Water and the Costs of System Sustainability

Elvin, Chapter 6

Subtitled: "Dihydrogen Monoxide and China", because having a silly name like that made it interesting.

Actually, I think by Chapter 6, Elvin had perhaps warmed up a bit to this whole "writing a book" thing and was getting better at making interesting points.

To sum up a few major points:
- The upper class was the only group within cities to get the good water; the lower class people were further downstream where there was a higher concentration of pollutants. (116)
- The "controlled flooding" that seemed to happen fairly frequently in the nineteenth century led to actual battles; nobody wanted to be on the side that flooded. (116)
- Efforts to maintain the elaborate irrigation systems were solid; everyone got in on it because everyone would suffer if things went wrong. (118)
- Maintaining China's irrigation and water-control systems was expensive in terms of labor, money, and resources. (119)
- "And while hydraulic systems are hydrologically unstable, they are also economically inherently static." (Elvin, 120) ~ Just... it's a funny sentence. He's so serious, and it comes out as absurd. It's the best thing he says in the entire chapter.
- Dredging was necessary to keep water flowing. (122)
- There was fierce competition for water; China's environment could only offer so much, and there was either too much or too little in most places.
- Elvin then uses "faustian", a term that the Oxford English Dictionary defines rather uselessly.
- Page 124 can be summed up rather simply: Despite the fact that better water-management systems existed, it was too expensive in terms of manpower and money to change technologies, even if the new system would be more effective.
- Also, there would not have been such sediment problems if they hadn't deforested China. Just had to say it.
- Maintenance of these systems though, as defunct as they might be, was a community effort and a matter of survival. (124).
- "Essentially, what had been happening was that the increased loads of sediments carried by the Miju River, because of land clearance and deforestation upstream, had raised its bed, and made it necessary both to keep dredging it and building the dikes higher and higher... by some time not too far into the Qing dynasty, a substantial proportion of the course of the Miju immediately south of the gorge was running above the level of the rooftops of houses on the surrounding land, as it still does today." (126) This is the most interesting thing that Elvin says; due to mankind's meddling with nature, a riverbed was raised above the surrounding land rather than cutting a new gorge or canyon into the earth as would normally happen.

Honestly, that's about as far as I got. I think Elvin did a much better job at getting interesting information across this chapter, or else I just got used to his repetitive system of speech. Whichever.