Water, water everywhere

The third of my life-altering historical technologies – irrigation . . . .

Modern irrigation canal

Agriculture does not exist without the presence of water.  Some areas are naturally supplied with plentiful water but if we are limited to what falls from the sky as rain or what runs through the landscape in the form of rivers and streams, only a fraction of the land would be used for agriculture.

A simple yet vital technology that has given humankind control over the land for millennia is the ability to irrigate.  In the simplest terms this involves moving water from one place to another by the means of a channel or pipe.  It’s the ability to artificially regulate how little or how much water is applied to the land.

Look how the people of Asia have created terraced fields to grow rice.  Look how people all over the world have drained low lying areas and tamed the flow of water to their fields with drainage channels and canals.  Look how otherwise arid desert has been transformed into arable land by piping in water, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.  Look how ingenious technologies that allow that water to be pumped uphill have opened up even more land to the benefits of irrigation.

Terraced irrigated field

It’s almost impossible to measure how this ability to control the flow of life-giving water to the land has shaped both the historical and modern world.

Another one of those foundation technologies that has enabled exploitation of land across the entire globe for thousands of years.