We are going to hear more about rivers in the years ahead. Almost all the waterways on which our civilisations were built — and on which they still depend — are under threat in the Anthropocene era, from the Nile and the Euphrates to the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Murray-Darling.
The main villains in Brian Eyler’s lament for south-east Asia’s most important river, Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, are not industrial polluters or the fossil-fuel producers that have contributed to climate change and glacier-melt on the Tibetan plateau but the hydroelectric dam-builders of China and Laos.
Eyler, director of the south-east Asia programme at the Stimson Center in Washington, concludes that ecologically and commercially hydropower is fast becoming an “obsolete technology”.