With his background in anthropology, it was the most natural thing for Peter to interview the people of the river – the Barkindji, and to hear their stories of disenfranchisement: anguished wounds that stretched back over generations, but which now bled afresh with the realisation that the Baarka, their Mother, was close to ecological death.
It simply could not be right that where the Darling was not dry it was a lurid green, and that millions of fish were dying. We did not approach the research and filming of When the River Runs Dry from a partisan position, unless that partisan position was the side of the River. Problems on the Darling had been on the periphery of many people’s awareness for years, but now here was ‘the bill’, the cost of over-extraction of water and institutional indifference manifest in a dying river. Then began a harrowing period, interviewing people, camping by and filming the remains of the Darling, simply capturing the moment. We arrived too late in Menindee – all the fish had sunk to the bottom, leaving only foul green water and a horrible stench. Sensing that this was a pivotal moment in Australia’s environmental history, we, (Peter Yates and Rory McLeod) moved quickly, and were on the road to Menindee within a few hours, to document the event and its impact on the people of the river. The devastating sight of enormous Murray Cod, dead in a man’s arms, led first to distress, and then anger. In January 2019, images and videos began to filter through social media of a massive fish-kill on the Darling/Baarka River near Menindee in NSW. Sometimes, even conservation isn’t the answer, bizarrely enough.When the River Runs Dry was born on an impulse. What’s especially troubling is cases like the Colorado or the Rio Grande where every last drop is spoken for, because changes in one area of the river can have multiple effects downstream and up. Some fishing towns haven’t seen water in decades. The constant salt exposure gives the Aral Sea residents the highest rate of anemia in the world - in some places, 90% of the children are anemic. The salt that is left on the old shorelines is eventually whipped up in dust storms, getting everywhere. After the two main rivers that fed the Aral were diverted to grow cotton in the desert, the Aral rapidly began losing area and became more saline and more clogged with fertilizers and pesticides. In response, the Chinese are building what will probably amount to the largest water diversion in human history to pipe water from the Yangtze to the North.īut the chapter on the Aral Sea - or more properly, its rotting corpse - is simply bone-chilling. And the Yellow River - the foundation of Chinese civilization, their version of the Nile - now barely makes it to the coastal province of Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius. The Colorado no longer makes it all the way to the Pacific, destroying the habitat of numerous species who thrived in that river’s delta. Some examples: The Rio Grande now ceases to exist shortly after is passes El Paso, only to be reborn from a tributary closer to the sea. This book manages to convey clearly and starkly the effects we’ve had on rivers and lakes all over the world. We’ve all probably met someone who refused to believe that anthropogenic CO2 could really be responsible for so many problems.
I think a lot of people have a hard time imagining that human activity really can have such a profound effect, but this book should be an antidote to that. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist.
0 kommentar(er)
