Derek Turner

Our rivers, as much as our oceans, are in urgent need of protection

Earth’s rivers are equivalent to a body’s veins, and neglect, mismanagement and sabotage are fast poisoning them

Detail of the great mosiac of the Nile from the Sanctuary at Praeneste, Palestrina, Italy. Now Ethiopia’s plans for the Nile’s headstreams could mean another Egyptian eclipse 
issue 18 April 2020

Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies.

Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers and fertilisers, fishing grounds and spiritual metaphors, power-givers and flushers of poisons. They are the veins of terrains, which like our own veins carry oxygen or pathogens, and extinction when they fail. They inspired Babylonian and Roman legal codes, outlining ideas about access, drainage, fishing, irrigation, maintenance, navigation, pollution and sharing that still course through 21st-century jurisprudence. We may never step in the same river twice, but at least we have some notion of riverine rights and responsibilities.

Even the sainted go to war over water – including Nelson Mandela, who sent troops to take a Lesotho dam

This enthusiastic, occasionally gushing, author opens his hymn to hydrology ancient and modern with a descent into a 9th-century Nilometer, a great pit with a notched marble column, now under concrete in central Cairo, but once a confidential key to understanding the flow and volume of the river whose silts permitted sowing and whose droughts could mean death.

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