A Short History of Rivers
"To write history without putting any water in it is to leave out a large part of the story. Human experience has not been so dry as that." Donald Worster
Rivers of Empire, 1985
All land is part of a watershed or river basin and all is shaped by the water which flows over it and through it. Indeed, rivers are such an integral part of the land that in many places it would be as appropriate to talk of riverscapes as it would be of landscapes. A river is much more than water flowing to the sea. Its ever-shifting bed and banks and the groundwater below, are all integral parts of the river. Even the meadows, forests, marshes and backwaters of its floodplain can be seen as part of a river - and the river as part of them. A river carries downhill not just water, but just as importantly sediments, dissolved minerals, and the nutrient-rich detritus of plants and animals, both dead and alive.
A watershed starts at mountain
peaks and hilltops. Snowmelt and rainfall wash over and through the high
ground into rivulets which drain into fast-flowing mountain streams. As
the streams descend, tributaries and groundwaters add to their volume and
they become rivers. As they leave the mountains, rivers slow and start to
meander and braid, seeking the path of least resistance across widening
valleys, whose alluvial floor was laid down by millennia of sediment-laden
floods. Eventually the river will flow into a lake or ocean. Where the
river is muddy and the land flat, the sediments laid down by the river may
form a delta, splitting the river into a bird-foot of distributaries which
discharge into the sea. The river’s estuary, the place where its
sweetwaters mix with the ocean’s salt, is one of the most biologically
productive parts of the river - and of the ocean. Most of the world’s fish
catch comes from species which are dependent for at least part of their
life cycle on a nutrient-rich estuarine habitat.
The diversity of a river lies not only in the various types of country it
flows through but also in the changing seasons and the differences between
wet and dry years. Seasonal and annual variations in the amount of water,
sediment and nutrients drained by a watershed can be massive, especially
in dry areas where most of a year’s rain may fall in just a few individual
storms. On average 85 per cent of the annual discharge of the Limpopo in
southern Africa flows from January through March; only one per cent from
August through October. Rivers in the far north are also highly seasonal,
with minimum flows during the frozen winter followed by huge floods during
the summer melt.
The great milestones of human history took place by the banks of rivers.
Fossilized remains of our earliest known hominid ancestor were found by
Ethiopia’s Awash River. Evidence of the momentous change from mostly
nomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary farming first appears in the
narrow river valleys of the mountains of the Near East at archaeological
sites between nine and ten thousand years old. The first civilizations
emerged in the third millennium BC along the Euphrates, Tigris, Nile and
Indus, and a little later along the Yellow. Much later another momentous
turning point in human history occurred along the rivers and streams of
northern England which powered the early industrial factories.
Rivers, and the rich variety of plants and animals which they sustain,
provide hunter-gatherer societies with water for drinking and washing, and
with food, drugs and medicines, dyes, fibres and wood. Farmers reap the
same benefits as well as, where needed, irrigation for their crops. For
pastoral societies, who graze their herds over wide areas of often parched
plains and mountains, perennial vegetation along the banks of rivers
provides life-sustaining food and fodder during dry seasons and droughts.
Towns and cities use (and misuse) rivers to carry away their wastes.
Rivers also serve as roadways for commerce, exploration and conquest. With
the exception of a few maritime societies, ’all the great historic
cultures,’ writes technology historian Lewis Mumford, ’have thriven
through the movement of men and institutions and inventions and goods
along the natural highway of a great river.’
The role of rivers as the sustainers of life and fertility is reflected in
the myths and beliefs of a multitude of cultures. In many parts of the
world rivers are referred to as ’mothers’: Narmadai, ’Mother
Narmada’; the Volga is Mat’ Rodnaya, ’Mother of the Land’. The Thai
word for river, mae nan, translates literally as ’water mother’.
Rivers have often been linked with divinities, especially female ones. In
Ancient Egypt, the floods of the Nile were considered the tears of the
goddess Isis. Ireland’s River Boyne, which is overlooked by the island’s
most impressive prehistoric burial sites, was worshipped as a goddess by
Celtic tribes.
The rivers of India are perhaps wrapped in more myths, epic tales and
religious significance than those of any other nation. Environmentalist
Vijay Paranjpye describes a sacred text which holds that ’all sins are
washed away by bathing thrice in the Saraswati, seven times in the Yamuna,
once in the Ganges, but the mere sight of the Narmada is enough to absolve
one of all sins!’ Another ancient text describes the Narmada River as
’giver of merriment’, ’flavourful’, ’of graceful attitude’, and ’one who
radiates happiness’.
Of the life sustained by rivers, salmon have perhaps been imbued with the
most mythological significance. The ’Salmon of Knowledge’, legend had it,
swam in a pool near the source of the Boyne. Anyone who tasted the fish
would acquire understanding of everything in the world, past, present and
future. Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest believed salmon to be
superior beings who ascended rivers for the benefit of people, died, and
then returned to life in a great house under the ocean where they danced
and feasted in human form. Some tribes welcomed the first salmon of the
season with the ceremony due to a visiting chief.
While rivers provided life, they also brought death. Settlement on the
plains, which enabled people to take advantage of the rich alluvial soils,
also exposed crops and villages to the risk of catastrophic floods.
Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving epic tale, tells of a great flood
unleashed by God to scourge the sinful in Mesopotamia. Myths and legends
of huge floods are common to many cultures around the world, from the Old
Testament Jews to the pagan Norse and the indigenous people of the
Americas.
The damming of the world has brought a profound change to watersheds.
Nothing alters a river as totally as a dam. A reservoir is the antithesis
of a river - the essence of a river is that it flows, the essence of a
reservoir that it is still. A wild river is dynamic, forever changing -
eroding its bed, depositing silt, seeking a new course, bursting its
banks, drying up. A dam is monumentally static, it tries to bring a river
under control, to regulate its seasonal pattern of floods and low flows. A
dam traps sediments and nutrients, alters the river’s temperature and
chemistry, and upsets the geological processes of erosion and deposition
through which the river sculpts the surrounding land.
For further information, please contact:
Day of Action Coordinator
International Rivers
1847 Berkeley Way
Berkeley, CA 94703 USA
Phone: +1 510-848-1155
Fax: +1 510-848-1008
E-mail: dayofaction@internationalrivers.org'