Tim Smedley’s The Last Drop is a smouldering indictment of the self-inflicted wounds we’re causing ourselves and Earth by careless exploitation of water
Review by Mark Rowe
When will we finally start caring about water and the rather important role it plays in our lives? Four billion people endure severe water scarcity for at least one month a year. Not enough to stir you into action? In 2017, the water supply for Cape Town – population four million – was turned off and residents had to queue at standpipes. That event became known as ‘Day Zero’. Tim Smedley’s sometimes angry, always informed book is a smouldering indictment of the self-inflicted water wounds we’re causing ourselves and our planet. Throughout hangs the spectre of the standpipe awaiting us all unless we change tack now.
Smedley is sensitive to the risks of ranting at a wall. Facts, anecdotes, pitfalls, mistakes, solutions, some of them mindboggling and entertaining, are narrated in the tone of a convivial foreign correspondent. We find the author in situ, first at the Karameh Dam in Jordan, built in one of the driest valleys on the planet, absurdly, on the whim of a minister’s son. He then shimmies to Lake Mead, the USA’s largest reservoir, where water levels have dropped by 43 metres over 20 years of drought and left tide marks ‘like suds on an emptying tub’.
The first half of the book, Running Dry, outlines the disturbing problems we’ve created for ourselves. But climate change also means water change, so extremes of drought and torrential cloudbursts are now profoundly embedded into nature’s pipework. The traditional expectation that ‘just one good winter’ will top water levels up again has itself evaporated.
Anyone can turn the taps on. India has set a five-year target to provide tap water connections to every household in the country by 2024 and isn’t far off course; but the programme isn’t integrated with resources, which are drying up. The difficult bit, it turns out, is avoiding the knock-on effect of taps being turned off somewhere else.
As became obvious during last summer’s heatwave, the UK doesn’t have the option of smugly sitting climate change out from the sidelines. England in particular happens to suffer from most global water problems: scarcity, over-abstraction, pollution, underinvestment, regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct. Elevated nitrogen concentrations affect groundwater and rivers across half of England. Smedley was already onto the scandal of how sewage has overwhelmed Britain’s waterways, his research conducted well before the issue plopped into the national consciousness in 2022. The image of surreal beauty with which he conflates flows of human effluent with an aesthetically pleasing chocolate drinking fountain is likely to linger long after you’ve put down this book.
More upliftingly, the second half, Turning the Taps, offers solutions that at least give the reader a reason to get out of bed the day after finishing this book (a personal admission: as the author of Geographical’s Dossier series, I found the problems around water shortages, and how easily avoidable most of them are, the most flattening, depressing theme I’ve tackled for the magazine).
Examples abound of innovation, many of which involve humans just stepping back and thinking twice rather than ploughing ahead with infrastructure projects whose raison d’être is big profits for private companies. We’re reminded how nature-based solutions are often just waiting for the call: we don’t need to rip up our cities and start again, just incorporate nature-based solutions such as rural and semi-urban floodplains. Planting reedbeds provides filtration for grey water to be used for farming; as in some aid sectors, direct payment and loans can help the poorest gain access to affordable fresh water and incentivise utilities to conserve it. In the UK and elsewhere, beavers are nature’s hard-hat engineers, providing groundwater storage, improving water quality and flood prevention. Water-footprint labels on food and clothing may generate awareness in the consumerist Global North. Water wastage needs to become socially unacceptable, on a par with drink driving or blowing smoke in the face of a baby.
And then there’s New Water, a euphemism with which we’re all likely to become familiar over time. If you’ve visited Singapore, you’ve already drunk it: the country has pioneered technology that goes beyond the established methods of recycling sewage into drinking water. As Smedley records: ‘Polishing a turd to the extent you can drink it direct – that’s a whole other story.’ Singapore got there in 2003, using breakthrough microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet disinfection. This achievement was the culmination of a water-supply policy that had evolved since 1961, when the tropical city-state, despite daily inundation, found itself without a single drop of drinking water sourced from within its own borders. The experience of reaching Day Zero (long before Cape Town did) tied water security and national security together.
What’s refreshingly unusual for a book such as this is the author’s self-awareness: he’s uncomfortable, knowing that he’s part of the problem. As he bemusedly puts it: ‘I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence… I am living on borrowed time, borrowed water. Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop.’ If it doesn’t, Day Zero is coming to a street near you.
