Water Irrigation Quotes

Long dormant feelings poured through my dried-up limbs and wound through me, slowly filling the emptiness. Like an irrigated field, I felt myself blossom and grow with new vigor. He was the sun, and the tenderness he showed me was life-giving water.

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us? Brought peace!

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Plant your tiny seeds and keep watering them every day. Soon, they’ll grow.

His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity whensoever possible with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.

Look for the man who's beaten. Feed him from my food, irrigate him from my water. Soul is for soul. He should be given only one equal hit regardless if I died. I would judge him regardless if I lived.

When the grass is greener at other people's feet, it is not because the grass chose to take up that complexion. But it is because, they have deliberately irrigated it on regular accounts.

I think of the memory as being rather like a dam," he said, after a pause for thought. "It irrigates and gives life to our whole spirit. But, like a dam, it needs overflow channels if it's not to burst its banks. Because if it ever does overflow or burst, its waters will destroy everything in its path.

girl rabbits in an’ tells the law she been raped. The guys in Weed start a party out to lynch Lennie. So we sit in a irrigation ditch under water all the rest of that day.

In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.

Eccolo!” he exclaimed. At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. “Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her…

Grass is greener at other people’s feet because they watered it. You need not to let your environment control you; you have what it takes to make it look beautiful!

It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance. ... In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes they lavished their skill and pains. But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

10. Never allow your imagination to stop. It was the imagination of great people that brought us the internet, the pyramids, cars, airplanes, boats, great novels, beautiful painting, classical songs, great movies, water irrigation, solar panels, the statue of liberty, the wall of china and so forth. Never under estimate your imagination.

His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity, whensoever possible, with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.

I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers.

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.” That is the essence of the Buddha’s universe and the whole theme of the Dhammapada. If we can get hold of the thinking process, we can actually redo our personality, remake ourselves. Destructive ways of thinking can be rechanneled, constructive channels can be deepened, all through right effort and meditation. “As irrigators lead water to their fields, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their lives.

Are you interested in irrigation? . . . Of course you are, if you are a western man. . . . Irrigation is the creed of the West. Gold brought people to this country; water, scientifically applied, will keep them here.

Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man. The consummation depended on our ability to develop electric forces of the order of those in nature.

Was Superstorm Sandy caused by greenhouse warming of the planet? In a word, no. Individual storms arise from specific conditions in the atmosphere. Since records have been kept, hurricanes have varied in number and intensity each season with cycles going up and coming down. The temptation to attribute any specific weather event to global warming distracts us from considering and adopting adaptive strategies, such as improving and expanding irrigation for agriculture and the water supply for cities, that will serve us well when climate changes inevitably arrives on our doorstep.

There has now emerged a global call for restoration of deforested lands, given the growing recognition that forests provide a disproportionate amount of the services—drinking and irrigation water, climate change mitigation, stormwater management, and recreation—that allow humanity to survive in the long term.

Irrigation is the biggest, most urgent, most vital problem in California today.

We read in the papers and hear on TV constantly that the world "is in an awful mess." Not true! The world is still most beautiful. It is man who is off center. The sun still illumines the day and gives light and life to all things; the moon still brightens the night; oceans still feed the world and provide transportation; rivers still drain the land, and provide irrigation water to nourish crops. Even the ravages of time have not sloughed off the majesty of the mountains. Flowers still bloom and birds still sing, and children still laugh and play.

The availability of irrigation systems to water the land and produce grain and other food crops was the material foundation for these two great river-valley societies, Egypt and Iraq. They were hydraulic despotisms, in which a small ruling class, with the aid of soldiers and priests, commanded the material resources that gave sustenance to these civilizations and allowed them to build cities, palaces, and tombs.

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.

Emerging, as we had, from the dark and gloomy bowels of the earth, the scene before us presented a view of wondrous beauty, and, while doubtless enhanced by contrast, it was nevertheless such an aspect as is seldom given to the eyes, of a Barsoomian of today to view. To me it seemed a little garden spot upon a dying world preserved from an ancient era when Barsoom was young and meteorological conditions were such as to favor the growth of vegetation that has since become extinct over practically the entire area of the planet. In this deep valley, surrounded by lofty cliffs, the atmosphere doubtless was considerably denser than upon the surface of the planet above. The sun's days were reflected by the lofty escarpment, which must also hold the heat during the colder periods of night, and, in addition to this, there was ample water for irrigation which nature might easily have achieved through percolation of the waters of the river through and beneath the top soil of the valley.

