American Scientist

WATER ALWAYS WINS: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. Erica Gies. 327 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2022. $26.

In many places, the current water paradigm is floundering, caught in a quagmire of mounting ecological costs, social disquiet, and a pile of technical dilemmas. A number of crises loom: Fish runs are being destroyed by large dams; soils are becoming waterlogged on vast tracts of excessively irrigated land; an ocean’s worth of water is being relentlessly withdrawn from underground reservoirs that are nearing exhaustion; and many levees and embankments are transferring the impacts of inundations onto vulnerable populations rather than providing meaningful insulation for flood-prone zones. When the effects of climate change, including a spiral in droughts and floods, are tipped into these ongoing troubles, things can quickly turn catastrophic. We can therefore no longer afford to take a business-as-usual approach to water management.

Any strategy to transform the current approach, however, must walk with two legs: It will need to give primacy to water’s ecological role while also having enough practical appeal to carry along governments and policy makers. In Water Always Wins, journalist Erica Gies ably takes up the task of defining such a strategy by spelling out for us the key philosophical ingredients and grassroots innovations from which a novel and sustainable water paradigm might be assembled.

At the heart of Water Always Wins lies the notion of what Gies refers to as “Slow Water.” In contrast to the dominant engineering approach, in which water is reductively viewed as a physical quantity that can be detached from ecological settings and shuffled around at will, the Slow Water movement maintains that natural flows of water are inextricably embedded within ecological relationships. Those who favor the engineering approach ambitiously aim for total control of water and maximal extraction of it through gray infrastructure—dams, high seawalls, embankments, weirs, barrages, concrete-lined canals, and the like. But Slow Water enthusiasts see in such projects the disruption of water’s ability to nourish ecosystems through the disbursement of sediment and the transfer of nutrients to a range of flora and fauna.

In the Slow Water schema, the main focus is on restoring the centrality of wetland ecologies—marshes, mires, estuaries, mudflats, mangroves, lagoons, and bogs. Gies explains that wetland ecology, as both metaphor and practice, can help us move away from storing water in reservoirs created by large dams and instead concentrate on deepening capacities for subsurface storage of water. Slowing water down to a pace that allows it to soak into the subsoil will steadily extend the natural abilities of underground reservoirs to accumulate water. When that occurs, as Gies points out, subsurface stores of water build up ecological resilience within a zone: They can make water available during a drought season and can absorb excess flows during an extreme flood event.

But figuring out how to transform wetland ecosystems into natural infrastructure for conserving water is a complicated and challenging endeavor. Over the course of 10 chapters, Gies takes us on a whirlwind tour of studies, restoration projects, campaigns, popular struggles, and ethnographic encounters across several countries, and along the way she highlights various twists and turns in the emergence of Slow Water thinking.

In California, for example, she alerts us to the growing interest in tapping into paleo valleys—underground areas beneath the state’s Central Valley that were created during the most recent glacial cycle, 10,000 to 18,000 years ago. Paleo valleys, which are made up of gravel, sand, and other porous material, are able both to store water and to rapidly disburse floodwater into aquifers. They could play a crucial role in coming years by helping the state of California to replenish its already much-depleted stocks of groundwater. This prospect is attractive, because as Gies notes, “storing water underground avoids the environmental impacts associated with building a dam and reservoir . . . and is much cheaper.”

Farther north, in the city of Seattle, there is an equally engaging effort to understand the role of the hyporheic zone, which is a liminal space, or ecotone, that is wedged between the streambed of a river and the groundwater systems farther down. The hyporheic, we are told, rolls underneath the stream or river, flowing in the same direction, but much more slowly. Its expanse and depth vary with topography and other factors, but along a large river the zone can extend laterally more than a mile beyond the banks and 100 feet or more below the bed, although the main flows are in the top few feet. The hyporheic is an intricate layer of biologically diverse microbiomes that provides nutrients for fish and moderates the temperature of the surface flow. A river or stream without a healthy hyporheic zone is unable to maintain a range of ecological and biological functions.

