From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, August 20
Al Jazeera — read the full story
"The Nile will not be ruled by treaties alone," Ethiopia said, and built the dam anyway. Al Jazeera reports that Egypt now faces three new Ethiopian dam projects — a renewed test of whether downstream nations can shape the water politics of shared rivers after failing to stop the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Each new barrier upstream means less flow into Egypt's farms and cities, and the tension between upstream builders and downstream dependents is hardening into something structural. Franklin gets the first word on this, then Emerson.
I have been reading of Egypt and Ethiopia on the Nile. The shape is familiar. He who holds the high ground holds the water , and no treaty signed in Cairo has ever made the river run uphill. In '69, Thomas Gilpin wrote to me of a Chesapeake-Delaware canal. Three routes surveyed. The best drew water from Elk River, seven miles back, to feed the locks at the summit... But the Maryland towns at the tide-head opposed it fiercely: the canal would steal their carriage trade. Local profit stood in the way of the common channel.
The water was there; the will was not. Ethiopia is the summit. Egypt is the tide-head. G.E.R.D. was the first lock; three more dams are the next. Cairo's diplomats may sign what papers they please , the striking distance belongs to Addis Ababa. When the cloud is full, it empties where it stands. I learned this with lightning.
A charged cloud, if high enough, passes in silence. Bring it within striking distance of a conductor, and the fluid quits it at once. The conductor does not negotiate. It receives. The Nile has no conductor. Only gravity. A man may dig his ditch and call it law. The river reads no statutes.
committee, but they are appointed soon to go upon it. The first of the above communications is too low down the Chesapeake and Delaware; the second is deep for digging and is very scant of water to supply locks; the third appears the best of all, as by a side canal or feeder, the…
St. John, labeled the “St. Croix.” This name conformed to the documentation Adams had brought with him. Even though none of the commissioners was sure which river was meant by “St. Croix,” they wrote the name into the second draft treaty. Adams also took the lead on another issue…
charg’d, is different according to the quantity of the fluid, the dimensions and form of the bodies themselves, and the state of the air between them. This distance, whatever it happens to be between any two bodies, is called their striking distance, as till they come within that…
and Dutch: For it was generally thought, that if the English were beaten, at so great a distance from home, very few would ever be able to reach their native country again; Hochstet being on the banks of the Danube, very far in Germany. Muschitoes, or Musketoes, a little venomous…
it discovered that the Ether grows denser in proportion to its Distance from the Sun Planets, &c. 3–13. The earth is surrounded by aether, causing gravitation towards it; aether pervades the “pores” of all bodies, its density in inverse ratio to the density of each body; hence we…
I read the cables from the Nile this morning. Three new dams rising where the Blue Nile tears from the Ethiopian highlands, and Cairo counts the days until the river thins. We have seen this arithmetic before , the upstream hand closing on the throat of the downstream world. In my study at the Old Manse I watched the Concord rise with spring melt and fall with August drought; the river does not negotiate. It obeys a law older than treaties. Ethiopia builds. Egypt pleads.
The G.E.R.D. stands complete, a wall of concrete across the gorge, and now three more. The engineers speak of gigawatts and acre-feet , the new science of Statistics making the wild calculable... But the river remembers what the ministers forget: that water seeks its level, and the soul of a people rises or falls with the flood. I wrote once that every master finds his mate. The Nile has met its master in the turbine... but the downstream nations are not...
yet beaten. A civilization that cannot feed itself from its own soil is already a colony, whatever flags fly over the ministry. The fellahin in the Delta know this in their fingers. They have felt the silt stop coming. They know the river is not a pipe to be valved. The flow cannot be owned. It can only be honored.
the dangers and glories of blue water."] [Footnote 4: Pole-star. Polaris is now the nearest conspicuous star to the north pole of the celestial equator. Owing to the motion of the pole of the celestial equator around that of the ecliptic, this star will in course of time recede f…
respects race, and not hybrids." "Every race has its own _habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over …
and the flying spume of the convulsed and agitated waters around that warring twain, rose in white clouds, and owing to the fierceness of the combat and the displacement of the waters around them, the Boyne on either hand beat her green margin with sudden and unusual billows, for…
other,--might easily believe that he and his country have seen their best days, and he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin. But, after this has been foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and government six per cents have not declined a quarter of a mill,…
botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look…
Al Jazeera carried this story. Egypt learned from G.E.R.D. that controlling the Nile's future means negotiating upstream, not blocking downstream — three new dams test whether that lesson stuck. That's Old News for today.