Customer Reviews

Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Often the most powerful messages come in the simplest form. The messae in "Heart of Dryness" is one of those, but it comes layered. Water is a scarce resource, be smart using and conserving it/We of the developed world may not have all the answers, and we should be humble, thankful and open to the wisdom of those whose "science" is deeper and more personal/The solutions to our problems today might well come in clever, even thoughtful thirty-second soundbites. It may well have to, since that seems increasingy to be the span of attention we have to deal with. However,it is the dedication, patience and persistence required to implement those solutions that is missing.

The author's journey in writing "Heart of Dryness" parallels the longer journey taken by the Bushmen he writes about. There is an instinctive awarensss of the injustices too prevalent in the world, and an understanding that science does not provide the only knowledge that can guide us. The narrative of human struggle is inseparable from the critical issue of water's role in the health and politics of the world.

The book weaves a compelling story that early on begins to raise the central question" "OK, growing water scarcity and waste in its usage is a pervasive issue for out times - but how can we tackle the problem?" The response to that question comes at the end of the book; it is concise and direct - longer than thirty-seconds but with the same impact. But as with the soundbites, the devil is in the details of execution and there is no encouraging indication that there is a growing leadership to move toward the complex steps of implementation.

This book is a must-read, whether you are a scientist concerned with water management, or a humanitarian searching for lessons and experience for others to live by.

In Heart of Dryness, James Workman has shown how the most prosaic of resources--water--can become a flashpoint for far-reaching political conflicts. Botswana is one of the few African nations that can be said to have had a prosperous post-colonial experience, but as Workman demonstrates, its success has been built, at least in part, on manipulation of scarce water resources. The losers have been the Bushmen, an ancient, nomadic tribe that has long lived a low-impact existence in the Kalahari, using age-old conservation methods. At a time when the problem of water scarcity is taking on increasing importance in the environmental debate, Heart of Dryness is not merely another warning--though it is full of alarming portents--but also a fascinating legal drama. The Bushmen end up taking the government to court, asking for an affirmation to the human right to water. Workman spent a great deal of time with the Bushmen during their long fight, and his book bursts with the kind of details and nuances that can only come from lived experience. If you've come to this subject because you're interested in environmental issues, this book will teach you about Africa; if you've picked it up because you're fascinated by Africa, as I am, this book will open your eyes to a budding--but with political will, addressable--world water crisis. And if you are merely a fan of well-told stories, full of vivid characters and surprising insights, Workman's masterful book will not disappoint. There's nothing dry about it.

This a book that raises conciousness on SO many levels! It is written straight from the heart of a person who has spent his career understanding water on a global level and people need to wake up and listen to his ideas before it is too late! The planet can exist without people just fine, it is people who cannot continue to exist without understanding how to coexist with the planet. Nature is stronger than we are and will not allow us to overtax our resources. We need to live within nature's boundaries or the earth will not be habitable to humans. The story is very well written and intriquing, almost a thriller, it just happens to be very real and on target for today's world. His suggestions on how to help our already very real problems with water are pragmatic and sensible. Everyone should read this book!

This readable, carefully documented little book seems essential reading for anyone not aware of the global water crisis--and important, fascinating reading for anyone who is.

Workman shares the example of the Bushmen, indigenous residents of Africa's dry Kalahari region, to illustrate one way that contemporary governments may cut off access to water in order to control independent-minded people. While he does share many of the Bushmen's strategies for thriving while using very little water themselves, the emphasis is on the role of water in power politics, both within a country and between nations.

For many Americans, this report may seem alarmist and distant. But, with 36 US states predicting water shortages in the very near future, last year's reports of droughts in Atlanta emerge as something more ominous than a freak, one-time occurence. As Workman explains, the warnings of "hand-wringing liberal environmentalists and social activists" are, this time, "amplified by nervous conservative, industrial interests, and development boosters preaching that the end of water [is:] nigh." Africa's Botswana, too, is not the only government willing to weaponize water by beseiging people it wants to move elsewhere. The US did the same thing, historically, to its own indigenous peoples, and has used the tactic in this century in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More essential than oil, more precious than gold or spices, water may be the resource that underlies power struggles in the years to come. That's a dark thought, because bystanders who can live without oil, gold, or spices will die without water.