The critical links between biology and flow have become particularly important in recent debates about urban flooding, with the most celebrated and widely acknowledged voice on the subject being that of Yu Kongjiang, landscape architect, urbanist, writer, educator, and cofounder of the landscape design company Turenscape. Yu believes that urban spaces should be designed with Slow Water principles, meaning that wetland environments and their ecological principles should be woven into and around city infrastructure. One of Turenscape’s stormwater projects inspired the compellingly named “Sponge City” initiative of President Xi Jinping, which was announced in 2013. As part of the initiative, between 2016 and 2020, Slow Water projects were initiated in about 90 provincial-level cities in China, while another 538 cities included such projects in their master plans. Steps being taken to make additional space for water in cities include widening riverbeds, creating parks along the banks of creeks and rivers to absorb excessive rainfall, and constructing filtration pools and bioswales (long, vegetation-lined trenches for receiving rainwater runoff). The key element of all of these approaches is mimicking the way in which natural systems absorb, store, and slowly release water. But the sponge effect is only sustainable if the project succeeds in creating habitats for a vast array of animals and plants that play crucial roles in anchoring top soil, keeping ponds and lakes biologically healthy, and even storing carbon dioxide.

Gies gives us further insight into urban wetlands with a field visit to the city of Chennai on the southeast coast of India, where she documents an ongoing campaign for the rehabilitation of the Pallikaranai Marsh. The campaign is focused on clawing back and reestablishing several hydrological linkages with backwaters, mangroves, and coastal estuaries that were lost to the city’s thoughtless real estate expansion, which reduced the area of the marsh by 90 percent. For many activists, central to their spirited efforts is a quest to revive the treatment of wetlands as shared-use commons, called poromboke in Tamil. Historically, communities strove to manage poromboke as multifunctional habitats that provided them with fish, seasonal agriculture, grass for weaving mats, fodder for animals, and medicinal plants.

Gies stresses that Slow Water cannot simply be reduced to water storage. Rather, its sustainability relies greatly on the extent to which wetland ecologies spawn and maintain dense arrangements of supporting and mutually beneficial flora and fauna. In this regard, the book’s chapter about the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) is particularly telling. As Gies explains,

Beavers, in their role as ecosystem engineers, help salmon populations to flourish. They create ponds of clean, cool water and expand gravel areas for spawning. Young fish grow faster and reach the sea healthier if they spend time in beaver ponds.

Moreover, because beaver dams are smaller than human dams and somewhat porous, they can steadily transform an entire river system into a collection of biologically unique and productive microenvironments.

Gies further dissects and gives nuance to Slow Water principles in explorations of Al-Hammar Marsh in modern-day Iraq; the amunas (canals) and bofedales (high-altitude tropical peatlands, or “cushion bogs”) in the Andes region of Peru; the “hydrological ecological zones” that are being created along the Mekong River in Vietnam; and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which is planting trees in watersheds.

Three main implications emerge in Water Always Wins. First, if cities intend to draw upon Slow Water principles, then urban residents will have to work out ways to coexist with a range of feral amphibians, reptiles, and various aquatic and semiaquatic species—a web of biological diversity that will be crucial to sustaining wetland ecologies. Second, dialogues between Indigenous knowledges and modern science will be necessary for implementing wetland restoration projects. And third, the skill sets of the modern engineer who is oriented toward big infrastructure will have to be decentered and located on a spectrum of the knowledges and experiences of others, including plant biologists, zoologists, water detectives tracking ancient subsoil pathways, fish biologists, hydrologists, stream ecologists, community organizers, nongovernmental organizations, landscape and natural system designers, and environmental historians.

Water Always Wins could, in effect, be read as a manifesto. It argues that the dominance and hegemony of the centralized technical bodies that currently command water as it moves through engineered infrastructure should be replaced with an understanding of rivers, flows, and water as a biological force. This very important book offers hope as we confront the grim realities of a world being overtaken by global warming and climate change.