10 ms·

Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water

176 points by midnightcity 5y ago

nikkinana 5y ago
Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.
- acdha 5y ago
  Can you explain where the article is wrong in saying that Peru has limited fresh water supplies? After that, explain “everywhere” including arid and desert regions. Please cite sources and your level of expertise.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    Troll
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    The fact is that water is plentiful in some areas while insufficient in others (and the areas can change over time), but so fucking what - you cannot transport it efficiently enough. Well, sometimes you can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River
    - acdha 5y ago
      Oh, as a native Southern Californian I completely understand this. It’s amazing to me that anyone can claim this is no big deal like there aren’t billions of dollars at stake in agriculture and industrial usage.
      - H8crilA 5y ago
        Yeah, not to mention just how old this problem is. Ever heard of Roman aqueducts? :)
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Is this the comment section of a news site or are you trying to grade a university-level student essay?
    - acdha 5y ago
      Asking someone to support very broad claims isn't “university-level” and in this case, it's something which would be world-changing if true.
      - tomc1985 5y ago
        The manner in which it was asked was very poor.
        acdha 5y ago
        Poor, or incompatible with your personal political beliefs? The person I was responding to is a science denier who made a claim he couldn’t back up which is incompatible with most of human experience. It’s unclear why you are so committed to their defense?
        tomc1985 5y ago
        Good lord, now you're accusing me of defending the guy? Cool it.
        acdha 5y ago
        Okay, so what was your goal? I asked him to explain a provocative take contradicting the article. This didn’t seem especially outlandish, but you reacted as if explaining what he meant was some kind of extraordinary burden.
- imagine99 5y ago
  Have you considered, as a service to humanity or yourself, to teach and share how this could be done "properly"? You clearly appear to have some knowledge of techniques that, while you think them obvious, other people don't seem to understand (not even on HN, as the downvotes indicate). At the same time, these techniques could solve a lot of issues including people losing their livelihoods, mass migration, devastation or even wars. So don't you think sharing how to do it would be worth infinitely more than your one-liner comment?
koheripbal 5y ago
TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season. The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure. What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  The linked paper > Infiltrated water is retained for an average of 45 d before resurfacing, confirming the system’s ability to contribute to dry-season flows. We estimate that upscaling the system to the source-water areas of the city of Lima can potentially delay 99 × 106 m3 yr−1 of streamflow and increase dry-season flows by 7.5% on average, which may provide a critical complement to conventional engineering solutions for water security. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    I can't see the paper, but there is some interesting technical details in the supplementary data https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41893-019-0307-1/MediaObjects/41893_2019_307_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs418... In page 15, table 2 they show that they put some Eosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosin upstream before the water entered the earth, and then they collected water from the springs downstream a few weeks later and measure how much Eosin was there, and used this to estimate how long the water was stored.
    - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
      I didn't have time to read the paper, but here is the pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential.pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential...
    - qubidt 5y ago
vanderZwan 5y ago
I can't speak for Peru specifically, but natural ecosystems play a huge role in absorbing and holding on to rain water, ensuring it doesn't all just flow back into the sea. This has been known for ages - I remember a friend who did environmental sciences telling me stories of cities in developing countries that cut all the nearby forests and as a side-effect also ruined their water supply. So with that in mind I'm a bit surprised at the skepticism on display here.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  I saw an interesting farmer presentation on YouTube[1] the other day where he eventually starts talking about how cover crops have improved his land's ability to absorb and retain water. He even includes photos contrasting his neighbor's monoculture fields with his during rain storms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
- beambot 5y ago
  Too true. For example, compare the 2-meter long root ecosystem of prairie grass that holds water exceptionally well to that of wheat: https://images.app.goo.gl/PHmVUNRwwBg8oUKv7 https://images.app.goo.gl/PHmVUNRwwBg8oUKv7