Every person you meet has been assigned to play a role in your story as you are assigned to play one in someone else’s. I often say that the people we come across can be one of the four kinds. They can be like pebbles, fountains, quagmire or bridges. Pebbles are those who you meet commonly and in abundance. They do not facilitate anything great but they help you continue walking on this journey of life. Everyone you cross in life without really connecting with them are pebbles. Then there are fountains – who spring water of happiness on you. They bring positivity and joy; they nourish your soul and irrigate the seeds of good thoughts. Your friends, well-wishers are all fountains. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have quagmires. These are the people who cause you pain. Now, even some pebbles may have caused you pain as it happens if you tread on a barbed pebble but the difference is that quagmires do that on purpose. They pull you down, induce fear and negativity by discouraging you and worrying you. They will not let you move on – that’s why they keep you bogged down in your failures. Finally, the rarest ones are the bridges – they connect you to unchartered ground that you wouldn’t have reached on your own. They unite you to your destiny. With them, your plane of consciousness expands, you see things you have not seen before; your life becomes more aware, more enlightened. Your parents, your teachers and anyone who touches your life and transcends it into something more beautiful – they are all bridges.

in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has other capricious tricks up its sleeve: in places it slows to drift lazily in wide pools before recovering its urgency and speeding on again. At Buscot it splits into twin streams to maroon a lengthy piece of territory, then regathers its water into a single channel. If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the

Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature’s (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

What is prayer but the promise pleaded? A promise is, so to speak, the raw material of prayer. Prayer irrigates the fields of life with the waters which are stored up in the reservoirs of promise. The promise is the power of prayer. We go to God, and we say to him, “Do as thou hast said. O Lord, here is thy word; we beseech thee fulfil it.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames. And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

And tell your mama I’ll come later, as soon as I can. Tell her to wait for me to have dinner, because she has a cake for you. It’s your birthday today. I wanted to show you everything today, but she stopped me. She said to me, “Bit by bit, Francisco.” And she was right: bit by bit. But I’m tired now. Look at me lying here. You go, but stay in the shade. Let me rest in my shade. Run so you reach the cake before the candles go out—they don’t last long. You’d better blow them out, blow hard, because I can’t now. I’ll stay to water the trees, soon as I can, because if you don’t irrigate them as soon as they’re planted, the roots don’t take. The roots are important, Francisco. Water the roots. Come on, Francisco, we’re a long way from home. Run now, or the candles will go out. I’ll watch you go, Francisco. Go on. Where are you? Have you gone?

He had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits. Cars were never destroyed. Parts of them were carried across a village and readapted into a sewing machine or water pump. The backseat of a Ford was reupholstered and became a sofa. Most people in his village were more likely to carry a spanner or screwdriver than a pencil. A car’s irrelevant parts thus entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley or the spinning mechanism of an office chair.

How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. “Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.

Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Another rain-swept day leaves everything water-logged—ponds, drains, streets, and rivers—everywhere water is overflowing. The green blades of grass in the garden lie submerged under a rippling shallow sheet of water. Through refraction, they take on magical underwater seaweed shapes. Except here, the grass is evenly cropped, so it appears as a glazed woven mat of wet-green. Rain has also left the plants and trees gleaming, bursting in plentitude. Natural irrigation in excess creates its own slow rot, a sublime slime of wet decay and birth, profusion and irresistibility. Rain has this special seductive appeal—its innocuous wet, its piercing strength, its gentle drizzle-caresses, its ability to douse and arouse. The entire charm lies in its simplicity.

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it’s as solid as a wall. And they all look so gray, faces twitching, young men who’ve been turned into old men. It’s a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they’re the same men, really. It’s an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it’s not water the buckets carry.

