constructing our own ecosystem. Now, we've always done it. And one of the things that you realize when you look at that sort of long arc of history is that it's a path dependent journey that you can never get off of, right? So you make a choice, you build an embankment

that creates security. So people start living under it. Then a flood breaks through it. Lots of people die. It's a new experience of water. You build a bigger embankment. More people move in, right? A bigger catastrophe happens. And so, further on, we're on this kind of constant cycle of adaptation, response, and action and response, right? And so, all of that takes us through the ages all the way to North America circa 1910, 1920. North America circa 1910, 1920. Then what happens is cement is this, you know, incredibly powerful state. It has never happened. One of the things that distinguishes the 20th century is that the size, the economic size of the state is unprecedented. You know, today we don't think about it, but the fact that the state is 30, 40% of the economy of a country is, you know, unusual in human history. You know, it's never

really happened before. And with those incredible resources, we pour cement over the landscape, we transform, you know, our home, and in some ways we succeed. Life expectancy improves, number of people improves, you know, education access. I mean, it was a, you know, it was a intervention for economic and social development, right? It had a very specific purpose, but it also transformed the landscape in a way that, you know, we had never done before. And now, of course, we've taken, you know, we're now at the next step. So we've built all this, we've maxed out its capacity, and now we are starting to see the cracks appear. And so now the step is ahead of us, and we don't yet know what that step looks like.

Certainly it's the case in California, right, where the water table is going down, the rivers are disappearing, and it's obvious that this can't be projected out forever into the future. Do you feel that that impression of total control is a false one that we give ourselves. For instance, we had on the show a number of years back a wonderful writer named Jenny O'Dell. One of my favorite interviews that we've done. She wrote a book called How to Do Nothing. In that book, she wrote about the experience of going back to the place where she grew up and looking at a map and seeing that there was a stream or a creek on the map. I don't remember a creek. And she went and looked and it

was, you know, buried underneath. It went through, you know, channels and ditches and drainages, but she was like, oh, it was there the whole time, right? And she wrote very movingly about how, you know, these, like the concept of a watershed, right? Where water falls on the earth and it finds its own path and that path is millennia old. And to some extent, we can't eradicate it. It's there no matter what we do. I found that a very moving idea. But you're also describing how we've managed to geoengineer huge portions of the planet. Do you think that that idea of control that we've promulgated starting from California, is that a real aspiration that we can live out or are we always helpless to some degree in the face of water? Well, in a way, that's a great open question.

So we are at an interesting junction if you – we the planet, right? We humanity. Because there are currently two different we the planet, right? We humanity, because there are currently two different theories playing out, right? One is the one that's played out in America that a hundred years ago decided that total control was the answer, built for total control, and now has reached a point where there are diminishing returns. And in fact, it's quite expensive and difficult to maintain that total control. And so even if you look at the infrastructure bill that was just passed in the United States, you can start seeing, you can start detecting the symptoms of a country that's starting to rethink what the landscape should look like. For example,

should we invest in ecosystems and forests as part of the infrastructure for security, right? So we're not just building, we're not just modifying things, we're also working with what we have. So that's one path that we're beginning to explore, particularly in countries that have gone through a full cycle of development, have benefited from that infrastructure, and now find themselves asking, well, what does our home look like, right? Now, in the meantime, if you go to China,

China has sort of taken the torch from the United States of sort of plumber-in-chief or, you know, hydraulic engineer-in-chief for the world. They've embraced the modernist theory that the Western United States had developed in the 20th century and knocked it down. And so you might have heard of Three Gorges Dam, for example, big, big dam on the Yangtze. So that is, to the 20th century, are not the game. And so you might have heard of Three Gorges Dam, for example. Yeah. Big, big dam on the Yangtze. So that is, to the 21st century, what the Hoover Dam was to the 20th, right? Except that Three Gorges Dam is 10 times the size of Hoover Dam, right? Wow. And they are engaging in a similar sort of race for control.