Well-written, well-informed, and well-referenced, Heart of Dryness is also well worth reading.

My parents live near Lake Hartwell on the Georgia-South Carolina border and they have been learning the hard way about extended droughts. The lake has dropped significantly and retreated away from the trophy houses of successful Atlanta lawyers and doctors. Wells have gone dry. Streams are being dammed up for lawn and garden watering.

The Bushmen have a culture and lifestyle built around a lack of water, a lack which could be coming to many of us used to a post-industrial consumer culture. The author, James Workman, was able, as a trusted outsider, to follow the Bushmen struggles with water, with modernity, and with the Botswana government. The focus of the book is definitely the water, but there's a lot of interesting material on the fight over indigenous rights as well.

This is an enlightened and perceptive book of interest for both the treatment of Bushmen culture and their water management lessons. Though I have traveled a bit through Southern Africa (including Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe) I never had an opportunity to learn much about the local water conservation efforts, or the Bushmen culture. This book has fixed that.

HEART OF DRYNESS: HOW THE LAST BUSHMEN CAN HELP US ENDURE THE COMING AGE OF PERMANENT DROUGHT recounts the history of the Bushmen of the Kalahari and how they struggled with water shortages. The Bushmen are one of the world's most successful civilizations: their story and experiences with both drought and politics offer numerous social, political and adaptation lessons to a world increasingly linked to water availability.

First, in case anyone knows me personally, I must give a disclaimer that the opinions presented here are my own personal opinions and not those of any employer, past, present, or future.

This book goes back and forth between today's impending water shortages in the U.S. and around the world and the Bushmen's "fight" to remain in their homeland in Southern Africa. The claim is that we can learn something from the way the Bushmen lived...something relevant to our impending doomsday situation. However, I'm not sure exactly what that is. Regardless of the way the book might lack clarity on this point I give it five stars, because I think the plight of America's future is more accurately outlined here than it is in any media story or article I've seen lately. Many of the newspaper reporters would have you believe that we have an endless supply of potable water, however, the author's belief (based on results of various scientific studies that are cited throughout the book) seems to be more accurate, even though the author does have a tendency to write as if the sky is falling. (Who knows, maybe the sky really is falling.)

Having said all of this, I trust that you would enjoy reading about the Bushmen, and I believe you or anyone else would benefit from reading such an informative and relevant book.

As the author states throughout the book, many wars are the result of fights over water (not just oil). This type of scenario can and will likely continue to tear apart communities and even families, in the quest for survival. If you're considering this book, I highly recommend it.

[...]

James Workman (someone I've met over lunch) wrote an excellent book about the Bushmen in Botswana. What's the book have to do with water? Quite a lot more than I expected.

In Heart of Dryness: How the Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Oncoming Drought [book site Amazon], Workman (a journalist and former staffer at the World Commission on Dams) draws on five years of personal and professional observation of Botswana's Bushmen. With fluid, authoritative, informative prose, Workman describes how the government of Botswana (darling of aid organizations and recipient of much praise for good governance) used force, lies, and outrageous condescension to attempt to force the Bushmen from their traditional homeland and into "reserves." (For more on overbearing government, I recommend Seeing Like a State.)