- jhayward 5y ago
  There is a really interesting example of the role of the surface vegetation for groundwater in Bamberger Ranch[1] in Central Texas. Central Texas was massively overgrazed by cattle in the 1800's and 1900's, and the ecosystem was completely transformed from prairie grass dominant to cedar and mesquite dominant vegetation. This resulted in a drastic loss of groundwater and utterly transformed the ecosystem. David Bamberger restored 5,500 acres to close to original condition and the results are amazing. [1] https://bambergerranch.org/ https://bambergerranch.org/
  - mackrevinack 5y ago
    there's a good video about that ranch in youtube as well https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE
themanmaran 5y ago
Very long winded. The actual technique is only described about 2/3s the way through. They're using canals to divert water into well draining soil. "They use water canals called amunas – a Quechua word meaning "to retain" – to divert wet-season flows from mountain streams and route them to natural infiltration basins." "Because the water moves more slowly underground as it travels through gravel and soil, it emerges downslope from springs months later, when the comuneros collect it to water their crops."
- hinkley 5y ago
  Ground storage of fresh water is a simple technique that people seem to resist. 'Controversial' is not the right word but in the permaculture community there is a definite divide between people who embrace it and those who resist. The interactions are... frustrating. There's also a relationship between water, soil health and climate change. The rule of thumb is that an acre of land can store an additional 20k gallons of water by increasing the soil carbon by 1% (of overall fraction, not relative to previous carbon levels, so in most real world cases that may involve increasing carbon by 10-25%).
  - naravara 5y ago
    What arguments do people have for resisting it?
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Some people think 'store water' and immediately jump to cisterns, or above-ground storage tanks. You simply cannot store a useful amount of water above ground, and exposing it to light and air (and thus mosquitoes) is a whole other set of problems. Some people do it anyway, others get very upset about what they see as wasted time and resources. Storing water [this way] is fundamentally about reserving the right to be wrong about where water 'needs to be' on your property, and I think without a way to correct it they feel like their hands are tied. The person I know who is loudest against this strategy is also very philosophical about not fighting nature. If a tree is happy, great. If it's not happy, then it wasn't meant to be. Let it go, get over the sunk cost, and try something else. To his thinking, trying things is cheap, forcing things is expensive (and arrogant).
menrris 5y ago
They should probably make a sustainable method other than an old tradition as our planet will inevitably go hotter.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Stashing water underground is a great strategy for a hotter earth. See also the great stepwells of India. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s not effective and sustainable.
john579 5y ago
Peru is also reviving other ancient practices to obtain water, such as the rain dance.
aaron695 5y ago
Africa has been using sand dams and India, Johad's for this. You just slow the water down and save it in the ground. This is fine for small scale farmers and communities and seems to work. On a larger scale - Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) map (It includes a lot of models but also active sites) https://ggis.un-igrac.org/view/marportal https://ggis.un-igrac.org/view/marportal This article is poor. Talking about Lima was silly and it as usual avoids the actual reason water is scarce, high populations with high use techniques. And where's the pictures, a big part of the amunas is they look awesome, like England and their stone walls lets not pretend it's the most efficient way of doing it. They look cool. That's a important part of communities.
KaiserPro 5y ago
tldr: Diverting streams to go into different places increases the dwell time of the water by 45 days. when you have a rigid dry season, keeping the streams running for an extra 45 days is absolutely fucking huge. The clever part is that over the years the locals have managed to find the best place to divert water so it goes into springs that feed streams. its a similar idea to a Johad, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johad which traps water for a number of days, increasing the dwell time and making the place wetter. The issue with Johads is that they can be a magnet for mosquitos. Johads differ in that they force the water into the soil rather than aquifers. In LA, everything is done to make sure the water yeets into the sea as quick as possible. That water that would have hung around is replaced with the water from the LA aqueduct and the like. THe place gets drier, and hotter. I would wager, but can't assert that this water mismanagement is causing a large part of the drought in that area.
- JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
  > In LA, everything is done to make sure the water yeets into the sea as quick as possible. The infrastructure bill may change that [0]: "Also, the money could fund stormwater capture and reuse projects, like the ones that filter rainwater into underground aquifers rather than let it flow into the ocean." Anyone know how likely this actually is? [0] https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/socal-could-get-billions-for-infrastructure-projects-these-are-los-angeles-county-and-more-improvements?fbclid=IwAR1snlvNaDjXR6MdTkFp1TtHvNxllfZcBogWtnq49mfJifxgpFuJoSp0ZQg https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/socal-could-get-b...
  - kjkjadksj 5y ago
    Unlikely since it rains so few times the cost to benefit ratio is terrible. Instead the city has been treating wastewater and using that constant source of greywater to irrigate public parks and recharge aquifers.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Especially if you already use plants adapted to a dry season. There's a huge difference between surviving 50 days without rain and being able to survive 90 days without rain.
slownews45 5y ago
What's interesting is water management historically was a huge area of research and work for cultures. But if you look at a place like CA, despite supposed water shortages - there are very very few water projects to increase for example storage capacity. I'd be curious in last 10 years how much capacity has come online vs population growth. I mention supposed shortages because it's really a shortage of free or near free water. We have passed a lot of bonds for water projects - with little to show for some reason. Not at all close to the details, but would be curious to know what is going on.
- vidanay 5y ago
  I think this is derivative of humans inability to comprehend large numbers. Do I have enough water for me and my family? Yes, I'm not thirsty and my crops look fine. Do we have enough water for 10 billion people for the next 150 years? We have no clue.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    What's funny though is that folks are paying $5 for a tiny water bottle in an airport. They are rationing URBAN water use (where water is relatively insanely expensive already). Even in CA where we have droughts - the amount of water used in ag / industrial is measured in ACRE FEET. And the cost is in pennies to dollars per ACRE FOOT. The scale is just totally different than your bottle of water or glass of water. You go to a restaurant "due to water shortage we aren't serving water"?? We've had insane population growth here. Last damns were in like 71 and maybe 79? So it's been 40+ years with no new reservoirs? https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20140829_083001_SJM-DAMS-0825-90.jpg https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20140... You'd better be working on desalination or maybe a small tax on water for all users (could be TINY) or something because otherwise yeah, you are going to have serious water problems. We've doubled population since 71. You can't do that without doing something around reservoirs, water use in ag / industrial or supply improvements.
seltzered_ 5y ago
Okay, the article references "Potential contributions of pre-Inca infiltration infrastructure to Andean water security" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 , https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0307-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0307-1 ) The problem is it could just be used just to extract more water rather than be part of a broader reforestation effort & cultural change around it's relationship to water. Joe Brewer criticized this a couple years ago: https://twitter.com/cognitivepolicy/status/1212533202964926464 https://twitter.com/cognitivepolicy/status/12125332029649264...
wolverine876 5y ago
For a more scientific, technical discussion, see this paper, linked in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 Available here: http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential.pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential... (Thanks abdullahkhalids for finding the latter link; I'm just posting it here for more visibility.)
foxhop 5y ago
I'm not sure why it's only happening in Peru, we should be doing this work world wide. I have similar water capturing techniques at my house where I redirect road runoff into a gentle stream and allow it to infiltrate my landscape, watering Maple, Apple, Plums trees, hydrating the landscape to reduce effects of multi-month droughts: Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQS4CN_4OY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQS4CN_4OY
- kjkjadksj 5y ago
  Road runoff is usually pretty polluted in cities and some places have laws against capturing rainwater to protect downstream resources.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    He doesn't say where he lives. While I agree with you that if he indeed lives in a place where the "road runoff" is nasty he should be careful, I really can't see why capturing rainwater should be banned. Of course "some places" is very vague so there might be good reasons but you'd have to provide much more context for me to believe that it's a good idea to prevent it. If my house wasn't where it is, the ground on which it is built would absorb that water. Now I capture it and put it on my veggies or use it to flush the toilet which ends up going out to the septic drain field on the lwab and then it filters further down. I don't see any issues with that.