And because they're now a significant power and they're exporting finance and they're exporting technology and they're exporting expertise and experience, many developing countries who historically would look to the United States to imagine their future are now looking to China as the model of development. And so Three Gorges Dam has become a bit of an archetype for the 21st century for development. And so you might have heard, you know, Ethiopia started building the largest dam in Africa on the Nile, on the Blue Nile, right? The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. That's a six gigawatt dam. It's three times, three to four times Hoover Dam.

And so, you know, they are proposing that the 21st century will be yet another century of cement and re-engineering of the landscape. And we are sitting over here saying, well, we tried that last century. It worked. It worked, right? We're all better off now, but it's starting to crack. And this question of which theory will govern the 21st century is a very open one. Well, we're not entirely better off, you know, like there are unwanted side effects of this. At the very least, the wars over who gets access to the limited amount of water that we have. We're all sort of aware that, at least here in the West, that we've built a system that is not sustainable to an extent, that we made water so attainable,'s building you know everyone can have a green lawn oh wait actually we can't all have green lawns but now we've told everyone that they can and we've got a big fucking problem you know that's right that's right no i think but you know that's because it's this dynamic relationship right so it was the right answer for you know 60 years ago

but it built it had built in it the problem that we're now confronting right because it in a way, so successful that it fooled people into thinking that you could do anything. And then eventually you end up with lawns all over Arizona, Nevada, and California, and that's simply not sustainable. It's incompatible with the amount of resources that we have. So, you know, the legacy of, you know, the reengineering of the United States is a really interesting and problematic issue. And there's no really easy sort of judgment that can pass because on the one hand, think of the Tennessee Valley Authority. To some, it's anathema.

To others, it's a great sort of example of the New Deal era. Tell us what it is very briefly for those who don't know. Tennessee Valley was the poorest part of the United States in the 1920s. Life expectancy – essentially, if you read the descriptions part of the United States in the 1920s. You know, life expectancy, essentially, if you'd gone there, if you read the descriptions of how people lived in rural Tennessee Valley, it sort of sounds like least developed countries, the poorest people in the least developed countries today, right? Malnutrition, silicosis, malaria, heart disease,

you know, life expectancies that barely approached 40. I mean, it was a, you know, life expectancies that barely approached 40. I mean, it was a disastrous place. They didn't have any access to electricity, like many of the poorest people today on the planet. And when Roosevelt won the presidency, one of the first acts he passed in the first 100 days was the Tennessee Value Authority Act, which established effectively a federally funded utility, which still exists today, the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

But it was much more than a utility. It was essentially an agency, a development agency, that would use the power of the state to build infrastructure, flood infrastructure, hydropower, etc., to electrify and develop the Tennessee Valley, right? And on the one hand, it succeeded. It was an incredible intervention in regional development, life expectancy improved, all sort of outcomes improved remarkably. So much so, actually, that the Tennessee Valley Authority became a model. It also became a model for the rest of the world. And so, you know, today we have a Jordan Valley Authority, we have a Helmand Valley Authority in Afghanistan, we have a Awash Valley Authority in Ethiopia, we have, you know, even the Yangtze was considered as a Valley Authority. So on the one hand,

it has a very positive legacy of development. That's what developing countries look at and say, well, that worked for you. But then at the same time, of course, it, you know, re-engineered the landscape, it was seen as a vast overreach of the federal government, creating all sorts of problems between the states and the federal government. And, you know, ultimately it was never repeated on American soil because it was the epitome of the modernist ideal. You get a bunch of engineers, you give them a lot of cement, and they'll redesign the landscape for you, right? It's inevitable then, you know, some marginalized communities may be displaced without anybody hearing about it. And, you know, you change the home of people. Maybe most people love it.

Some people might not, right? How do you intermediate those political debates? So it's a very, it's a mixed legacy, but it's a very important one. Well, I want to ask if there are other ways for us to deal with water that you've seen throughout history. but we got to get a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Giulio Boccoletti. So, Julio, I want to ask, given the destructive legacy in many ways of this sort of modernist idea that got its start in America of total control of the water system, you've examined throughout human civilization, throughout human history, different ways that humans have interacted with water. Are there other models for dealing with water that are worth considering from our history that you've seen? Well, two things.

