TWH – Climate change has brought some ecological issues into sharp focus. In Peru, severe water shortages have caused the government to fund projects utilizing ancient water management technology.
Rev. Rayna Templebee, an anthropologist, teaches courses about the ancient cultures of Peru. More generally, she studies the Indigenous cultures of this hemisphere.
Templebee said, “Many indigenous people, including those in Peru, have strong covenants with their local land base and their local communities–ties of mutual obligation with a strong spiritual component. Protecting the water is protecting Pacha Mama, the Andean name for Mother Earth.”
Revivals and survivals of an ecofriendly ancient technology.
The BBC reported that some Peruvians are reviving a native technique to store water. During the wet season, there are villagers who divert mountain streams to canals.
Peru contains many climate zones. Almost no rain falls on Peru’s Pacific coast. To the east, the Andes rise. Beyond the Andes, tributaries of the Amazon emerge. High in the Peruvian Andes, one day can be extremely hot at noon, but very cold at midnight.
The Peruvian capital city of Lima receives 13 mm (about 0.5 inches) of rainfall per year. People in Lima have water for only 21 hours per day. In 2019, the World Bank estimated that Lima’s ability to manage its water supply will fail, possibly by 2030.
In Peru, water issues have become so desperate, that the legislature acted by passing laws that forced water utilities to invest in “natural infrastructure” for water.
This water crisis has caused researchers to examine some of the ancient native techniques of water management that have survived and continue to be used. After all, native techniques relied on natural infrastructure.
That decision to invest in natural infrastructure allows Peru to build it on a large scale. The U.S. and Canada have given aid to 60 projects to develop natural infrastructure. Those projects include the ancient water storage technique of canals called “amunas.” They also involve the development of high-altitude bogs, called “bofedales.” While not an ancient technique, bofedales prevent floods and landslides.
“bofedales” wetlands in Estero Chilon, Putaendo commune; Image credit: Patricio Novoa Quezada from Valparaíso, Chile, CC BY 2.0
Templebee said that she had not heard of any other national program utilizing “indigenous environmental knowledge on a national scale, but there are hundreds of places in South America where indigenous systems of water or land management continue, more or less unchanged, from centuries or millennia ago.”
Amunas
Peruvians call these canals “amunas.” The word “amunas” comes from the Quechua word for “to retain.” The native language, Quechua, remains a living language in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Columbia, and Argentina. In Peru and Bolivia, millions of people today speak Quechua, as a first language.
Amunas divert waters from “wet-season flows from mountain streams, and route them to natural infiltration basins.” From those basins, the water seeps slowly into the earth, traveling through gravel and soil. In the earth, water flows like a stream, with eddies and pools. Months later during the dry season, that water emerges from springs. Villagers can then collect the water for their crops.
How water is “planted” and “harvested” – Image credit: Actualidad ambiental, CC BY-SA 4.0
The BBC article stressed the differences between natural water management systems and those that humans made. Modern systems tend to “confine water and speed it away, erasing natural phases when water stalls on land.”
In contrast, natural systems allow water to slow down and stall. Rivers flow like that. They have eddies, rapids, and slow pools. Rivers slow down becoming wetlands, and those wetlands then provide habitants for waterfowl, fishes, and vegetation.
In some villages, people have used amunas since at least the Inca period. They generally have widths of 2 ft (0.7 meters) and a couple of feet deep.
A villager, Lucila Castillo Flores, calls this water management system “planting the water.” The villages treat the water like a crop. Villagers can link each amuna with a specific spring. Scientists have confirmed the accuracy of those links.
Like gutters, people have to clean the amunas. In the villages of Peru, people have created rituals for that cleaning.
Templebee said, “This is indigenous spirituality at work.”
She said that throughout this hemisphere “indigenous cultures honor the spirits of the landscape, and local deities or spirits, and especially local ancestors, are ever-present aspects of life.”
Templebee described native care for amunas as acts of spiritual service. She also said they were “service to their communities.”
The Andes have glaciers. Templebee reported that in South American, people have maintained practices of glacier worship which protect the glacial environments. Templebee also reported “communal fish harvests that manage fish in a sustainable manner, agricultural systems which gather moisture from the clouds that roll in over the huge coastal desert?”
Peatlands, bogs, or bofedales
In Peru, people call a high altitude bog or peatland, a “bofedale.” Wide variations in daily temperature have caused vegetation to evolve in unique ways. The flora in those bofedales are short, “tuffety,” and spongey. They absorb a lot of water. According to the BBC, peatlands cover only 3% of land area. They store, however, 10% of all freshwaters, as well as 30% of carbon in the soil.
These bogs also create a thriving habitat for a many creatures which include “deer, pumas, Andean foxes, and pampas cats, as well as vicuña and guanaco, wild ancestors of domesticated alpacas and llamas.”
Unfortunately, peat poachers have begun to cut squares of these peatlands to sell to nurseries in Lima. The poaching exposes part of the remaining peat to oxygen, that results in the start of the rotting process which can cause the peatland to begin to die. Local utilities are trying to involve villagers in the upkeep and surveillance of these bofedales.
Templebee said, “It is clear to me that the future of the world, especially given the human role in climate change, depends upon reducing modern levels of consumption and exploitation (many of which are rooted in a Christian vision of the earth as our dominion). By studying and being advocates for indigenous ecological systems of water and land management, we can return to a more respectful and co-creative relationship with the earth.”
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