When dry it was not only a sad comment on the city’s civic pride, but also its sense of being civilised. The link between controlled water and civilisation is deep and ancient.

In a few weeks the great scheme to deliver clear highland water to the filth of industrial Glasgow will mark its 150th birthday. This seems like a good time to go back to the beginning. If the fountain’s supply is a long walk into the Trossachs, then the start of the great tale of mankind and water control is 6000 years old and has its source in the sandy desert of southern Iraq.

The very first fountain probably existed in Uruk or Ur or Eridu -- cities that bloomed between the Euphrates river and the Tigris river near the coast. These settlements came about because mankind had learned to control the floods of the two great rivers and to channel the water into ditches. Irrigation allowed for a predictable food supply, which led to a population boom and the need for social organisation and urban living. Our story starts there.

The fountain was invented as show of strength: being able to control water, and to waste it, proved the power of the owner. Of course, in a hot climate, the burble of water over stone, perhaps in a garden, needed little explanation -- it was a delight, a rich man’s luxury. The puzzle is why anyone would think a fountain built in Glasgow,

where the rain falls endlessly, would prove anything.

The city fathers, when they commissioned the fountain, were doing what all civilised people do: copying the past to show they were equal to and perhaps better than previous times. And there is no greater symbol of glory than controlled water, as an Egyptian irrigator or a Roman aqueduct builder would have told you.

As it expanded, civilisation had to find ever more ingenious ways of getting water to follow man’s whims. The population of ancient Ur was about 50,000. Until only a few hundred years ago, most European cities were no bigger. To create a modern Glasgow, for example, we had to get a lot better at bringing clean water to our houses. Loch Katrine is a good example of Victorian ingenuity building a model of the urban expansion that lies at the heart of our modern mega-cities.

The history of civilisation is also written in the countryside. Irrigated fields, up to four times more productive than naturally watered land, are what made the global population boom possible. It means a field in an arid country can be as fertile as one in northern Europe. The British in particular exported the notion of large-scale water control for semi-industrial farming to places like Egypt and Pakistan, so that enough cotton could be grown to feed the mills

of Lancashire.

Unfortunately the existing model of civilisation was invented in the wet north of Europe, where water is plentiful. Elsewhere, the big city and industrial farming suck up water at a relentless rate. Reserves in the Middle East, India, China and southern Africa area reaching “peak water”, when the rate of extraction exceeds nature’s ability to replenish.

Unlike peak oil, peak water doesn’t refer to the global reserves -- there’s plenty of fresh water in the world. The problem is that there isn’t enough water in the places where people live. This threatens civilisation not only in the affected areas, but for everyone. If one of these regions finds crop yield declining and water becoming short, then the economy and social stability will implode. The consequences of that will be felt as much in rainy Glasgow as in Delhi.

The food and commodities grown and made in arid regions will not keep coming when the water runs out -- the meat and cotton and fruit and wine in our shops will become precious items. Further, a waterless society is an uncivilised one. Not only will we have less stuff to buy, but we’ll live in a world where chaos becomes commonplace. When the water runs out, the world will come to our border and ask to be let in -- there is no army that could hold back so many desperate people.

If this all sounds like “we’re all doomed”, then let me shed some optimism. We should put some kind of value on the water extracted from stressed regions -- the cotton from Pakistan, the wheat from Egypt or the fruit from Spain should carry a premium, or at least a warning, that it required huge amounts of water to produce. This should prompt a change in the structure of global trade. The aim should not be for developing nations to try to cash in on the western market, but to develop economies and water usage suited to their regions. This will require a dramatic change in behaviour in the west. The World Bank should be weaned off its cultish devotion to privatisation and the grand scheme, when local solutions and community ownership are better ways of managing a resource as vital as water.

We began at the end of the pipe, at the dry fountain. Let us end at the beginning, in the water at the loch, in the stuff that allowed Glasgow to become the second city of the empire. Water is the key to our human greatness and the essence of liberty. We should manage it as a global resource, owned by everyone, in the interests of everyone. The consequence of failure means the fountain dries up for everyone.

 

 

Alex Bell’s Peak Water is published by Luath on October 6.