Virginia Mendoza: ‘We must unite against those who seek to monopolise water’

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People were told that the problem was the lack of rain. The source of the river was almost dried up, they were told, and that was why the crops were failing. But then they noticed that the maize on a large estate was growing lush and green. Water could be found for that. Citizens took to the streets to protest this unequal control over water.

A month earlier, riot police had violently dragged the residents of a centuries-old village from their rooftops. Their village was about to be wiped off the map by a reservoir. They, too, were protesting the control of water.

These stories unfolded in Riaño, in the Cantabrian Mountains, and in Villanueva de la Fuente in Castilla-La Mancha, in 1987, the year Virginia Mendoza was born, and the year in which she became fascinated, as a child, by both too little and too much water. This fascination eventually led to her nonfiction epic The Search for Water: A Human History of Thirst.

Without water, there are no humans. But the reverse is also true: without drought, there would be no humans either. Our ancestors proved best adapted to the arid conditions of East Africa. They evolved into Homo sapiens.

The rest of human history is a story of thirst, too. Some 2.8 million years after our species first began walking upright, drought once again became a decisive force in East Africa. It set the stage for the “Out of Africa” migration. Homo sapiens spread across the planet, took up agriculture, founded settlements such as Jericho, and eventually built great civilizations along the world’s rivers, from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Indus and the Yangtze.

Rethinking Ourselves as a Species

Mendoza shows that our ability to think collectively and make decisions together has helped us weather climate change in the past. Who we are today is, in part, the result of the ways humanity has adapted to it. So why shouldn’t we be able to do it again? Why have we become so much less capable of making decisions collectively?

“Because humanity has fallen victim to a crisis that, without fully realising it, we helped create,” Mendoza says. “Collective decision-making is our survival mechanism. We need it today more than ever, yet at the same time it has become harder to achieve.”

“The human community used to be much smaller, which made it easier to reach decisions together. Now billions of people, scattered across the planet, need to recognise that they are facing the same problem. We need to learn to think as a species again.”

In smaller communities, people are still capable of thinking collectively, Mendoza says. “It’s interesting to see how people respond to disasters. Last year, Spain experienced a nationwide power cut. There was no electricity, no light. People went out into the streets, met their neighbours and shared what they had.”

‘Drought is not purely a natural phenomenon. Those in power help determine its causes and consequences. And victims can also find solutions.’

“While writing this book, I discovered that the communities that survived historical droughts were precisely those that understood the importance of cooperation.” That is why Mendoza refuses to give up on her faith in Homo sapiens. “If I have to choose between a naïve view of humanity, based on trust, and one based on distrust, I choose trust. Until science proves otherwise.”

“After interviewing people in my village, I broadened my perspective. I began looking at other cultures and other periods in history. I discovered that rain dances serve much the same purpose as the processions in honour of the saints that my grandmother took part in. It’s not really about believing that a saint can make it rain. It’s about sharing our fears, being part of something larger than ourselves, seeking a connection with that something, and with one another.”

For Mendoza, then, religion is about connection. And rituals are a form of collective consciousness that we need. “When you realise that human beings have shared suffering for thousands of years, it becomes easier to reconnect with that collective consciousness,” she says. “And with hope.”

Who Benefits?

Controlling nature is a way of projecting power. Under General Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain, the construction of dams became a symbol of progress and state power. Socialism, too, promised prosperity through dam building.

“Many Spanish dams were neither necessary nor proportionate,” Mendoza says. “A large share of the water from the reservoirs that swallowed up villages in Aragón was channelled to industry in Barcelona, to projects presented as serving the public interest. So the real questions are: Where does that energy go? Who benefits from it? What do you sacrifice for it? And to what end?”

“On television, people were shown propaganda. Ribbons were cut at ceremonies celebrating major infrastructure projects. But nobody talked about the people who had been forcibly driven from their homes. Near where I live, there was a village where, one night, the water began rising while people were asleep. Someone told me that at three in the morning, he had to carry the bed of a sick woman out onto a balcony.”

“We owe a debt to the people who were forced to leave their homes, to those who watched their family graves disappear beneath the water. Sometimes the remains were moved to a new cemetery, but often even that didn’t happen. I cannot imagine how painful that must have been.”

Scarcity

We also need to keep reminding ourselves that we are heading into an era of water scarcity. “Humanity has become what it is through scarcity and adversity. Scarcity and ingenuity go hand in hand,” Mendoza explains. “Throughout history, human beings have learned to value what they lack, or what is in short supply. But in today’s world of abundance, we have lost touch with the scarcity that once shaped us.”

“We have reached a point where we can no longer fully avoid drought. Yet we continue to use water as though we have forgotten what is happening. And it is not just ordinary people who forget; those in power, the people who are in a position to act before it is too late, do too. We forget history, and we struggle to think about the future. That is why we need to keep telling these stories and repeating these lessons.”