Water Communities: Volume 2

Water is the key to life. Water is the key to civilization. Water is the key to culture. Issues of water had been discussed by many authors in many contexts. Water issues are mostly linked to its quality and quantity, because both these issues impact the human lives. Therefore, for natural reasons, there are many researches on these two issues. When we look at the quality and quantity of water, it is seen that it is deeply rooted in people's culture. There are also several literature on the cultural issues, water usages, and anthropological aspects of water.

Any Solution to be effective must identify and meet the distinct needs of each region and every river basin and it is probably best found in the wisdom accumulated over millennia by local inhabitant like navigation channels.His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince of JapanEdo and water Transportation

The Japanese culture has many meanings and proverbs associated with the word “water.” “Water” could mean “clear,” “clean,” “beautiful,” and “life.” Water is valuable to people in that it is used for drinking, cooking, washing, and fishing. On the flip side, water is a cause of disaster. Thus, people use water for survival, as well as fight with water during disasters. Because of the many uses of water, people developed a rule for water utilization. This rule cultivated trust in the community. However, infrastructure development (e.g., water supply system, dikes, and road networks), the promotion of washing machines, and social advancement changed the role of the water area from just a flowing stream, which can be simply likened to a sewer, to an important component of infrastructure.

Along the 14th parallel, day and night oscillate exactly between predictable twelve hour divisions and months pass with little change in temperature barely affected by the earth's axial tilt. However between May and October, a shift in atmospheric currents brings monsoon rains from the Indonesian archipelago north to the mountain ranges ringing northern Thailand whose runoff feeds the Mae Nam Chao Phraya River Basin and Bangkok sprawling across its flat, silted tidal delta. Seasonal cycles of precipitation rather than temperature extremes of winter and summer bring rhythm to life just above the equator, putting into motion human cycles of planting, harvest and migration, as well as shaping Thai beliefs and rituals (Fig. 1).

In Asian monsoon region, rice production has been a key industry for two millennia. This region is blessed of fertile paddy on vast alluvial plain, which has been formulating through erosive/transport/depositional work of rivers around upthrusted high mountains due to orogenic movements of the earth. Rice harvest was the main taxable property since the first step of the human history, and rice production process has made fundamental land use in this region. Catching up with the development of water transport and commodity economy, paddy field covered wide and flat alluvial plains expecting more and more harvest. Rice was brought away for tax or as currency.

This chapter reflects on the approach and learning of an innovative project in Bangladesh that addresses drinking water security issues of the poor and marginal communities through participatory research, innovation, and social mobilization. The people, living in the most difficult geophysical areas, are facing severe crisis of drinking water and associated health risks due to remoteness, seasonality, social isolation, and poor institutional links. The geophysical constraints such as growing salinity, arsenic, flood and drought, and drawdown of groundwater tables have aggravated the problems. The existing government services hardly reach to the most unserved and needy people because of remoteness and lack of responsiveness of the government departments. A participatory action research project led to collective understanding about the severity of the problems and associated health risks and vulnerability. This again built greater awareness and motivated the poor, women, and marginal communities to establish links with key actors and take various local and collective actions toward ensuring their greater access to drinking water, sanitation facilities, and health services from the relevant government departments and development agencies.

In recent years, cooperation between the public and the private sectors has been emphasized in the field of river basin management, which includes flood control, water use, and river environmental conservation. During the 3rd World Water Forum held in 2003 in Kyoto, Osaka, and Shiga, Japan, participants from various countries had reported participatory approaches and joint initiatives between public and private sectors in river basin management. Through this forum, it is shown that this theme has been receiving attention in different parts of the world.

Sri Lanka, as an island located near the southern tip of India and the Asian Continent and in the core area of the South Asian Monsoon has developed its own unique forms of Hydraulic Civilization. Sri Lanka is covered with a network of thousands of man-made lakes and ponds, known locally as “tanks,” numbering more than 25,000. Some are in the functional mode and others still remaining abandoned type. Many are thousands of years old and almost all show a high degree of sophistication in their construction and design. Sri Lanka's tanks are fascinatingly distributed in the cascades of tanks one below the other conserving water and soil and most effectively, acting as buffers against droughts while giving due consideration to maintaining the ecosystem equilibrium.

A varied amalgamation of diverse people and ecosystems, India, since its traditions inherits a collective based governance concept, otherwise colloquially known as Panchayat. A Panchayat is fundamentally a group of few wise men in a village, who would periodically meet to take decisions on any issue of local concern or conflict. Although, similar collective decision-making mechanisms would exist in other forms in other parts of the globe too, but what make Panchayats unique in the country, or one can say the whole sub-continent here, is the avenue for a direct participation by the people. The individuals in a village would quintessentially elect five wise men within their community, thus in a way leading to their own responsibility towards the decisions affecting them. On similar lines of collectiveness transgresses the term Pani Panchayat. Pani is the commonly used Indian vernacular for “water.” With more than two-thirds of the country's population directly dependent on water for livelihoods through agriculture, and therefore in the economy, due emphasis has been given to water for agriculture in implementation of its policies. However, water's role in drinking and sanitation, industrial needs, and environment has been submitted to improvidence.