The most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps anywhere in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the world are in retreat—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible to climatologists and tourists. When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers; now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first-reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snowpack are bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the snow

The world’s most celebrated religions teach people that the world around us, our environment, is sacred. A diet rooted in anymal products is exponentially more harmful to the earth than is a plant-based diet. Seventy percent more land must be cultivated in order to raise anymals for food than would be necessary for a vegan diet. This means that 70 percent more land is taken away from natural ecosystems to produce flesh, nursing milk, and bird’s reproductive eggs for consumption, and this land that is necessary for a diet rich in anymal products will be sprayed with pesticides and earth-damaging fertilizers. These additional crops—70 percent more—also need to be irrigated, using exponentially more water. Anymals exploited by food industries also drink millions of gallons of water and drop millions of tons of manure. Finally, raising animals for flesh contributes significantly to carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, and methane—global climate change.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the food maker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California's was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation.

Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

One of the standing examples of Gujarat strides in solar power is the Charanka Solar Power Generation Park in North Gujarat which was raised in just one year. The park, which is today Asia’s biggest single-point solar generation facility, produces 225 MW of solar power by 22 private producers who have invested Rs 3400 crores in the park. A work force of 5,000 worked on it for 1 year during peak hours everyday. Says D.J. Pandian, Gujarat’s Energy Secretary: ‘Charanka is a shining example of Gujarat’s enterprise and efficiency.’ What is more, the governance in the energy sector is not marked by just goal setting and achieving. It is a reflection of farsightedness of a rare kind that isn’t visible elsewhere in India. It is best demonstrated in its steps to control the depleting water table with an eye on future. In an age in which populism and vote-bank politics are the norm in Indian democracy, the Modi Government has purposely kept the supply of agriculture power to 8 hours though it can afford to give more power with an eye on rural votes, power being surplus now. The reason is simple, the more the power to the farm sector, the greater the exploitation of groundwater by farmers wanting to earn more by producing more. Striking this fine balance between the farmers’ needs and balancing the natural resources is seen as a fine example of precise planning and farsighted governance free of populism. Interestingly, Modi has been able to maintain this balance even in the face of electoral pressures. In 2012, an election year, the Modi Government did allow new bore connections to farmers in 40 banned tehsils but with a rider: those taking new connections would have to adopt drip or sprinkler method of irrigation which consumes less water and therefore less power.

A curse of being a writer is the compulsion to edit. Take the sign on my walking trail, for example. It reads, 'Watered by well water.' One of these days, no matter how hard I try to resist, I just know I'm going to paint it out to read, 'Irrigated by well water.' If you don't get this, it's because you're not a writer.

Is it just me, or do you not communicate with humans?" A.J. demanded, breaking the silence only because she could hear herself thinking. "I'm not uncommunicative," Kane said mildly. "I'm meditative." "Great. I'm teamed up with Ghandi." He snorted a laugh and she cheered up a little. "Wow. Was that an actual reaction?" "Don't press your luck." “Quit meditating and talk to me, or I’ll talk to you and you already know how good I am at that,” she warned, and even while his gaze narrowed, she went on another rant—the kind that used to drive her brother, Gabriel, nuts. “So if you think about it, all of these planted fields probably look the same as they did three thousand years ago. Do you think the pharaohs used irrigation systems, or did they just beat small children until they cried enough to water the plants?” No response. Fine, she could keep this up all day. “Did you know that some people believe the pyramids were built by space aliens? It would explain a lot, but what do you think? Was it ancient astronauts, or were the Egyptians just really good architects, or—” “Okay!” he snapped. “I surrender.” “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

regulations, wastewater was managed in treatment facilities and no longer dumped into streams. Thus, the cost of pollution was captured in the cost of oil production. indeed, clean water from these treatment facilities was sold to nearby farmers for irrigation. on the other hand, these new technologies spewed large amounts of pollutants into the air. That air pollution was viewed as a cost of doing business; its environmental costs were ignored. oil prices collapsed in the 1980s. at the same time, air-quality regulations were becoming stiffer. operations at the Kern river oil field were again tenuous. yet once again, technological innovation provided a fix. oil companies built facilities to generate electricity that were fueled by natural gas, which burns cleaner than oil. This electricity was a source of revenue. The electric facilities also supplied steam that was used to increase production from the wells. in 2000, the Kern river oil field produced nearly 40 million barrels of oil. however, this level of production could not be sustained. since then, production has fallen to less than 30 million barrels each year (Figure 15.3). since 1899, over 2 billion barrels of oil have been extracted from the Kern river oil field. scientists estimate that this field could yield another 475 million barrels. But actually producing that much oil will depend on continuing improvements in technology and high oil prices. like many of the resources upon which we depend, oil is being consumed by humans at a rate that is thousands of times faster than the rate at which it is being produced. What are the factors that influence the total amounts of such resources? how do technology and economic factors affect the availability of those resources? What are the environmental consequences of their use? These questions are central to

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The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.

