“Those who drank their pond could not continue where they were”

-Their history of thirst goes back to the beginning of human beings. How much do we owe to the search for water?

-We owe our existence to water, so imagine how much those of us who come from arid areas owe to its search. Most. We get used to some things already being there, be it a river or a tap, and perhaps that keeps us away from a fear that is perhaps universal, because there have been countless cultures whose founding myths begin with a drought or a flood.

-He quotes a saying, “the frog does not drink the pond in which it lives”, which seems quite appropriate for these times of excessive use of aquifers. Does the history of water allow us to better understand the challenges of this present climate emergency and such intense drought in so many places in the world?

Of almost everything I have found writing this book, this proverb shared by Sioux and Chinese may be what has marked me the most. It is a great teaching that we should all integrate. I think so, understanding the history of our relationship with water can give us some clues. For example, delving into those cultures that collapsed in the midst of a drought or survived gives us an idea of ​​what to do and what not to do, broadly speaking and independently of everything that distances us. But there are essential features: those who drank their pond could not continue where they were. Those who made intelligent use of their resources and, something that seems very important to me, those who in some way strengthened their ties came out ahead.

-Does the lack of water have a domino effect that goes far beyond the moment and the obvious suspects, such as the loss of droughts? Its historical examples – and also current ones – point to suicides, collective depressions and even the beginning of revolutions.

Those cases that you point out speak precisely of why I talk about thirst and not drought. The farmers who have committed suicide in rural areas of India in the middle of the drought do not do so just because of the drought, but because the drought puts their harvest at risk and losing it means not being able to pay their bills while creditors pursue them. This extreme situation is not caused by the climate, or it does not do it alone. The same occurs with the beginning of several bread riots: those who could not feed their children because they could not pay for bread and rose up against the powerful did not do so because of the drought, but because in the middle of the drought, while they were losing crops, while They were told that as soon as there was grain available, they discovered that there was a hoarder in their city.

-In the book he talks about how in the discoveries that have been made in La Mancha, precisely, the most powerful buried people seem to be connected to water. Was water the first stone to create inequality?

The first civilizations were hydraulic civilizations. In the case of La Mancha, the motilla culture is considered a hydraulic society because there is no evidence of writing, but it has in common with Egypt, Mesopotamia, China or Harappa the importance of water and the power around it. In cultures such as the Motillas, the origin of inequality in the Iberian Peninsula is being studied. And that inequality resided in the control of water and also grain, because the motillas were not only wells, but in many cases they also housed silos and became burial points in which the grave goods speak of the different status of those buried.

-Will it be the marker of the great inequalities of the future? Reading the stories he comments on of the falls of empires and political regimes due to drought seem like very distant stories, but at the same time not so far away.

Possibly. It already is in many places. But those declines in the past were not because of the drought, but because in the midst of the drought other factors occurred that often had to do with unequal access to resources and abuse of power.

-And in relation to this, he says that the first war was over water. Will the wars of the future also continue to be due to this element?

It is the first war that we are aware of because it was documented. Maybe one day one archaeologist will find another. But, in addition to the first war, it is considered the first of water because what was at stake was a particularly fertile land. Also the oldest dispute of which we have written evidence in the Iberian Peninsula speaks of a fight for water, although it was resolved peacefully through mediation by a neutral people.

-At the same time, has thirst been an excuse to cover up other problems? That is, while you accuse water and its absence you have a scapegoat. I'm thinking about what he says in the book about how during the dictatorship people talked all the time about the “persistent drought” as a temporary curse when it was neither new nor, as he demonstrates using historiography, the complete story.

Drought has often been an excuse, yes, as is the case in the case you mention. The press of the 19th century also spoke of persistent drought and, shortly before, at the beginning of the 1930s, there was another serious drought that brought a large part of Andalusia and La Mancha to the limit. In the 1940s, the well-known famine years, there was a real famine, but the famous “persistent drought” was not alone because this famine mainly affected very specific areas and did not hit the day laborers by chance.

-He threads his childhood memories and also those of his family into the book about the lack of water. It is something that has been very present in your lives, but do you think that in Spain we have lost the collective memory of the drought and, therefore, of the value of water? Have we become accustomed to the fact that science—and infrastructure—end up ensuring that when we turn on the tap, water always appears?

Yes. Furthermore, this is partly why I vindicate so much the role of the people who were displaced, often by force and often with violence, so that their towns were flooded by reservoirs. If we forget the sacrifice of tens of thousands of people thanks to those of us who have water at home, how are we going to be aware that we come from what you mention, from that “collective memory of the drought”?

-And speaking of these infrastructures, is thirst the excuse we use—a bit like the overwhelming card of the One—to impose certain works above other issues, such as environmental or social impact?

This thing you mention has also happened. These people were talked about as a common good, although if you do a little research on some reservoirs you will see that it was not always so common nor did it have to be done under those conditions by force. Fayón was not even going to flood, why was it finally decided to change the location of the dam that would mean its flooding without turning back? Already since the end of the 19th century, the idea that Spain could not take off economically because it rained little, late and poorly was deeply rooted, and a utilitarian idea of ​​water was also widespread, that Spain wasted the water from its rivers in the sea. The reservoirs that were proposed at that time were for irrigation, everything else would come later, but that base was very useful later when it came to leaving aside the social and environmental consequences. If you add to the idea that you sacrifice yourself for the common good, the fact that in the 50s or 60s you are going to have to keep quiet… Although in democracy neither could they do much to save themselves nor those who climbed onto the roofs of their houses in Riaño nor those who locked themselves in the town hall in the nineties to prevent the Lindoso reservoir from flooding Aceredo…