11 August 1993 Scientist Calls for 'Blue Revolution'

The world is in urgent need of a "blue revolution" focusing on water, to match the "green" one of environmentalism, says visiting U.S. soil scientist Professor Daniel Hillel of Massachusetts.

Addressing a Desertification seminar at Lincoln University as the 1993 Prestige Lecturer, Professor Hillel said there were still plenty of unutilised water resources but some sort of international inventory was needed so that global agencies, governments, scientists, farmers and everyone else concerned with the welfare of the land knew what was available.

Professor Hillel, who has devoted much of his career to the study of arid and semi-arid parts of the world, says his life has been closely concerned with the "environmental symphony" of water and soil.

"Droughts are a fact of life in semi-arid regions," he says, "but by finding water we can transform delicately balanced pastoral societies into more stable irrigated ones."

Professor Hillel played a leading part in in establishing new approaches to improving irrigation and water use efficiency in Israel, and he helped initiate high frequency, low volume irrigation, including the drip and micro-sprayer systems in use throughout the world today.

Criticising the conventional view of "desertification" which has deserts "advancing" like some rapacious enemy, he says it has become an emotive word which has given rise to a whole bureaucracy of assistance-givers from the United Nations downwards.

"We are constantly told that the Sahara, for example, is advancing by so many kilometres a year and if it's not halted we'll eventually all succumb to its spread.

"In reality there is little scientific evidence on the advance of deserts and simply planting belts of trees will not necessarily stop any expansion.

"The real problem is not what is happening along the sides of deserts but what is happening outside them and in the semi-arid lands. Soil degradation is emanating from centres of population, not from the edges of deserts.

"Soils may take millenia to form, but they can be destroyed by a single generation. That's why we must care for what we've got left and try to restore to life what has been devastated by past imprudence."

Professor Hillel said the outlook was not one of bleak pessimism, rather there was a challenge for humankind to make sure that what had happened to past civilizations who had allowed their soils to degrade did not happen to the inhabitants of today's world.

Professor Hillel is in New Zealand for a month as a guest of the Society of Soil Science.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury.

Image source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daniel_Hillel.jpg (resized)