Water Always Wins

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of both flooding and drought all over the world. Erica Gies thinks our modern obsession with controlling water has made things worse. In her book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, she says water could actually help us adapt to climate change but only if we start working with it instead of against it.

Erica Gies is an author and journalist covering science and the environment. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic, and other publications.

Water Always Wins:
Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge
By Erica Gies
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2022

The illusion of control

Think of all the ways we try to control water. When we’re not trying to hold it back with dams, dikes, sea walls and levees, we’re trying to speed it off the land and away from towns and farms with pipes, culverts, drainage ditches and channels. We do this using enormous amounts of concrete, building what Gies calls “grey infrastructure.”

Take river dams. Large dams — defined as 50 feet tall or higher — have become more controversial in recent years, but even so Gies reports there are over 58,000 of them worldwide.

We’ve built this infrastructures for ostensibly good reasons: to control flood damage or to provide water for drinking and irrigation. The problem is we’re depriving ourselves of ecosystem services such as water storage, groundwater replenishment and storm containment formerly performed by wetlands, marshes, flood plains and forests.

Gies says that another consequence of our desire for control is we’re speeding up the flow of water by compressing it into narrow channels and preventing it from spreading out and slowing down.

This has several negative effects. For example, when levees fail, fast moving water does far more damage. (Gies quotes a morbid water industry joke: there are only two kinds of levees, those that have failed and those that are going to fail.)

Another effect is that fast moving water doesn’t stay on the land long enough to sink in and replenish aquifers. And river sediment that used to fertilize croplands and rebuild sinking lowlands in places like southern Louisiana, now gets washed out into open seas.

Now add climate change to the picture. Storms are more frequent and severe. Our infrastructure fails more frequently, and when it does, the damage costs billions of dollars. Droughts last longer so we have to pump more water which depletes aquifers faster.

Gies raises a subtler point here too: climate change makes large grey infrastructure projects riskier. These projects are engineered and built based on specific assumptions about air temperature, precipitation levels, storm frequency, water flow rates, and so on. With climate change, those assumptions may not be valid by the time the project is completed, let alone over its useful life. Sea walls are a good example. They cost billions and often take over a decade to complete, but by the time they’re done, sea level rise and higher storm surges can render them useless.

Our attempts to control water have come at a high price.

“We have lost much in seeking control: soil and land retention, natural coastal protection, water cleaning services, carbon storage and regulation, knowledge of how to live withing the limits of our water resources, habitat for many plants and critters, more livable habitat for ourselves. But perhaps the most in-our-face consequences are the abrupt failures: massive flooding of our farms and cities.” [p. 181]

Are there better solutions?

Gies says there are.

“The answers … lie in conserving or repairing natural systems, or mimicking nature to restore some natural functions – not building more concrete infrastructure. These ecosystems can buffer us from bigger rainstorms and longer droughts by absorbing and holding water. When we obliterate them, we make our places brittle, multiplying the intensity of these disasters.” [p. 7]

Slow water

What we must do, Gies says, is let water slow down, allow it to spread out and soak in, the way it used to.

In Water Always Wins, Gies takes us all over the world, from San Francisco Bay to the marshes of Iraq, the Peruvian Andes, and to Chennai in Southern India, looking at how different societies relate to water and how they’re responding to the challenges of climate change.

She shows us how traditional and Indigenous cultures had a much more respectful and holistic relationship with water, and with nature generally.

Tragically, in many parts of the world these ancient water management systems have been destroyed or abandoned due to land use changes driven by colonialism or industrialization – a phenomenon that Amitav Ghosh calls “terraforming” in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse.

But Gies says this traditional knowledge holds important lessons for reforming our relationship with water, especially for seeing water as a collective resource that the community must care for rather than control.

Some of these ideas are starting to catch on.

Gies notes the beginning of a “rights of nature” movement where rivers and other natural features are given legal rights, such the 2017 law passed by the New Zealand parliament granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River on the North Island.

She describes how the cities of San Francisco and New Orleans have started to rebuild their tidal marshes. It’s now a race against time: can they be restored fast enough to deliver protection against rising sea levels?

And in the US, communities are beginning to retreat from flood-prone areas, partly because it’s becoming harder to get flood insurance and also because it’s often cheaper for governments to buy out homeowners whose properties have been damaged by flooding than to build more grey infrastructure.

Fundamentally, Gies argues, we have to give up on the idea, the illusion, that we can control water. Because water always wins.

Unsolicited Feedback

I first heard about Water Always Wins in a piece on NPR describing “sponge cities” in China where urban landscapes are being designed for slow water. That got me interested in the book.

It is interesting but unfortunately I found it frustrating to read. The book is overflowing with mundane information about the logistical details of Gies’s travels around the world and the people she meets. It’s one thing for authors to put a human face on the subjects they’re writing about, but Water Always Wins has way too much of this for my taste.

And there is a whole chapter about beavers. Okay, I grew up in Canada, I think beavers are cool and I know they’re marvelous ecosystem engineers that certainly create slow water. This chapter would have made a fine stand-alone article but it was unclear to me how relevant it was for humans trying adopt more natural ways of caring for water.

On the other hand, if you like lots of travelog-y detail you might enjoy the book more than I did.

Despite all that, Water Always Wins is about an important subject, and many parts of the book are very interesting and well written.

Thanks for reading.

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