First of all, yes, is the answer. Adam, I should answer first that. Yes, there are different models. Some of them are actually layered in our own experience because if you go back in time, beyond the modernist hump, if you will, so you skip the 20th century, you start looking back in the 19th, 18th, 17th, that's all that's wrong, you start realizing that water, solutions to water problems are first addressed through

legal and political institutions long before we deal with cement and with transforming the landscape, right? And so, you know, for example, I come from Bologna, a lovely town in northern Italy where lasagne and tortellini and lots of good things come from. Now, Bologna is in the center of the Po Valley. It's a hundred kilometers from the sea. And so it's for all intents and purposes a landlocked city. And if you go there today and you walk around, you're surrounded by buildings and cement, and you wouldn't know the water matters. But in fact, under the city,

there's a complex system of water canals that powered the economy of medieval Bologna. You know, Bologna was a great textile center. And, you know, the only kind of force other than human force and animal force that we had until the steam engine was water power, right? And so all these mills that essentially powered all these textile industries in Bologna. Now, we're talking about the 10th to the 14th century. So people depended on Bologna, the 14th century. So people depended on Bologna, on water for their economy. Now, it so happens that at this same time, a very important document emerged from the depths of history in Bologna,

right there and then, which was the Justinian Code, the Roman law, reappeared in medieval Europe in Bologna around the 11th century. And so people started using the law to solve all sorts of water problems. Do I get the water? Do you get the water? Let's go and see what the Codex says. You know, if a river floods and leaves behind an island, who owns it? Let's go and find out what Roman jurisprudence says. And so over time, all through the 12th, 13th, 14th century, Europe accumulated an enormous amount of jurisprudence having to do with water. And in the book, I describe how even very basic ideas of sovereignty, or even the Magna Carta itself, have water at the heart of their origin. And I would argue, by the way,

even the American Constitution, if you want to hear that story, I can go there. But before I do that, let me just close on the, are there other ways of dealing with it, which is, yes. So all these kind of legal institutions, the political institutions, which we can talk about. But the other thing I realized as I looked back in time is that there are many human stories that don't reach the present and that had developed very different ways of dealing with the water landscape. One of the most interesting ones was the way in which the Amazonian forest societies dealt with water

before the invasion of the Europeans. This is something that we've only discovered very recently. Archaeologists have discovered it through remote sensing. For a long time, we thought the Amazon was virgin territory. Nobody lived there. Nobody had lived there until we arrived. It was a sparsely populated place. But it turns out that in the 14th century, 15th century, before Columbus came, it was a heavily, densely populated place. And people had followed a completely different path in dealing with water than we had followed. So we had, you know, domesticated crops, weeds, sedentary agriculture, built canals, etc., etc., right? In the Amazon, it turns out, they didn't domesticate individual species of plants and animals. They domesticated the entire

landscape. And so instead of having what is typical of our societies, which is a separation between the urban center and the rural landscape, the forest societies of the Amazon had a completely integrated water landscape, where the water rushed right through the dwellings. And, you know, they caught fresh water to catch the fisheries of the river, they built mounds to collect the water that rushed through the forest, they then built your orchards on these embankments. And so it was a very, very different landscape, one that we can only see now in the archaeological record.

We've lost any trace of the institutions and practices that were needed in order to support it. Wow. I mean, my first question, though, is, given everything that we've said about disasters, what did they do in times of flood? Being so close. If you've got a river running right through your home.

Yeah. Well, you know, and this gets back to the point, which is, you know, the first and most important instrument in dealing with water and with catastrophes in general and with kind of the variability of nature is culture. Right? It's how do we interpret our life vis-a-vis the variability of the landscape if you believe that the variability of nature flood events are you know in a pantheistic sense just the the uh you know the manifestation of a divine will for example then you're much more likely to simply accept it as part of life and adapt and kind of accommodate it, right? I'm reminded, for example, the Romans, you know, Monty Python has trained us to think that the Romans built aqueducts all over the place, thus giving this impression that Romans were great hydraulic engineers, and they were.