    - kjkjadksj 5y ago
      The issues with water capture is that you are basically building an illegal reservoir and not necessarily returning the water as it were if it just hit the ground. You might flush your toilet and think all is fine, but maybe now the creek in your back yard goes dry a week sooner in the year, and less tadpoles are able to be born or some other unforseen ecological effect. Or maybe downstream water users don’t get what they expect out of the watershed anymore due to illegal collecting.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
Water retention needs to be made a bigger issue globally. Others eluded to the fact that what is effectively the draining of the water cycle in CA is a main cause of CA's water/fire problems, but that is also the problem in places like central Europe where the straightening of the rivers during industrialization (19th C.) is and has essentially been "draining the swamp" of the central European water cycle. It's something I have had the hardest time getting people to understand. The various straightened rivers all throughout Europe that have far less retention capacity than in the past, are essentially drainage canals that are sucking the whole of the central European region dry of water, which will only compound problems. There are a couple things going on that are fooling people into an illusion that everything being fine, but it is happening and it is causing the low rainfalls, the low snow packs, and the low cloud cover that increases temperatures that are all perceived as/blamed on global warming. If Europeans don't stop the draining of the continent, the problems and heat will only accelerate. Just alone in order to prevent the necessity of using climate control systems that devour energy should be enough of an argument to try to restore the cloud cover and rainfalls that could lower temperatures to what they were like before the rivers were straightened and evaporation also caused more winds and breezes.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Interesting. As a European (dutch even, so more water interested) I would love to learn more. I often felt that, in agriculture we (dutchies) have over engineered for short term profits. I wonder if the same holds for our water engineering.
- meristohm 5y ago
  North America used to be home to so many more beavers than at present. Europe, too? Ben Goldfarb wrote Eager, about beavers and their place in a resilient ecosystem: https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-life-of-beavers-and-why-they-matter/ https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-l...
wolverine876 5y ago
The amunas are channels that slow the movement of water from mountain streams to farmers; "the diverted water spends between two weeks to eight months underground, with an average delay of 45 days". As far as I can tell, they are used to retain water from the wet season into the dry season. How is that advantageous over using water storage at or near the endpoints? Perhaps ancient farmers didn't the ability to create underground storage, but how are amunas preferable now? I imagine there's a good answer, but if it's in the article I overlooked it.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Storing water in ponds has to deal with evaporation, algae growth etc. Also expensive to build. Storing water in tanks means buying and maintaining something as well. I think the point here is the "low tech, thousands of years old and it works" part. Underground water doesn't evaporate or grow nasty stuff. You do have to have the right terrain I suppose but where you do this sounds awesome. The ground will actually even help with filtering out many nasties.
- appleflaxen 5y ago
  It's a capacity issue. The bandwidth of the amunas is enormous compared to a reservoir.
colochef 5y ago
If you are into this, you have to check all the different systems found in Lo Tek. Can't recommend this enough. https://lampoonmagazine.com/lo-tek-sustainable-resilient-infrastructure/ https://lampoonmagazine.com/lo-tek-sustainable-resilient-inf... https://longnow.org/seminars/02020/sep/15/design-radical-indigenism/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02020/sep/15/design-radical-ind...
- syntaxing 5y ago
  The first link is NSFW as a headsup
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    If that link is NSFW your work isn't safe. OH MY GAWD! ZKIN! NEKKID!
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Persistently pursuing peak performance by preaching puritanic prudence? BABBITS!
ncmncm 5y ago
It is nice to see acknowledgement that there was any activity at all in Peru prior to the Incas. Who knows, those earlier people, probably already speaking Quechua, might even have built this or that monumental structure, too, instead of waiting around for the Incas to come along and build everything, last-minute, just in time for the Spaniards to find.