There were two-foot-tall coils of barbed wire over the bridge wall that caught shopping bags in their spikes and shredded them. I watched those plastic ribbons fight in the wind, and far below saw concrete irrigation ditches that once contained the Rio Grande. The water dissipated, the only thing to see was the concrete spray painted with graffiti. The city, like the river, had dried up and left little in its place.

What do you water right now in your life? Because whatever you water will take over your garden. Whatever you water will grow, whatever you irrigate in your imagination will grow.

the Snake River dams should not be compared to the Elwha Dams. Where the former produced relatively little power and had no fish ladders, those on the Snake have fish ladders and “provide $20 billion in annual economic impact.” Farmers are among the most vocal opponents, as the dams provide water needed for irrigation and make it possible for ocean going barges to carry their produce to market.

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The Taoist Zhuangzi classic offers a fascinating story on this topic. A scholar named Zigong, while traveling, notices an old man working in a garden digging trenches, repeatedly going over to a well and returning with a jug full of water. “There's a machine,” Zigong tells the farmer, “which could irrigate a hundred plots like yours in a day. Would you, good sir, like to try one?” The farmer shows some initial interest, and Zigong explains to him how it works. Suddenly, the farmer's face flushes, and he retorts: “I've heard that where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've lost what was pure and simple; and the loss of the pure and simple leads to restlessness of the spirit. Where there is restlessness of the spirit, the Tao no longer dwells. It's not that I don't know about your machine—I would be ashamed to use it!” This colorful story highlights a deep-rooted mistrust of technology, driven not necessarily by a reactionary fear of change but by a worldview that values, above all else, harmonization with the Tao in all one's activities.30 This ingrained distrust of technology permeated the mind-set of traditional Chinese peasantry throughout its history.

Creeper Three: This guy was good. His camouflaged head mixed right in with the wheat I was harvesting. I almost tried to pick him out of the ground. Then the flashing started and I was blown back several feet, landing on some potatoes. Half of the field is blown to pieces and water draining everywhere from the irrigation troughs. What a mess. I fixed the field, but will have to re-plant and add water another day.

Daniel Mas Masumoto: The blade slices into the soil. My muscles tense and push the shovel into the moist ground. Dark and damp, the sweet warm smell of wet earth…I can’t count the thousands of shovelfuls of earth I have moved in my life. But I like to think of the thousands that lie in my future, if I am fortunate. Spring irrigation brings life to the orchards and vineyards. Peaches ripen and the scent of bloom lingers in the air…I guide the water into my fields in an act of renewal, I think of Paul, a farmer and oil painter friend. He enjoys experimenting with green, capturing the subtle nuances of a fresh leaf or the thriving growth of mid-spring or the weak yellow green of a cover crop on bad soil… Paul knows his paintings work when the farmers gravitate toward a few, attracted by the colors, and begin talking about his greens. The true green of a field has depth, like the mysterious colors of a clear by deep lake. Each shade has meaning we interpret differently. Paul says farmers are his best art critics, we know more of greens than anyone else. I’ve lost raisin crops, peach harvests, whole trees and vines. I’ve lost money, my time, and my labor. I’ve lost my temper, my patience, and, at time, hope. Most of the time, it’s due to things beyond my control, like the weather, market prices, or insects or disease. Ironically, the moment I step off my farm I enter a world where it seems that everything, life and nature, is regulated and managed. Homes are built to insulate families from the outside weather. People work in climate controlled environments designed to minimize the impact of weather. In America, a lack of control means failure…I’ve abandoned my attempts to control and compete with nature, but letting go has been a challenge. I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before I had not reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

In the U.S., it's a free-for-all, and with what result?' [says Haim Gvirstman] '... it is illogical to squander water with flood irrigation on farms while people downstream in Los Angeles and other cities have water restrictions.

the cotton-growing regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where so much water has been diverted from waterways to irrigate cotton fields that the fourth-largest lake in the world has almost vanished.

Every farmer knows this, you can't continue irrigating when nothing comes out after a while. Otherwise you're wasting water. Similar is to love, if you pursue someone that can't respond to the amount of energy you provide towards them, then you need to let go.