The Bushmen (led by their wisewoman-in-chief, Qoroxloo) resisted the government, wanting only to stay in the land of their ancestors and live their traditional life. Workman gives an interesting and informative account of how these Bushmen are not only our genetic forebears (all genes lead back to this part of Africa), but also how the Bushmen live in the middle of a place with "no water." Their habits of millennia made him (and me!) rethink how we manage drinking, bathing, waste and environmental water. This isn't just anthropology -- this is resource economics as taught by a people who have lived sustainably for hundreds of generations! This excerpt captures some of these thoughts:

We may not like the rule of increasingly scarce water but at the same time we cannot escape it. And Qorolxoo's band demonstrated how to embrace that reality. Her fundamental rule of adaptation was not to organize and mobilize physical resources to meet expanding human wants, but rather to organize human behavior and society around constraints imposed by diminishing physical resources. To reiterate this book's thesis: we do not govern water; water governs us.

Workman also spends some time thinking about centralized water management. Although he veers off at one point into an anti-capitalist tirade (the book's only weakness), he later comes to this sensible observation:

All of us growing up in cities and suburbs have surrendered both our right and our responsibility to water to state-run or -regulated institutions. Most of these command-and-control structures are now teetering on the brink of physical failure or institutional collapse. The left wants trillions invested to improve all creaky public waterworks. The right wants to privatize them. Ideology aside, it matters little whether our taps and pipes and sewers can be traced back to a government utility or corporate venture if both operate as absolute top down centralized monopolies that impose involuntary and uncompetitive rates and quality about which we cannot, by definition, negotiate. Public or private utilities are neither good nor evil; but right now they still remove all real incentives and accountability to conserve water efficiently, while making us dependent on aging infrastructure, political fecklessness, wistful approaches, and unreliable supply in a radically changing climate.

Now that's what I've been saying (preach! preach!): What matters is not private vs. public ownership as much as community oversight and control.

Bottom Line: I give this book five stars -- it's got a great story, informative facts, useful insights, and real message: Traditional cultures can teach us how to live well and get off our unsustainable path to ruin.

Water wars must be on all our minds. It was even the premise of the last 007 film, "Quantum of Solace". Faced with a future where global warming, desertification, global banking conglomerates buying up water rights, and forced relocation paints a picture of a dystopian society where water becomes the new oil, (since OIL is the now the new GOLD), we all need to wonder what our options are. Move humanity to Mars? Not likely. Mass extinction, or nuclear wars waged by rogue states with limited nuclear capability? Let's hope not. Yet by 2030, half the world could be facing severe water shortages, so its time to face the problem, and get a handle on it NOW. As a first step, HEART OF DRYNESS discribes the way a desert people, in the heart of the Kalahari desert, have developed social and "primitive" technologies, in order to live in an area of the world so dry, it could not support most of humanity. James Workman's writing style is concise, yet engaging. He seems to jump from one topic to the next...at one time talking about human DNA dispersal, other times exploring the science of climatic change over the centuries, and how it affected where humanity could survive, or not. Sometimes, he talks about the indigineous rights of the Bushmen people of Botswana, and their forced relocation, sometimes, he talks about his misadventures traveling thru the Kalahari desert, researching this book. But at his best, he is talking about ONE WOMAN, Qoroxloo, a woman in her late 70s, who was one of the last of the "elders" from the Bushmen tribes, who knew just how their people, over the countless eons, were able to survive in a world that was without rivers, lakes, wells, or much else. When the government forced the last of the Bushmen living in the Kalahari desert to move to relocation camps, she refused, so she could stay close to the ancestors. It resulted in her death. But before she ended up on the autopsy table, for the most grim part of the book, we find out the secrets of the Kalahari culture. It offers a ray of HOPE to humanity, and the global warming and aridity that faces us. The Bushmen can CONSERVE WATER. They are also a people, who refused to FIGHT OVER WATER RIGHTS. In fact, they are a people who know what it means to die from dehydration, in order to allow the newest generation to have water. This strenght is seen as a weakness by the corperations and govenments that gladly allow a people's water to be taken from them, as a means of control. But true, alturistic sharing of water, is the only option that humanity might have, if we are to get thru what faces this planet. We can go without many amenities. BUT we cant live more than 3 days without water. The powers that be KNOW this, and are using it against the poorest of the poor. If you want to get rid of some people, get them fighting against each other, by removing them from their cultural heritage, introducing illnesses that they have no immunity towards, and allowing them to die from boredom and addiction. It has worked in the past, with the American indians, for example. IT might be employed wide scale in the future, perhaps is even now, in third world countries. THe control of water can control how indiginous people leave their homelands. BUT the hope that is carried in this book, is that there are ways we can learn from the "WISDOM OF THE ELDERS", to avoid the death of humanty, due to the greed of the global industrialists, mixed with the stupidity of governments who wont regulate what is going on, or work to stop the global warming which is baking the global.

