When, many years ago, VS Naipaul referred to the land of his birth as “the little island in the mouth of the Orinoco,” Trinidadians resented what they interpreted as an intentionally belittling description. But Trinidadian yachtsmen knew Naipaul was right. ‘Little’ Trinidad, in so many ways different from the rest of the insular Caribbean, abuts the Orinoco delta, and the consequence is that any wind-propelled vessel arriving in Trinidad from points north has to struggle mightily against the current (really, an underwater river) pouring out through the Grand Boca.
Add to this the fact that high cliffs block the wind, and you’ll understand why in the 16th and 17th centuries the Spaniards used to say a special mass aboard ship as their galleons approached that dreaded channel. Indeed, on his third voyage, Columbus nearly lost the Santa Maria on those rocks — he had to lower his rowboats and tow it away from being washed onto a cliff — which is why he named it the Dragon’s Mouth (Boca). And even today, when modern yachts are so much more efficient, there are instances a-plenty of sailing boats which, lacking auxiliary engines, have spent up to a day (or night) eking out the paltry quarter-mile of those turbulent, narrow straits.
For 10 years in the ’80s and ’90s this columnist sailed his engineless Lisa in Trinidad, as well as to Tobago, Grenada and points north; and in the latter cases, having more than once learned the hard way (one remembers in particular a night spent ‘sailing in place’ in the Boca, serenaded by the startling ‘Puh! Puh!’ of porpoises which surrounded the boat and stayed with us for most of the night), we took to planning our return trips to maximize our chances of getting back in through the Boca. It was a struggle that preoccupied us while still 20 and 24 hours away: getting in through the Boca when the time came.
I mention all this because, one day in the summer of ’95, an extraordinary thing happened. Returning from Tobago, we braced as usual for the struggle with the Boca, only to find ourselves sailing in through it with no loss of real, over-the-ground speed. It was disorienting, that unexpected release, like pushing with all your strength on a supposedly jammed door which unresistingly flies open; and, back home, I phoned the Institute of Marine Affairs for an explanation. And was told the Orinoco was down by 17 feet.
Seventeen feet!
That seemed so unlikely — and so potentially catastrophic for the millions of Columbian and Venezuelan villagers who depend on that great river for their livelihood — that I didn’t quite credit it. But I never forgot the experience of meeting no resistance where great resistance had always been. And I remembered it again last week when reading a NYT story headlined ‘Iraq Suffers as the Euphrates River Dwindles.’
“Throughout the marshes,” that story begins, “the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat. ‘Maaku mai!’ they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. ‘There is no water!’
“The Euphrates is drying up…”
Understand: the Euphrates (as the NYT points out) was the river so instrumental in the original birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times. But now, beset by drought, bad management, and more so by the water policies of Turkey and Syria, which between them have erected seven dams on the river (both countries are upstream of Iraq) the Euphrates is drying up.
Warned Iraq’s Minister of Planning: “Our agriculture is going to die, our cities are going to wilt. No state can keep quiet in such a situation.”
Notice the implicit threat contained in that last sentence.
Now, access to oil was the major casus belli of the 20th century. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, part of his raison d’être was to seize the oilfields of Romania and the Caucasus. When Roosevelt cut off Japan’s access to oil in support of China, an ally which Japan had invaded, FDR had to have known he was forcing Tokyo to choose between ceding its empire and going to war with America. When the Bushes, father and son, twice attacked Iraq, their strategic concern was each time with America’s control of Middle Eastern oil. And so on.
Yet as early as the 1970s, western think tanks began to warn that, in the 21st century, water, access to water, would displace oil as the world’s chief casus belli.
From the NYT: “Along the [Euphrates], there is no shortage of resentment at the Turks and Syrians. But there is also resentment at the Americans, Kurds, Iranians and the Iraqi government, all of whom are blamed. Scarcity makes foes of everyone…”
For us in these parts, the significance of such a shift is worth noting. The world’s reserves of oil and gas are predicted to run out some time in the second half of this century (presumably, alternative energy technologies will be fully functional by then), just when the nations’ thirst for water will be peaking. And this suggests the economies of the insular Caribbean will increasingly be reoriented away from North America and Europe, and towards those South American countries (Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname) upon whose great rivers we ought by then to be dependent for water.
Only, this isn’t exactly a given. (Nothing about the future ever is.) Flying over Santo Domingo, you can see clearly where brown, denuded Haiti ends and the forested green slopes of the Dominican Republic begin. And returning to Jamaica 30 years after I’d been an undergraduate here, I was struck at once by the ‘Haitianization’ of the Blue Mountains: many and large swathes, up on the high slopes, of treeless, lime green where, after just a few decades of illicit logging and slash-and-burn agriculture, the topsoil had washed away, never to return, and many rivers had become mere gullies. Jamaica, the ‘land of wood and water,’ today has a chronic water problem.
When I was in Suriname in 1995, the big scandal concerned an Indonesian consortium which, with the corrupt involvement of Surinamese government ministers and their relatives, was engaging in massive illegal logging. And one regularly reads of logging, both legal and illegal, in the great rainforests of Brazil and Guyana, on a scale that can only premonish ecological disaster — and not in the long term either.
So maybe the Orinoco really was down by 17 feet in the summer of ’95. And maybe, 50 years from now, the great South American rivers — and the hundreds of millions of lives that depend upon them — will be similarly imperilled.
When they come, the water wars will doubtless begin in the Middle East (with Turkey holding most of the cards). But it may be time to start thinking the unthinkable, if only in order to avert it: that, given current policies and practices, such wars may well be on track to erupt in our part of the world, too.
