From Aeon:
A great river encircles the world. It rises in the heartland of the United States and carries more water than the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. One branch, its oldest, streams over the Atlantic, heading for Europe and the Middle East. Another crosses the Pacific, flowing towards China. Countless tributaries join along the way, draining the plains and forests of Latin America, Europe and Asia.
You probably have never heard of such a river, even though almost all of us draw from it. You cannot fish in it, float on it, drink from it. If you were to look, you would not find it: it is invisible. Yet there is no doubt that it flows.
The river starts anywhere water feeds agriculture. But from there, physical water vanishes, replaced by a flow of crops that carry only the memory of the water used to produce them. Crops then travel along the shipping lanes of the global trade system, eventually displacing the water that would have otherwise been used to grow them locally. Thus, water flows from source to destination ‘embedded’ in its products. It is a flow of ‘virtual water’, an idea first developed in the 1980s by the late geographer Tony Allan.
This great virtual river helps explain how nations exercise power over each other. It is far from a coincidence that its dominant source today is the waters of the Mississippi. Its current path was established when Franklin Roosevelt’s US replaced Britain as the world’s hegemon. The US began feeding an imploding, war-torn Europe with crops nourished by the rich waters of Old Man River, and the rest is history.
In 1947, Thomas Hart Benton painted a celebrated allegory of this transition, Achelous and Hercules: a youthful US Army Corp of Engineers, cast in the role of Hercules, fights the Missouri River – Achelous, the river god, in the shape of a bull – while the Midwestern farmland fills a proleptic Cornucopia with food headed east. The US had become the postwar granary of the world.
Benton’s geopolitical reference in Ovid’s myth might seem obscure today. But he could be confident that, when the average customer of Harzfeld’s store in Kansas City glanced at that mural above the elevators, near the perfumery section – the location of the original commission – she would have recognised the elemental nature of water, the struggle that shaped the rural landscape of the 1940s, and the power that water control gave to the nation.
Streams of power and identity run deep in the waters of the great virtual river.
All through the 20th century, trading the products of a country’s water resources was an act of power. When the US became the granary of the world, flooding food eastward, it also provoked a countercurrent of hard currency streaming back to pay for it, setting the stage for the Bretton Woods settlement.
Lenin and Stalin paid for Soviet industrialisation with cereal production of Ukrainian, Russian and Central Asian fields, irrigated by canals built by thousands of Gulag prisoners. In China, Mao may well have measured the targets of the Great Leap Forward in tons of steel, but planned to fund their pursuit by irrigating the plains of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.....
....MUCH MORE
And on a specific type of embedded water, Virtual water:
"Water is the hidden imbalance in U.S./China trade..."
Water is interesting stuff.
We'll have a few posts on it over the next week or so, starting off with something easy: virtual water....
February 2014One of the few Limits to Growth that actually is a limit rather than some sort of scarcity meme.However even this should be beatable if some smart people can do the deep dive into the wonder and magic (okay, chemistry and physics) that is H2O.
We'll be hearing about virtual water with increasing frequency, right now there are only 298,000 hits in a Google search....[now up to 459,00]
California Drought: Why Farmers Are 'Exporting Water' to China
March 2016
Shipping U.S. Water To Saudi Arabia
As we've noted elsewhere this is an example of what the hydrology pros call 'virtual water'.
