The second largest store of fresh water in Russia by capacity after Lake Baikal, and certainly one of the most remote & stunning areas of Siberia, the Putorana Plateau in pictures by Sergey Gorshkov.
If by any chance you are in Moscow, exhibition of Sergey's pictures goes until 16 October; see more here.
The highway to Oroville, a small town in California’s Central Valley, runs into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As the road and the temperature climb, the neon lights of the valley’s box stores give way to orchards. Before the weather changed, this was a good place for fruit. Along the highway, hand-painted posters flash: ‘Fresh! Peaches’. The town was founded during the Gold Rush, and although today it’s home to more farmers than miners, it’s still a place where people search for what they don’t have. ‘Severe drought,’ highway signs blink. ‘Limit outdoor watering.’ There’s been no rain here since April, and the land is so dry even the moonlight is dusty. I’ve travelled 3,000 miles to California looking for a woman looking for water. I’ve come to a desert.You can read the rest of this fascinating Aeon article here.
Sharron Hope, I’ve heard, can find water underground. As a dowser, she uses tools as simple as a stick to determine where to place a well. Holding a forked branch, Hope can tell if she is approaching a buried spring because she will feel these tools move in her hands. She can even estimate how many feet to dig and how many gallons per minute the finished hole will produce. She’s right so regularly that excavators often call her before breaking ground.
Of course, there are people who doubt Hope’s abilities. According to the United States Geological Survey: ‘The natural explanation of “successful” water dowsing is that in many areas water would be hard to miss.’ But the state is now entering its fourth year without enough rain, and this summer struggling farmers will let 620,000 acres lie fallow, losing an estimated $5.7 billion dollars. As increasingly desperate Californians turn to dubious and expensive long-term projects like piping water 1,400 miles from Alaska or building a billion‑dollar desalination plant in San Diego, dowsing for a well looks downright sensible. Hope’s become one of the few people sure of their answers, and the appeal of that certainty is easy to understand. The more difficult question is: how, in the middle of this century’s worst drought, is she still turning up water?
Hope agrees to explain over breakfast and suggests we meet at Oroville’s Gold Country Casino and Hotel. Just after sunrise, the parking lot is filled with dusty pickups. The farmers inside might have more of a chance at a jackpot than rain. The waterfall is closed for construction and the slot machines sing. Hope is waiting outside the café with a large map, a ruler and a pendulum – a long crystal on a silver chain. Dowsers use these tools to answer questions the same way one might use an Ouija board, by holding them and concentrating until they move one way for yes, and another for no, pointing their owner in the right direction.
We sit at a greasy vinyl booth. Hope pulls out a bird’s‑eye view of a client’s property and holds her pendulum over it. When the tool swings, she marks the spot with a black Sharpie. ‘Where it circles, that means there’s two water veins,’ Hope says. She’ll double-check her results in person. ‘You get on the land, and then you just concentrate.’ When the tools move, Hope knows she’s in the right spot.
Like dowsers, geologists look for water by preparing a map of the land. But their cartography focuses on the physical terrain, tracking where different kinds of rock come to the surface and plotting historical well data. Radar can reveal fractures in the ground where water might flow. Geologists combine this data for a pretty good guess at where underground aquifers might lie. ‘Geologists get a black‑and‑white printout that goes hundreds of feet down and shows you the layers of rock and openings where water might be,’ Hope says. ‘But they can’t actually tell you if there’s water.’ She took graduate hydrogeology courses at Chico State University 25 miles away, and she says that the more she learned, the more she thought: ‘I might as well go dowse. It saves people money and it’s just as accurate.’
However popular dowsing may be, the US Geological Survey takes pains to point out that it is not a science. Hope says: ‘If you call a geologist, it’ll cost you $2,000 a day.’ By comparison, she charges a one-time fee of $250 for a well-siting. Despite the differences in her methods, she works regularly with real estate agents and drillers, and the drought has multiplied her business. David Munch, an excavator who digs wells throughout the Central Valley, says he calls her anytime he has a client in the foothills. Her results speak for themselves: Hope has found dozens of wells this year.
Think of what would change if we valued terrestrial water as much as we value the possibility of water on Mars. Only 3% of the water on this planet is fresh; and of that, two-thirds is frozen. Yet we lay waste to the accessible portion. Sixty per cent of the water used in farming is needlessly piddled away by careless irrigation. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are sucked dry, while what remains is often so contaminated that it threatens the lives of those who drink it. In the UK, domestic demand is such that the upper reaches of many rivers disappear during the summer. Yet still we install clunky old toilets and showers that gush like waterfalls.
As for salty water, of the kind that so enthrals us when apparently detected on Mars, on Earth we express our appreciation with a frenzy of destruction. A new report suggests fish numbers have halved since 1970. Pacific bluefin tuna, which once roamed the seas in untold millions, have been reduced to an estimated 40,000, yet still they are pursued. Coral reefs are under such pressure that most could be gone by 2050. And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2,000 metres. We can only guess at what they could be destroying.
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Let the market decide: this is the way in which governments seek to resolve planetary destruction. Leave it to the conscience of consumers, while that conscience is muted and confused by advertising and corporate lies. In a near-vacuum of information, we are each left to decide what we should take from other species and other people, what we should allocate to ourselves or leave to succeeding generations. Surely there are some resources and some places – such as the Arctic and the deep sea – whose exploitation should simply stop?
All this drilling and digging and trawling and dumping and poisoning – what is it for, anyway? Does it enrich human experience, or stifle it? A couple of weeks ago I launched the hashtag #extremecivilisation, and invited suggestions. They have flooded in. Here are just a few of the products my correspondents have found. All of them, as far as I can tell, are real.
An egg tray for your fridge that syncs with your phone to let you know how many eggs are left. A gadget for scrambling them – inside the shell. Wigs for babies, to allow “baby girls with little or no hair at all the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic hair style”.The iPotty, which permits toddlers to keep playing on their iPads while toilet training. A £2,000 spider-proof shed. A snow sauna, on sale in the United Arab Emirates, in which you can create a winter wonderland with the flick of a switch. A refrigerated watermelon case on wheels: indispensable for picnics – or perhaps not, as it weighs more than the melon. Anal bleaching cream, for… to be honest, I don’t want to know. An “automatic watch rotator” that saves you the bother of winding your luxury wrist-candy. A smartphone for dogs, with which they can take pictures of themselves. Pre-peeled bananas, in polystyrene trays covered in clingfilm; just peel back the packaging.
Every year, clever new ways of wasting stuff are devised, and every year we become more inured to the pointless consumption of the world’s precious resources. With each subtle intensification, the baseline of normality shifts. It should not be surprising to discover that the richer a country becomes, the less its people care about their impacts on the living planet.