But the reality is that, for example, in terms of floods, they did relatively little. You know, Most people had water rushing through their homes every so often, and that was just part of life. What we do with water largely depends on what we expect our life to look like. Right. And if you have built your society around, hey, there's going to be a flood every once in a while. And so maybe don't keep all your precious stuff on the floor, you know what I mean? And be ready to pack up and move if you need to, if you need to go to higher ground, be a little bit more nomadic, as opposed to, you know, just bring it back to Los Angeles, like, you know, early, you know, European settlers,

you know, putting down, oh, shit, my house washed away and I'm penniless now because I really put down roots here. It's your choice of whether you want to create a flood-resilient society or culture or not, basically. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's this lovely short story by Faulkner who describes the Mississippi as that river that comes through your living room and takes out the piano, you know. And so there's a sense in which you can imagine a society that's much more accepting of the variability. Now, the reality is, Adam, we may have to go there because our infrastructure is built for a stationary world, is built for a world in which we know, roughly speaking, when it might rain. We can predict in a statistical sense what the future looks like. All of our infrastructure is built to manage the future,

but it's based on the past. And we are living through a dramatic change that means that the future is much less predictable. So we don't actually know whether we've built the right infrastructure to deal with the 21st century climate. Yeah, and there is that argument always about, oh, we need to build more climate resiliency and more adaptation into our infrastructure. But of course, that's also a bit of a cop out for, you know, saying you'll do that instead of making the changes that will result in less disastrous climate outcomes. But yeah, tell me how climate change, you know, comes up in your book. And it's certainly part of the history of water.

For sure. I mean, I think that, you know, it was one of the motivations of my climate scientist by training. And so I ended up working on water issues, because, in a way, you know, I started working on this almost 20 years ago now. And at the time, if I spoke to people about climate change, you know, most people wouldn't have known what I was talking about. It was a niche issue and people weren't really ready to engage. But water is and has always been a very tangible issue for people. And so it's very easy to talk about climate change and climate in terms of water. And as I said earlier, you know, water is simply the agent of the climate system. Floods, the droughts, the storms, those are just the ways in which the climate system expresses itself. And so part of me wanting to write this book was to say, well, we're about

to go through a very significant shift in the way in which this agent operates on the landscape. Let's look back in time and think through how did changes in the past affect the way in which we, you know, we evolved. And as it turns out, you know, most of the institutions of society emerge out of some response to a slight shift in climate, you know, from, you know, the Abramitic tradition, which has within it the seeds of a society that has to deal with scarcity in the Levant, to the Roman law system that we inherited, and that's the basis of all legal systems today, to democracy and make a strong case for democracy having a strong relationship with the distribution of water in the Mediterranean. And so then you fast forward to today, we're about to live through a very

significant shift in the climate system. And it would be a mistake, based on 10,000 years of history, it would be a mistake to believe that we can simply give engineers the following problem. Just let us live exactly like we have done over the last 30, 40 years. Solve it. Right? That, I don't think, is an available option. I think that what's going to happen is that all aspects of our living together will be engaged. There will be engineering,

but we'll have to think about the politics. You know, for example, you know, I'm always struck by how relevant and salient environmental issues are today to people. And yet the American Constitution doesn't mention the environment. You know, there's no environmental provision. There's no mechanism to deal with these fundamental tradeoffs between what we do with the landscape and what we do with, you know, individual liberty. Right. That's at the heart of the problems that are ahead of us, I think. Yeah. I mean, what are the changes that you think we will see in terms of, first of all, in terms of our relationship with water over the

next few decades or centuries? Well, we've already started to see them, right? So the problem is that we bucket them into the category of unexpected catastrophe all the time. And so, you know, New York gets flooded and the subway gets filled with water and then British Columbia gets mudslides and then you have these persistent droughts in California. And the mental category that's currently being applied to all of this is, oh, my goodness, how unexpected, right? Isn't it extraordinary? This is a tail event. It sort of exceeds the boundaries of our common experience.