176 points by midnightcity 5y ago

Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.

acdha 5y ago
Can you explain where the article is wrong in saying that Peru has limited fresh water supplies? After that, explain “everywhere” including arid and desert regions. Please cite sources and your level of expertise.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  Troll
- H8crilA 5y ago
  The fact is that water is plentiful in some areas while insufficient in others (and the areas can change over time), but so fucking what - you cannot transport it efficiently enough. Well, sometimes you can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River
  - acdha 5y ago
    Oh, as a native Southern Californian I completely understand this. It’s amazing to me that anyone can claim this is no big deal like there aren’t billions of dollars at stake in agriculture and industrial usage.
    - H8crilA 5y ago
      Yeah, not to mention just how old this problem is. Ever heard of Roman aqueducts? :)
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Is this the comment section of a news site or are you trying to grade a university-level student essay?
  - acdha 5y ago
    Asking someone to support very broad claims isn't “university-level” and in this case, it's something which would be world-changing if true.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      The manner in which it was asked was very poor.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Poor, or incompatible with your personal political beliefs? The person I was responding to is a science denier who made a claim he couldn’t back up which is incompatible with most of human experience. It’s unclear why you are so committed to their defense?
        tomc1985 5y ago
        Good lord, now you're accusing me of defending the guy? Cool it.
        acdha 5y ago
        Okay, so what was your goal? I asked him to explain a provocative take contradicting the article. This didn’t seem especially outlandish, but you reacted as if explaining what he meant was some kind of extraordinary burden.
imagine99 5y ago
Have you considered, as a service to humanity or yourself, to teach and share how this could be done "properly"? You clearly appear to have some knowledge of techniques that, while you think them obvious, other people don't seem to understand (not even on HN, as the downvotes indicate). At the same time, these techniques could solve a lot of issues including people losing their livelihoods, mass migration, devastation or even wars. So don't you think sharing how to do it would be worth infinitely more than your one-liner comment?

koheripbal 5y ago

TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season. The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure. What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.

abdullahkhalids 5y ago
The linked paper > Infiltrated water is retained for an average of 45 d before resurfacing, confirming the system’s ability to contribute to dry-season flows. We estimate that upscaling the system to the source-water areas of the city of Lima can potentially delay 99 × 106 m3 yr−1 of streamflow and increase dry-season flows by 7.5% on average, which may provide a critical complement to conventional engineering solutions for water security. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1
- gus_massa 5y ago
  I can't see the paper, but there is some interesting technical details in the supplementary data https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41893-019-0307-1/MediaObjects/41893_2019_307_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs418... In page 15, table 2 they show that they put some Eosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosin upstream before the water entered the earth, and then they collected water from the springs downstream a few weeks later and measure how much Eosin was there, and used this to estimate how long the water was stored.
  - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
    I didn't have time to read the paper, but here is the pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential.pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential...
  - qubidt 5y ago

vanderZwan 5y ago

I can't speak for Peru specifically, but natural ecosystems play a huge role in absorbing and holding on to rain water, ensuring it doesn't all just flow back into the sea. This has been known for ages - I remember a friend who did environmental sciences telling me stories of cities in developing countries that cut all the nearby forests and as a side-effect also ruined their water supply. So with that in mind I'm a bit surprised at the skepticism on display here.

droopyEyelids 5y ago
I saw an interesting farmer presentation on YouTube[1] the other day where he eventually starts talking about how cover crops have improved his land's ability to absorb and retain water. He even includes photos contrasting his neighbor's monoculture fields with his during rain storms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
beambot 5y ago
Too true. For example, compare the 2-meter long root ecosystem of prairie grass that holds water exceptionally well to that of wheat: https://images.app.goo.gl/PHmVUNRwwBg8oUKv7 https://images.app.goo.gl/PHmVUNRwwBg8oUKv7
jhayward 5y ago
There is a really interesting example of the role of the surface vegetation for groundwater in Bamberger Ranch[1] in Central Texas. Central Texas was massively overgrazed by cattle in the 1800's and 1900's, and the ecosystem was completely transformed from prairie grass dominant to cedar and mesquite dominant vegetation. This resulted in a drastic loss of groundwater and utterly transformed the ecosystem. David Bamberger restored 5,500 acres to close to original condition and the results are amazing. [1] https://bambergerranch.org/ https://bambergerranch.org/
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  there's a good video about that ranch in youtube as well https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE

themanmaran 5y ago

Very long winded. The actual technique is only described about 2/3s the way through. They're using canals to divert water into well draining soil. "They use water canals called amunas – a Quechua word meaning "to retain" – to divert wet-season flows from mountain streams and route them to natural infiltration basins." "Because the water moves more slowly underground as it travels through gravel and soil, it emerges downslope from springs months later, when the comuneros collect it to water their crops."

hinkley 5y ago
Ground storage of fresh water is a simple technique that people seem to resist. 'Controversial' is not the right word but in the permaculture community there is a definite divide between people who embrace it and those who resist. The interactions are... frustrating. There's also a relationship between water, soil health and climate change. The rule of thumb is that an acre of land can store an additional 20k gallons of water by increasing the soil carbon by 1% (of overall fraction, not relative to previous carbon levels, so in most real world cases that may involve increasing carbon by 10-25%).
- naravara 5y ago
  What arguments do people have for resisting it?
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Some people think 'store water' and immediately jump to cisterns, or above-ground storage tanks. You simply cannot store a useful amount of water above ground, and exposing it to light and air (and thus mosquitoes) is a whole other set of problems. Some people do it anyway, others get very upset about what they see as wasted time and resources. Storing water [this way] is fundamentally about reserving the right to be wrong about where water 'needs to be' on your property, and I think without a way to correct it they feel like their hands are tied. The person I know who is loudest against this strategy is also very philosophical about not fighting nature. If a tree is happy, great. If it's not happy, then it wasn't meant to be. Let it go, get over the sunk cost, and try something else. To his thinking, trying things is cheap, forcing things is expensive (and arrogant).

menrris 5y ago

They should probably make a sustainable method other than an old tradition as our planet will inevitably go hotter.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Stashing water underground is a great strategy for a hotter earth. See also the great stepwells of India. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s not effective and sustainable.

john579 5y ago

Peru is also reviving other ancient practices to obtain water, such as the rain dance.

aaron695 5y ago

Africa has been using sand dams and India, Johad's for this. You just slow the water down and save it in the ground. This is fine for small scale farmers and communities and seems to work. On a larger scale - Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) map (It includes a lot of models but also active sites) https://ggis.un-igrac.org/view/marportal https://ggis.un-igrac.org/view/marportal This article is poor. Talking about Lima was silly and it as usual avoids the actual reason water is scarce, high populations with high use techniques. And where's the pictures, a big part of the amunas is they look awesome, like England and their stone walls lets not pretend it's the most efficient way of doing it. They look cool. That's a important part of communities.

KaiserPro 5y ago

tldr: Diverting streams to go into different places increases the dwell time of the water by 45 days. when you have a rigid dry season, keeping the streams running for an extra 45 days is absolutely fucking huge. The clever part is that over the years the locals have managed to find the best place to divert water so it goes into springs that feed streams. its a similar idea to a Johad, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johad which traps water for a number of days, increasing the dwell time and making the place wetter. The issue with Johads is that they can be a magnet for mosquitos. Johads differ in that they force the water into the soil rather than aquifers. In LA, everything is done to make sure the water yeets into the sea as quick as possible. That water that would have hung around is replaced with the water from the LA aqueduct and the like. THe place gets drier, and hotter. I would wager, but can't assert that this water mismanagement is causing a large part of the drought in that area.

JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
> In LA, everything is done to make sure the water yeets into the sea as quick as possible. The infrastructure bill may change that [0]: "Also, the money could fund stormwater capture and reuse projects, like the ones that filter rainwater into underground aquifers rather than let it flow into the ocean." Anyone know how likely this actually is? [0] https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/socal-could-get-billions-for-infrastructure-projects-these-are-los-angeles-county-and-more-improvements?fbclid=IwAR1snlvNaDjXR6MdTkFp1TtHvNxllfZcBogWtnq49mfJifxgpFuJoSp0ZQg https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/socal-could-get-b...
- kjkjadksj 5y ago
  Unlikely since it rains so few times the cost to benefit ratio is terrible. Instead the city has been treating wastewater and using that constant source of greywater to irrigate public parks and recharge aquifers.
hinkley 5y ago
Especially if you already use plants adapted to a dry season. There's a huge difference between surviving 50 days without rain and being able to survive 90 days without rain.

slownews45 5y ago

What's interesting is water management historically was a huge area of research and work for cultures. But if you look at a place like CA, despite supposed water shortages - there are very very few water projects to increase for example storage capacity. I'd be curious in last 10 years how much capacity has come online vs population growth. I mention supposed shortages because it's really a shortage of free or near free water. We have passed a lot of bonds for water projects - with little to show for some reason. Not at all close to the details, but would be curious to know what is going on.

vidanay 5y ago
I think this is derivative of humans inability to comprehend large numbers. Do I have enough water for me and my family? Yes, I'm not thirsty and my crops look fine. Do we have enough water for 10 billion people for the next 150 years? We have no clue.
- slownews45 5y ago
  What's funny though is that folks are paying $5 for a tiny water bottle in an airport. They are rationing URBAN water use (where water is relatively insanely expensive already). Even in CA where we have droughts - the amount of water used in ag / industrial is measured in ACRE FEET. And the cost is in pennies to dollars per ACRE FOOT. The scale is just totally different than your bottle of water or glass of water. You go to a restaurant "due to water shortage we aren't serving water"?? We've had insane population growth here. Last damns were in like 71 and maybe 79? So it's been 40+ years with no new reservoirs? https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20140829_083001_SJM-DAMS-0825-90.jpg https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20140... You'd better be working on desalination or maybe a small tax on water for all users (could be TINY) or something because otherwise yeah, you are going to have serious water problems. We've doubled population since 71. You can't do that without doing something around reservoirs, water use in ag / industrial or supply improvements.

seltzered_ 5y ago

Okay, the article references "Potential contributions of pre-Inca infiltration infrastructure to Andean water security" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 , https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0307-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0307-1 ) The problem is it could just be used just to extract more water rather than be part of a broader reforestation effort & cultural change around it's relationship to water. Joe Brewer criticized this a couple years ago: https://twitter.com/cognitivepolicy/status/1212533202964926464 https://twitter.com/cognitivepolicy/status/12125332029649264...

wolverine876 5y ago

For a more scientific, technical discussion, see this paper, linked in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1 Available here: http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential.pdf http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential... (Thanks abdullahkhalids for finding the latter link; I'm just posting it here for more visibility.)

foxhop 5y ago

I'm not sure why it's only happening in Peru, we should be doing this work world wide. I have similar water capturing techniques at my house where I redirect road runoff into a gentle stream and allow it to infiltrate my landscape, watering Maple, Apple, Plums trees, hydrating the landscape to reduce effects of multi-month droughts: Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQS4CN_4OY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQS4CN_4OY

kjkjadksj 5y ago
Road runoff is usually pretty polluted in cities and some places have laws against capturing rainwater to protect downstream resources.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  He doesn't say where he lives. While I agree with you that if he indeed lives in a place where the "road runoff" is nasty he should be careful, I really can't see why capturing rainwater should be banned. Of course "some places" is very vague so there might be good reasons but you'd have to provide much more context for me to believe that it's a good idea to prevent it. If my house wasn't where it is, the ground on which it is built would absorb that water. Now I capture it and put it on my veggies or use it to flush the toilet which ends up going out to the septic drain field on the lwab and then it filters further down. I don't see any issues with that.
  - kjkjadksj 5y ago
    The issues with water capture is that you are basically building an illegal reservoir and not necessarily returning the water as it were if it just hit the ground. You might flush your toilet and think all is fine, but maybe now the creek in your back yard goes dry a week sooner in the year, and less tadpoles are able to be born or some other unforseen ecological effect. Or maybe downstream water users don’t get what they expect out of the watershed anymore due to illegal collecting.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

