Wendy Barnaby discovers it’s sustainable

Dry: Life without water, edited by Ehsan Masood and Daniel Schaffer (Harvard University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-674-02224-6), 192 pp

When I first opened this book, I didn’t bother with the text. The pictures are stunning.

People tend cattle in Pakistan, water sheep in Nepal, drive donkeys in China, inspect rose petals in Oman, sort wheat in Morocco, weave wool in Jordan, shear vicuña in the Andes, grow trees in Burkina Faso, discuss camels in Sudan  – and all against a background of these dry regions’ stones, rocky escarpments, sand dunes and dusty plains.  The book aims to highlight how people can live in dry and semi-arid regions while conserving biological diversity and using it sustainably.

Criteria for success

One billion people live in dry regions, which cover 40 per cent of the world’s land surface. The productivity illustrated here has been helped along by aid from the world’s largest environmental funding body, the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The book is not simply an advertisement for the GEF’s projects, however. It points out that some of them have only led to temporary improvement, and one failed altogether when the foreign experts went home.

The second aim of the book is to filter out the features common to sustainable results from GEF aid. The idea is to provide a checklist of criteria for success, which scientists and specialists in economic development and public policy could build in to subsequent projects.  The editors have come up with six lessons.

Lessons learned

The first is that projects funded locally lasted longer than those which relied on external money.  In part of the Thar desert in Pakistan, local people kept costs down by using donkeys, instead of mechanized transport, to build micro-dams in natural rock hollows. Drought is no longer the enemy; agriculture has taken off; enrolment has increased at primary schools.

Second, locals need to try to use modern science to benefit their communities. Camel herders in the Sudan have shown veterinary scientists how to track camels, so that the scientists can check and improve their health. 

Third, successful initiatives need to revive or build on traditional knowledge. Moroccan farmers need a modern gene-bank to ensure that they never run out of seed. Moroccan women can identify favoured species, because they know which soil best supports different species, how crops are stored, transformed into food for humans and livestock, and sold.

Fourth, local heroes can provide leadership necessary to get projects off the ground. Mexican villagers living in poverty on the mountainous Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve are backing efforts of a trusted official, Sergio Graf, to improve their situation. He is proposing that the city people benefiting from the water which falls on the mountains should pay compensation to the villagers for maintaining the biosphere in a form which will go on delivering the water to the city. The villagers would be prohibited from cutting down trees or converting land for cattle grazing.

Fifth, projects need to learn from failure as well as celebrate success. When foreign scientists erected huge nets in Chile’s Atacama desert, to collect the fog rolling in from the coast and convert it to usable water, they harvested more than twice the village’s daily water supply. However, the system fell into disrepair when the scientists left. Chilean experts are now designing fog-catchers which the villagers themselves will be able to repair.

Sixth: sometimes, you strike it lucky. Young railway workers were trying to find a way of stopping the sand burying new tracks in the middle of the Tengger desert in China. To pass the time, they played a game in which they made vertical walls and Chinese characters out of straw and wheat stalks, which they half-erected in the sand. These turned out to stop the sand much more effectively than the straw carpets brought in for the purpose – and 50 years on, lines of adapted straw tiles have protected the railway and greened the desert nearby.

Real lives

The book isn’t perfect. The putative lessons learned from the 16 individually-authored stories don’t always stand out from the texts themselves. Neither does the overall production of the book maintain the standard of the illustrations. The copy needs better proof reading, and some of the pictures lack captions. 

However, the stories are fascinating to dip into. This is the reality of development discourse: the lives of people with their needs, beliefs, constraints and possibilities. Water is part and parcel of all these things, and affected by them all. Above all, the illustrations make this an enchanting window onto the richness and resilience of life in dry regions.

Wendy Barnaby is the editor of SPA. She is the author of Directing the flow: a new approach to integrated water resources management (European Commission, 2006)