And the reality is that the future is not that these are rare events. These are the new normal, right? Yeah, I mean, the New York City subway has flooded in that way twice in the last 10 years. And I don't know if it ever happened before that. Certainly not in my lifetime and I think in many other people's. That's right. But yeah, I mean, they literally just got done fixing the subway from last time it flooded and it flooded again. That's right. That's right yeah i mean i was they literally just got done fixing the subway from last time it flooded and it flooded again that's right that's right and so you can imagine adam

that if this keeps happening what what ends up then happening is that you have to exit a catastrophe an emergency regime and start dealing with these issues as part of the politics of living together right yeah Which means in practical terms, how much money do you allocate to dealing with recurrent flooding or recurrent scarcity? How much do we, for example, force individual owners of land, you know, landowners to change their practices for the common good, right? How much do we intervene on the forestry regimes of private timber companies in order to manage potential fire hazards? It sort of poses this question of, you know, what are the limits of collective action here? What do

we ask ourselves collectively to do? And how far do we go in changing the way in which any individual has to live? You know, we've gotten used to being just a collection of individuals because we've engineered anything that connects us out of our life. But water moves, right? You do something over there and then it trickles down to you and suddenly it's both of our problem, right? And that's what you see in the West when people have to share scarce resources. You know, Colorado River, as scarce events get cold, you shut off supply from the upper riparian states. Nevada, Arizona need to make choices.

Which farmers? Who gets to feel the pain? And how much should it be individualized on one person versus collectively born, right? These are political questions that require mediation. They require political debate and institutions to help. And I'm not saying there aren't institutions. I'm saying it's just going to be a much, much more central part of our daily life.

Well, and it's a political problem that our political infrastructure, say nothing of our water infrastructure, our political infrastructure is not especially well equipped to handle. I mean, as you say, we've engineered things so that it feels individual no one can tell me what kind of lawn to have because it's my water it comes out of my tap and i i pay for it i don't even pay that much for it it costs me an extra if i water my lawn a couple extra times pay an extra five bucks a month who cares right um but uh and the know, the farmers who are relying on that same water source to grow almonds in the Central Valley and in California also feel the same way. Hey, this is my water. Why don't I get it? But then we we, you know, we've built a system that that sort of treats that as our individual birthright. our individual birthright and yeah we have no cognizance of the fact that this is a collective resource and a collective project that we need to figure out how to divvy up instead people just go no i gotta have mine give me my piece you know yeah that's right and but i should say i mean

the good news in a way and i wouldn't say i'm a you know i'm an optimist by design because what else can you be right but i i i do a lot of people are pessimists julio yeah but you know what's the point of that right no i mean i think that i think that the american particular you know it's interesting i mean i you know as you can tell i'm not american i sound english in fact i'm italian but i have a i have a kind of a admiration for the american project the long arc of the American project in some ways. And one of the things that's interesting is that people forget that this individualistic approach to the landscape is actually a relatively recent phenomenon in American history.

Because in truth, you know, the story of American, you know, the conquest of nature that happened, you know, it was a literal conquest, right? I mean, people got displaced. But the expansion towards the Western frontier, the movement of people, the colonizers that sort of went, you know, behind that movement, the establishment of a constitutional architecture, you know, the New Deal, all of these were acts of sovereignty and truth. They were underwritten by the state, they were paid for in many ways by the state. And so in the institutions and in the history, and even in the legal system of America, there is the muscle memory of collective

action problems. And so I think the question is, how do you kind of excavate it and get people using it again? This is not, you know, this is not some socialist overlay that one has to worry about. In reality, it's all there. It's in the DNA of the country. You know, the American Constitution is born out of Washington's need to coordinate states

for fluvial trade around the Potomac, right? I mean, even at the heart of the constitutional compact of the United States is this problem of managing water together. So I think the DNA is there. The question is, you need politicians to recognize it. You need the citizens to see this not as a consumer issue, but as a citizenship issue. We all have to have a stake in what our home looks like. And we all have to accept that we have to create a collective picture of what that home looks like because we all live in the same place, right? That would be a wonderful note to end on, but I have to ask you more about the Constitution of Washington that you just said.