Water retention needs to be made a bigger issue globally. Others eluded to the fact that what is effectively the draining of the water cycle in CA is a main cause of CA's water/fire problems, but that is also the problem in places like central Europe where the straightening of the rivers during industrialization (19th C.) is and has essentially been "draining the swamp" of the central European water cycle. It's something I have had the hardest time getting people to understand. The various straightened rivers all throughout Europe that have far less retention capacity than in the past, are essentially drainage canals that are sucking the whole of the central European region dry of water, which will only compound problems. There are a couple things going on that are fooling people into an illusion that everything being fine, but it is happening and it is causing the low rainfalls, the low snow packs, and the low cloud cover that increases temperatures that are all perceived as/blamed on global warming. If Europeans don't stop the draining of the continent, the problems and heat will only accelerate. Just alone in order to prevent the necessity of using climate control systems that devour energy should be enough of an argument to try to restore the cloud cover and rainfalls that could lower temperatures to what they were like before the rivers were straightened and evaporation also caused more winds and breezes.

rocqua 5y ago
Interesting. As a European (dutch even, so more water interested) I would love to learn more. I often felt that, in agriculture we (dutchies) have over engineered for short term profits. I wonder if the same holds for our water engineering.
meristohm 5y ago
North America used to be home to so many more beavers than at present. Europe, too? Ben Goldfarb wrote Eager, about beavers and their place in a resilient ecosystem: https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-life-of-beavers-and-why-they-matter/ https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-l...

wolverine876 5y ago

The amunas are channels that slow the movement of water from mountain streams to farmers; "the diverted water spends between two weeks to eight months underground, with an average delay of 45 days". As far as I can tell, they are used to retain water from the wet season into the dry season. How is that advantageous over using water storage at or near the endpoints? Perhaps ancient farmers didn't the ability to create underground storage, but how are amunas preferable now? I imagine there's a good answer, but if it's in the article I overlooked it.

tharkun__ 5y ago
Storing water in ponds has to deal with evaporation, algae growth etc. Also expensive to build. Storing water in tanks means buying and maintaining something as well. I think the point here is the "low tech, thousands of years old and it works" part. Underground water doesn't evaporate or grow nasty stuff. You do have to have the right terrain I suppose but where you do this sounds awesome. The ground will actually even help with filtering out many nasties.
appleflaxen 5y ago
It's a capacity issue. The bandwidth of the amunas is enormous compared to a reservoir.

colochef 5y ago

If you are into this, you have to check all the different systems found in Lo Tek. Can't recommend this enough. https://lampoonmagazine.com/lo-tek-sustainable-resilient-infrastructure/ https://lampoonmagazine.com/lo-tek-sustainable-resilient-inf... https://longnow.org/seminars/02020/sep/15/design-radical-indigenism/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02020/sep/15/design-radical-ind...

syntaxing 5y ago
The first link is NSFW as a headsup
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  If that link is NSFW your work isn't safe. OH MY GAWD! ZKIN! NEKKID!
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Persistently pursuing peak performance by preaching puritanic prudence? BABBITS!

ncmncm 5y ago

It is nice to see acknowledgement that there was any activity at all in Peru prior to the Incas. Who knows, those earlier people, probably already speaking Quechua, might even have built this or that monumental structure, too, instead of waiting around for the Incas to come along and build everything, last-minute, just in time for the Spaniards to find.