Okay, this book might not be the most uplifting message, even if it DOES give you a message that its POSSIBLE to fight the system. However, the book paints portrait after portrait of corageous people, who stand up to governments, and corperations, and use science, sociology, climatology, and clear thinking, to understand that the prophecy of TOTAL DOOM need not destroy humanity, or our individual cultures. Even tho lots of different intellectual disciplines are explored in the book, far from making the book dull, it keeps HEART OF DRYNESS interesting to read. After a few pages about the droughts in the USA, it covers the history of other periods of drought thru history, and how this time is different. It talks about Bushmen linguistics (they have many many words for water), then turn to the DNA world map, which shows the Bushmen to be the oldest DNA left on earth. It explores African Eco-politics, then moves on to how the society of a tribe works. Coupled with LOTS of strong research, Workman brings his point home. (The book has 50 pages of footnotes.) Tho touching upon many areas of research, its not a textbook written for some college level sociology class about post apocalyptic water wars. Instead, its written for people with an interest in what legacy we leave on this earth, to our descendants. Its also a book that lets us see, how our abundant supply of water has been the motor behind the rapid population rise in the northern hemisphere, coupled with the water useage of industrialization, that's lead to the amazing amount of water usage we use today. (The writer claims that american indians used about 100 gallons of water a year per person, and today, we use over 3000 gallons per person per day in the USA.) ITs a book for EVERYBODY. People who own farms, people who own boats, and even those of us that drink water. Yes, its for EVERYBODY. Because, lets face it, we CANT survive what we face as a species, unless we face it TOGETHER. Like the Bushmen, we need the wisdom of the elders, and the knowledge of cutting edge science, to see the path to humanity's continued existence on earth, when the water runs out. If you care about this, then this book is a good place.

James Workman's Heart of Dryness will make you rethink your life, the universe and everything--particularly everything you've ever thought about water. Using the example of the Kalahari Bushmen in both their relationship to water and their political struggle concerning water, Workman weaves a narrative of vital importance to our global future. The subtitle references a "coming age of permanent drought" that has already arrived in many regions and will inevitably become rapidly worse as we add half again to our population.

Along the way the author points out that water is not merely the single most important ingredient for living beings, but is intrinsic to all human endeavors: farming, manufacturing, mining, transportation. The necessity of water has made control of the stuff a weapon of war for thousands of years, but now we have entered an era where water is the object of war and the source of dire international tension. The U.S. denies water to Mexico while refusing Canada the right to limit its south flowing rivers. Turkey's dams enrage Iraq and Iran. Israel seizes the West Bank to control three tributary rivers. China grabs Tibet to control the outflow from the Himalayas.

From our position of relative water wealth and waste, Workman turns our eyes to Quoroxloo, a Bushman elder, who taught her people the old ways. Some food is for eating, most food is for drinking. Desert bees fly in a straight line to water. That slender thread of foliage emerging from the sand is attached to a massive tuber rich in moisture. Children! Handle that ostrich egg full of water with utmost care, your family's life depends upon it! Through it all we watch her people fight a protracted legal battle with the government of Botswana and the diamond giant, DeBeers, with losses and wins in the struggle for human rights.

A towering achievement and a must-read. Follow the bees. Share your water.