Introduction

As spiralling growth and development place unsustainable pressures on water resources around the globe, the right to control and manage river systems has become increasingly contested. Populations and urban areas are expanding fast, with more affluent lifestyles pushing per capita water use higher and higher. Farming activity is intensifying, and in every decade since the 1960s, countries such as the USA, Australia and New Zealand have doubled their use of water for irrigation. As Reisner (2001) points out, such expansions have been driven by an almost fanatical desire to ‘green the desert’ and ‘civilise’ putatively unproductive arid landscapes and make them productive in relation to human needs. The transformation of the desert in Israel is the most well-known example, but there are many other such endeavours around the world, for instance in the Middle East, America and Australia.

For a long time there was unquestioned acceptance that the irrigation of arid areas constituted a positive form of development. It was taken for granted that this should continue in the future with, for example, the USA looking to Canada to provide a diversion scheme from the Great Lakes, and Australia - even now - reviving earlier grandiose plans to turn major rivers inland to create new areas of farmland. However, increasingly obvious environmental degradation is forcing a rethink about the wisdom of what has often proved to be only a short-term transformation, in which productive ‘greening’ has been rapidly followed by widespread land salination.> This is now a major problem in Australia, where vast swathes of land have been over-irrigated and are now so salinated as to be unable to regenerate even their original vegetation. Equally urgently, untrammelled development has forced industrialised societies to acknowledge that freshwater resources are finite.