But water is increasingly a factor in conflict, and there’s a long his-

tory of violence over water, and I think it’s going to get worse.”

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Just how much fighting there has been over water is a matter of

wide debate. But every two years, in his report on the world’s water,

Mr. Gleick updates what is perhaps the most comprehensive water

conflict chronology ever compiled. The latest version of the

chronology goes on and on for seventeen pages, listing scores of in-

cidents between 3000 BC and the early part of the twenty-first cen-

tury in which water was either used as a military tool, targeted by

military opponents, or otherwise became a source of tension.

Among the incidents on Mr. Gleick’s list: (1) a series of bombings

in California between 1907 and 1913 designed to prevent the di-

version of water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles; (2) the

mobilization of the Arizona National Guard in 1935 during a dis-

pute with California over water in the Colorado River; (3) an inci-

dent in August 2000 in which six people died after officials in

China’s southern Guangdong Province blew up a ditch to prevent a

neighboring county from diverting water; and (4) violent riots that

broke out in 2002 over controversial water allocations from India’s

Cauvery River.

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Asia has become one of the most volatile global water hot spots,

a continent that holds 60 percent of the world’s population but

only 36 percent of the world’s water and where many rivers and

aquifers are already oversubscribed.

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The Aral Sea, in the Central

Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, is one of the most

overtapped water systems in the world and is now one-fourth its

original size. “This is a serious problem in a lot of different places,

many of them in Asia where you have the biggest disparity in pop-

ulation and available water,” says Sandra Postel, director of the

Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts. “That’s

translating into a fair amount of rivers running dry during long

stretches of the year.” China has responded to its significant water

woes by embarking on a massive scheme known as the South-

North Water Transfer Project, which plans to move 44 billion

cubic meters of water per year via three different canals—spanning

To H a v e a n d H a v e N o t

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