Water control was a continuing necessity in the economy of the region. The area from the vicinity of ancient Eshnunna and modern Baghdad as far south as ancient Ur and Eridu, a distance of over 200 miles (320 km), could be irrigated. Further north, one of the most impressive of public water works was the aqueduct and associated canal built to supply the city of Nineveh with water by Sennacherib, king of Assyria—just one of a number of hydraulic works constructed at his instigation.

The afternoon passes, the light fades, and evening is coming when are upon the cold, treeless ridges in austerity and awe, utterly removed from everyday life and everything we are used to in light and sound. As we top the last edge, we see below us Blue Lake. Bottomless, peacock blue, smooth as glass, it lies there like an uncut, shining jewel. Symmetrical pine trees, in thick succession, slope down to its shores. This Blue Lake is the most mysterious thing I have ever seen in nature, having an unknowing impenetrable life of its own, and a definite emanation that rises from it. Here is the source of most of the valley life. From this unending water supply that flows out of the east end and miles and miles of the stream to the Pueblo, fields are irrigated and winds down and feds all our fields and orchards. It has never been surprising to me that the Native Americans call Blue Lake a sacred lake and worship it…it is fitting to sleep beside it and try to draw what one could from its strong being. Most of us are used only to the awesome holiness of churches and lofty arches, cathedral where, with stained glass and brooding silences, priest try to emulate the religious atmosphere that is to be found in the living earth in some of her secret places. 1945 Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Hydrolectricity is the largest modern non-fossil source of primary energy; the combination of relatively low cost, high suitability to cover peak demand, and the multi-purpose nature of most large reservoirs (they serve as sources of irrigation and drinking water, a protection against downstream flooding, recreation sites, and, increasingly, places for aquacultural production) should make it one of the most desirable choices in a world moving away from fossil fuels.

Mines and trenches were just the obvious applications. Teller also suggested using hydrogen bombs to change the weather, to melt ice to yield fresh water, and to mass-produce diamonds. (Another unconventional suggestion attributed to him was to close off the Strait of Gibraltar, making the Mediterranean a lake suitable for irrigating crops.) Ted Taylor, a bomb designer, argued that nuclear bombs would be able to drive a rocket into deep space, even to other stars.21 Teller even found the idea of bombing the moon incredibly enticing. “One will probably not resist for long the temptation to shoot at the moon . . . to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause,” he wrote.

Irrigators channel waters; fletchers straighten arrows; carpenters shape wood; the wise master themselves.” —The Buddha

Consequently, they controlled vital resources such as the irrigation system which provided essential water to nearby farmland.

To provide a continuous water supply and irrigate the rice fields, the farmers built canals and waterways.

So Enki was responsible, according to this myth, for irrigating the fields with his ‘water of the heart.’ 

Agricultural losses are costly to prevent. Most irrigation is deployed through canals. They lose water because it seeps through the bottom, evaporates during transmission, and spills out at junctions; a rule of thumb is that almost two-thirds of the water is lost, and often much more. (The figures are imprecise, because some of the “lost” water flows usefully into neighboring fields or percolates back into rivers.)

Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just the rate at which it can be absorbed by plant roots. Invented by the Israeli engineer Simcha Blass, it can use half or less of the water used in ordinary irrigation to nourish the same number of plants. At the same time, drip irrigation is one of those ideas that sounds simple but is hard to accomplish in practice. To exude water in regular amounts from the holes, the water pressure must be exactly the same down the entire length of the pipe, an engineering challenge; if the pipe is underground, which maximizes contact with roots, the holes must not be susceptible to clogging by dirt or being infiltrated by water-seeking roots. The first Israeli drip-irrigation firm was established in 1966; by the 1990s, the method was being used in about half of Israel’s farms.

Yet beavers are as balletic in water as they are clumsy out of it. They can hold their breath for up to fifteen minutes, and their underwater gymnastics are powered by webbed hind feet. Transparent eyelids allow them to see below the surface, while a second set of fur-lined lips close behind their teeth, permitting them to chew and drag wood without drowning. Building dams expands the extent of beavers’ watery domains, submerges lodge entrances to repel predators, and gives them a place to stash their food caches. Ponds also serve to irrigate water-loving trees like willow, allowing beavers to operate as rotational farmers: They’ll chew down vegetation in one corner of their compound while cultivating their next crop in another.

Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine—more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced that the hostility was due, in part, to the region’s lack of resources; the immigrants were exceeding Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” (that is, its carrying capacity). The limit to absorptive capacity was water—British experts argued that regional supplies couldn’t sustain a big influx of immigrants. In this arid, eroded landscape, the supply of well-watered farmland was so small that incoming Jews who used their superior financial resources to acquire it would necessarily create “a considerable landless Arab population.” Zionist groups sent out water testers, who proclaimed that they had found much more water than Britain allowed. London ignored the reports and in 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to fifteen thousand a year. No! Lowdermilk protested. Britain had it backward! The new Jewish settlements were the only bright spots he had seen in the entire dismal region! In the midst of the desolation were Zionist village cooperatives where jointly owned farms grew newly bred crop varieties that thrived in the dry heat. The farms were investing their profits to buy advanced well-boring equipment and create small industries—carpentry and printing shops, food-processing facilities, factories for building material. Most important to Lowdermilk were the irrigation and soil-retention programs—“the most remarkable” he had encountered “in twenty-four countries.” If the British increased immigration, rather than restricted it, he said, Palestine would be able to support “at least four million Jewish refugees from Europe.

Hard by the social costs were the environmental costs. The intensive fertilization mandated by the Green Revolution has heavily contributed to nitrogen problems on land and water. Pesticides have wreaked havoc on agricultural ecosystems and sometimes poisoned sources of drinking water. Poorly constructed and managed irrigation systems have drained aquifers. Soils have become waterlogged or, worse, loaded with salts when irrigation water evaporated. Possibly most worrisome, the energy costs of agriculture, mainly from making fertilizer, have soared. Industrial-style Borlaugian agriculture is a significant contributor to air pollution and climate change.

There’s a natural process called osmosis. You take your treated water, which is practically black with petroleum molecules and full of heavy metals, thick as molasses, then push it through a membrane that filters out the noxious particles. It’s not drinking-water level, they haven’t got there yet. But the EPA has said that it’s good enough to irrigate crops. They’ve allowed discharges into the Allegheny River. Imagine, instead of burying the water, we can reuse it. We can fill our rivers with it.

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What is it?" I asked. "Rain," she said. "It's too early for rain." "That's what you think. Open the door. You'll see." I turned off the air conditioner so that we could hear better, slid open the glass door -- and the soft thunder of rain falling onto sand curtained us in. Deaf, we would still have known it was raining: smell would have told us; the smell of dry earth watered, of dehydrated vegetation reconstituted, the smell of resurrection. The first rain in a dry land! It smells better than lilies in July, or the ocean, or the wind in sun-warmed pines, or the irrigated patch of alfalfa you reach after a long haul through dry hills. It is hard to smell that sweetness and believe in death.

The heart is a tree that is irrigated by the water of worship and good deeds; its fruits are the emergence of vivid spiritual states.

Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency, fuel imports fell even further and the electricity stopped. The coal mines couldn’t operate without electricity because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage. The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output. Even the collective farms couldn’t operate properly without electricity. It had never been easy to eke out enough harvest from North Korea’s hardscrabble terrain for a population of 23 million, and the agricultural techniques developed to boost output relied on electrically powered artificial irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that were now closed for lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry, they didn’t have the energy to work and so output plunged even further. The economy was in a free fall.

IN MEL’S WORDS The 10 Commandments of Square Foot Gardening I. Thou shalt not waste space with a large row garden. II. Thou shalt not use or dig up your existing soil. III. Thou shalt not use a hoe, shovel, or rototiller. IV. Thou shalt not waste seeds by planting, then thinning. V. Thou shalt not remove your Square Foot Garden “grid.” VI. Thou shalt not use any fertilizer, insecticides, or pesticides. VII. Thou shalt not plant more than you can harvest or take care of. VIII. Thou shalt not waste water by hosing, sprinkling, or heavy irrigation. IX. Thou shalt not fail to grow all your vine crops on a vertical support. X. Thou shalt not fail to replant each square as it is harvested