First of all, you said fluvial trade. What is fluvial trade? Oh, that's – yeah. And tell me more about how that influenced the formation of the Constitution. Fluvial trade is a fancy way of saying that people had to put goods on boats and transport them along rivers. That was my guess. Okay, good. That's right.

So the story is actually fascinating and goes more or less like this. So Washington was a rather clever speculator. rather clever speculator. And so he acquired a whole bunch of land in what was then called the Ohio Valley, just over the Appalachians, on the other side of the Appalachians. And of course, you know, we're talking about the end of the 18th century, and the Spanish controlled much of the Mississippi commerce, and particularly owned New Orleans. So moving goods naturally down the Mississippi waterway was not an option. And so in order to make that land productive, Washington needed to get the goods over the Appalachians and to the eastern seaboard, where he could then send them off to Europe, right? Now, the problem was the Potomac was the natural choice for this,

but the Potomac went through multiple states. And so it had to go through Maryland, through Virginia, through Pennsylvania. And the problem is that these states, which had recently become independent, as you well know as an American, in fact were tied together by the Articles of Confederation. Now, the Articles of Confederation were a supremely libertarian document, right? There was no infrastructure to manage, you know, trade-offs between different states. And so the problem Washington had was that if he had invested in a canal company, which he needed to, in order to build the locks and dams that would allow transport on the Potomac, he would then have been taxed in each of the states that he had gone through, making the project non-economic. And so he needed some arrangement to ensure that

he wouldn't be double taxed. This incidentally was a problem that had already happened in Europe several times and is at the heart of one of the treaties of his failure. A different story that we probably don't have time to get into, but water matters there too. So anyway, so Washington decides to convene a meeting at his Mount Vernon estate of these four states. And what emerges out of that is this thing called the Mount Vernon Compact, which is essentially an international treaty between these four states on how to manage tariffs and on trade along the river. Now, it turns out that Madison was looking at this with great interest and wondered whether this particular compact, this way of dealing with commerce,

was a good excuse to try and bring the 13 states together in some form of treaty that would supersede the Articles of Confederation. So he convenes another convention in Annapolis. Some people show up, some people don't. The convention itself was a bit of a failure. But what it did is it then provoked the famous Philadelphia Convention, right, which is where ultimately the United States debates the Constitution. And if you go and read the debates that happened during the Constitutional Convention, you realize that people are referring back to this commerce on the river and the Mount Vernon Compact over and over and over again,

because it's the first model of interstate collaboration that suggests that there ought to be a federal architecture above the states. And so at the heart of the constitutional project of the United States is coordination on the river. That's why I'm optimistic that you guys can figure out a way of doing it again. Well, it was a very different country back then there. And there were the problems to be solved were, you know, a lot, a lot different. And I think that it's a lot easier to team up to do a big, you know, common waterworks project when it's a lot easier to team up to do a big common waterworks project when it's a frontier, right? And you're trying to

scrabble a life out of a unforgiving wasteland. Not wasteland. It wasn't a wasteland, but you know what I mean. Out of a wilderness. And when a few men have to make all the decisions, right? So there are a number of complexities here. Yep, yep. And when you can trample over any of the indigenous groups that were there and et cetera,

but that you, you are, you are blowing my mind with this because I mean, you're absolutely right. Like also one of the, the most important federal power in the constitution is to regulate interstate commerce, like half of more than half of the things that the federal government does stem from that passage in the Constitution. And so that is all, and that literal provision dates back to needing to control what is happening on the nation's rivers.

It really does all come back to water. You're blowing my mind. That's right. And, you know, I mean, for the first hundred years of the country, it was rivers that were the primary transport infrastructure across states. Erie Canal is the reason why New York is as big a city as it is today. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the my God, the more I think about this, the more the more strange stories I've heard about America that I've encountered in my life, you know, for this, you know, revolve around water.

