Download Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind AudioBook Free
Elixir spans five thousand years, from the beginnings of civilization to the parched North american Sunlight Belt of today. It is a story of human effort: our present-day relationship with this most essential reference has deep origins in the distant former, and every human culture has been molded by its relationship to normal water. For the initial hunter-gatherers, knowing where to find normal water was a matter of life and fatality; the "songlines" of Australia's Aborigines establish the whole surroundings as a map of sacred normal water sources. In lots of agricultural societies, from Africa to the rice domains of Bali, a communal "water idea" surrounds the important resource with cultural traditions that preserve fair access for people upstream and down. The sweeping narrative techniques from the Greeks and Romans, whose mighty acqueducts still normal water modern metropolitan areas, to China, where emperors marshaled armies of laborers in a centuries-long struggle, still ongoing today, to tame the country's powerful streams. Medieval Europe and then the Industrial Revolution helped bring ingenious new answers to normal water management---but, for the first time, turned normal water into a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited rather than natural make to be worshiped and husbanded. With the twentieth century, technology allowed the American desert to sparkle with swimming pools and lush golf courses---with little respect for sustainability. With his customary beauty and peerless scholarship or grant, Brian Fagan illustrates that days gone by demonstrates to us that technology for resolving one or another normal water problem are not enough. From a practical standpoint, we still live susceptible to the natural world. To resolve this crises of the future we might need to change this ethos of our ancestors.