Consider this analogy. When it rains heavily, the water does not necessarily penetrate the earth. If the surface is dry and hard, the rain water floods the surface and runs off. But if it rains gradually for many days continuously, and the ground is moist, then the water seeps deep into the earth, which is good for cultivation and for life. Similarly in ourselves, we must moisten our muscles and nerves through the expansion and extension of the various asana. In this way, the stress that saturates the brain is diffused throughout the rest of the body, so the brain is rested and released from strain and the body releases its stress and strain through movement. Similarly, while doing the various types of pranayama the whole body is irrigated with energy. The nerves are soothed, the brain is calmed, the hardness and rigidity of the lungs are loosened. The nerves are made to remain healthy. There is a certain vibration, which you can make rhythmic and subtler in your asana and pranayama practice without force or stress. You are one with yourself and that is in and of itself a meditative state.

But the Bellagio’s fountain, often mocked as a symbol of water excess in the arid Southwest, may in fact represent some of the highest-value water around. The 12 million gallons a year needed to keep it topped up starts as water too salty to drink, drawn from an old well that once irrigated the Dunes Hotel golf course. Twelve million gallons sounds like a lot, but it’s really just enough to irrigate eight acres of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley.3 Total revenue at the seven giant casino–resort hotels contiguous to the fountain, at the corner of Flamingo Road and South Las Vegas Boulevard—the heart of the famed Las Vegas Strip—is an estimated $3.6 billion.4 Include all of the hotel/casino operations in the greater Las Vegas metro area, and the total rises to $21 billion.5 That compares with total agricultural revenue of $1.9 billion in all of Imperial County.6 Imperial County’s farmers get ten times the water Las Vegas gets. Las Vegas makes ten times the money Imperial County farming does. Given the crowds lining the sidewalks for each one of the fountain’s dancing-water shows, the fountains must represent one of the most economically productive uses of water you’ll find in the West.

You’re a criminal?” “A minor criminal,” El Diablo clarified. “I have never hurt anyone—and I give back to the community. I also farm sustainably; I don’t use any pesticides on my crops, and I water with drip irrigation. You know who the real criminals are? The gas and coal companies. They’re destroying this planet. And yet, they get government subsidies for their businesses, while I’m branded a villain.

the phenomenon known as the “cutback.” In simple terms, the river was carving itself a new gorge. Rather than flowing into the Salton Sink as though down an unbroken incline, the current hurtled over a precipice at the point where the New River entered the Salton Sea. This miniature Niagara proceeded to claw its way upstream at a pace of a mile a day, leaving in its wake a canyon eighty feet deep. For a time, the display of nature ruthlessly at work attracted curiosity seekers to the brink of the new gorge. But no one could ignore the awful consequences that would ensue if the cutback continued working its way upstream. If it managed to cleave through the main canal at the Alamo River, all the Imperial Valley’s irrigation channels would drain into the gorge like unstoppered bathtubs, leaving almost all the valley’s arable land sitting eighty feet above the water level. Irrigation would cease forever.

In February 1965, Strider won a special election to the state senate, where he represented Grenada, Yalobusha, and Tallahatchie Counties for the next five years. In addition to his role with the Game and Fish Commission, he was a member of the Public Property, Transportation, and Water and Irrigation Committees, and chairman of the Penitentiaries Committee.94

Yet God controls the king’s heart. The stubborn will of the most powerful monarch on earth is directed by God as easily as the farmer directs the flow of water in his irrigation canals.

How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks.

In the Indus Valley, the Nile Valley, and Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, barley-wheat cuisine supported small cities by 3000 B.C.E., as millet cuisine supported them in the Yellow River Valley.19 The cuisine of Mesopotamia is the best known of the barley-wheat cuisines, already thousands of years old in 1000 B.C.E. It was prepared in cities and villages on the flat plain, hot and parched much of the year, partly marshy and covered with reeds, the home of fish and waterfowl, featureless except for the channels bringing water to irrigate the fields and the date palms lining the pathways between the fields. The abundance of rich soil and water for growing barley and wheat outweighed the lack of timber, building stone, and other resources. The poor, including foot soldiers, prisoners, construction workers, and servants, survived almost exclusively on barley dishes, receiving roughly made conical pottery bowls containing about two liters (a little over eight cups) of barley grains, porridge, or bread daily. They ate these with a little salt and dried fish. Their diet was so meager that a popular saying went: “When a poor man has died, do not try to revive him. When he had bread, he had no salt; when he had salt, he had no bread.”20