I stayed years ago with a friend in Amherst, Massachusetts, and nearby there are. Do you know this story? There are three towns, their entire towns that were flooded and now exist at the bottom of a reservoir. They evicted everybody from the towns. And like the houses that these people lived now exist at the bottom of a reservoir. They evicted everybody from the towns. And the houses that these people lived in are like the bottom of the reservoir. And the reservoir was built to feed Boston, I believe. Yeah, I know. And I know that's a story that's been repeated many times across the globe.

But it was such a mysterious, bewitching thing to me to encounter, to hear that story. mysterious, like, bewitching thing to me to encounter, to hear that story. And we walked around the reservoir and, like, looked at some of the few remaining ruins when I was, you know, my early 20s. And that's, you know, things like that are just part of the history of our civilization in this deep way. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, that's a story. There's a similar, very similar story with the Catskills in New York, right? So the Catskills are this beautiful, forested landscape that essentially provides the water supply to New York City. And New York City can avoid having to filter the water

because it's so clean coming out of this forested and protected landscape. In fact, it has a thing called an avoidance filtration determination, which is the same thing that Boston has because of those reservoirs, right? You have this bit of nature, or that looks like nature, that protects the watershed, and therefore the water comes so clean that you only have to disinfect it. You don't have to

filter it. And so you're offsetting an enormous amount of expenditure because of that. And in the Catskill, it's the same. In reality, under the reservoirs, the Shurkin reservoirs and other reservoirs, there are some villages. People were moved out of the way in order to make room for this. It was the time of Moses, not biblical Moses, but Robert Moses, the guy that built the ring road around Manhattan, right? Yeah, the famous urban planner, yeah. That's right. And again, it was – and there's so much packed in those stories, right? Because it was an exercise of sovereignty, right?

And there's so much packed in those stories, right, because it was an exercise of sovereignty, right? It's a state that comes in and buys up the land and moves people out of the way in order to solve a problem, a problem for rich people living in cities, by the way, right? So it was also the rural sort of urban dichotomy. But it engineered. It was a difficult choice at the time. But today we celebrate the Catskills. We celebrate the landscapes around Boston. There's a similar story in Seattle. There's a similar story actually in San Francisco where we celebrate these forested landscapes for the water they provide. example of the story of my book, which is always about choices that we make at some point in the past for different reasons that end up creating situations in the present, but then produce the next step in this kind of constant journey, this constant dialectic relationship.

Well, I always like to bring it personal to end the show. Do you have any, I don't know, thoughts to share with the listeners as they, next time they turn on the tap, you know what I mean? How should they think a little bit differently about the water that flows out, you know, in a way that might help us solve some of these problems? Well, I, you know, at the risk of stating the obvious, I'd love it if they read my book. And I would also say that, you know, the intent of the book is to try and link in people's minds, maybe some of the stories that are familiar to them with this kind of fundamental resource that's so central to their life. They spend a lot of time with it every day, and yet they don't see it as connected to their life as citizens or to their life as political beings. one thought, one belief I have is that, you know, if we're going to solve water problems, if we're

going to figure out how we're going to live together in a changing climate, we cannot delegate choices to scientists and engineers. We have to be able to author our own life. We have to be able to understand that these choices are ultimately about what our home looks like and what are the rules that we give each other to live together in these complicated landscapes. And so that's really the intent of the book. And I hope the message I can send to people, which is this is fascinating and can be also complicated, but it's essential that you understand it because it's about where you live. Yeah, that is an incredibly fascinating and important message. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show to share it with us, Julio. Thank you so much. The book is called Water, a biography. You can pick it up at our

special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books if you want, or go down to your local bookshop and buy a copy or any particular place you'd like to plug people to pick it up. Thank you, Adam. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Giulio Boccoletti for coming on the show.

If you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, once again, check out his book, Water a History, at factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm speaking to you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover dot net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Once again, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually. that was a hate gun podcast