Urbanization is a mode of social progress in history. However, it repeats headway and fallback. In the lifetime of a person, he/she may watch only a certain phase of recovery from fallback as if it were a phase of progress. Such a social activity as evocation of sense of togetherness may seem to be so primitive that it might be practicable even in past communities. It is true of water quality issue of river and sea around us. Do you find the more innovative way that has never been seen? Otherwise, do you chant simply a slogan like “Clean the river more!”? Although water quality transition is merely a physical phenomenon, the community nearby may either worsen or improve the quality. The interaction between the quality transition and the action of community continues in a dynamic process. Community should progress, if possible, by managing the process appropriately. This chapter first illustrates a case of social remediation process for water quality issue of Horikawa river in Nagoya City, Japan. Then it considers the issues, concerns, activities, and moreover the relation of them over the water community. It finally refers to more strategic direction through simple mathematical formulation of social remediation process.

The northwestern China has been suffering from severe droughts. Water management has been considered of great importance throughout the history. For drought disaster reduction, water management technologies such as ridge planting, water conservancy projects, and Karez irrigation systems have been developed since ancient times. In this chapter, water cellar system is introduced as an example of indigenous knowledge for water management in Chinese rural communities.

With the literal translation of “New Village,” Kampong Baharu came into existence in 1899 with an area originally of about 223 acres located between the Klang and Batu rivers. It used to be a traditional water community, where people's lifestyles were entirely dependent on the river systems, and the main sources of livelihood were fishing and agriculture. It is believed that the idea to open the settlement was mooted by His Highness The Sultan of Selangor in 1897 to provide permanent settlement for the relocated Malays who were requested to leave, so as to make way for tin mining and related activities in the areas around adjoining Klang and Gombak rivers. Today this area is located around the Kuala Lumpur Mosque at Jalan Tun Perak. This event, however, is unrecorded in history (Personal Communication with MAS, 2007). It was reserved as the Malay Agricultural Settlement (M.A.S.), composed of nine communities then reduced to seven under a special autonomy of M.A.S. The total population of the area is around 45,000 with certain variation each year. To carry out the projects mentioned above, allotments of land were approved for the Malay people along with the condition that they develop the land through crop planting. Also, schools were built and amenities including roads and even irrigation water wheels were provided. M.A.S. was mandated to manage people's lives and activities and mediate between the people and government when conflict arises.

As part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research project that conducts research in metropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system, scientists have measured the effect of urbanization on entire watersheds, such as Gwynns Falls, from headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. In general, urbanization has buried many seasonal headwater streams and has contributed to the erosion of extant streams due to flashy urban storm runoff in what was a slow moving, beaver-dominated landscape (Elmore & Kaushal, 2008; Brush, 2009). This chapter fuses scientific ecological research in Baltimore with ethnographic evidence of human ecological technologies practiced in Northern Thailand. Anthropologist Shigeharu Tanabe studied one such ecological technology practiced for centuries in Chiang Mai called muang fai. More recently, a royally inspired community project of forest regeneration was successfully completed through small headwater dam building in nearby Lampang. The authors report on a recently conducted survey of the sites Tanabe documented in the 1970s and the results of the community reforestation project in relation to design proposals for three neighborhoods in Baltimore. The ecological research in Baltimore and the ethnographic research in Chiang Mai are integrated in this chapter to argue for new sustainable design practices in urban headwaters that combine ethnography, scientific monitoring, and design.

Rivers flowing through the land are a source of life. They have different importance and functions such as for drinking, sailing, irrigating crops, generating electricity, sightseeing, fishing, and so on. In addition, animals like amphibians, birds, and mammals also live and propagate near the river environment. Therefore, rivers are ecosystems for some animals and plants that are special, rare, or on the brink of extinction (Water Resources Agency, Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2006).

Water is a very common word for every human and a very common element for every life on earth. But underneath a very common meaning, a critical element and path for life being and existence lay placidly. Through various interactions between human and water, the intrinsic perceptive meaning is developed and varied in different place and time. It can mean life or death, strength or weakness, rich or poor, peace or conflict, and rise or fall. And this perceptive intrinsic meaning can be captured in one mind or extended to or shared with many thoughts. Sharing or extending from one to many or from an individual to an assemblage represent the evolution and development in complexity of relationship or social structure and function among all associates through space and time.