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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
Not listed in any guidebooks pertaining to my recent visit to Morocco is an extraordinary museum in Marrakesh documenting the long history of sustaining and managing water. Monumental, brilliantly informative, the building was empty of visitors, neither Moroccans nor tourists, but the message was fulsome and important, communicating a record of awareness, innovation, and success, over a long time, in responding to scarcity, increasing need, changing physical conditions, and maintaining supply through conservation and distribution, through imagination, innovation, and responsibility accepted for the continuity of an ancient society in a very dry place.
The museum exhibits presents, in clear, encyclopedic displays, the nature of water: as solvent, distillate, nutrient, and guarantor of individual and communal health through the water cycle specifically adapted to a topography that extends from the Rif and Atlas mountain ranges through intervening desert to the coastal plane. – a descent of extremes, each requiring a specific, ingenious response using local, restricted resources. This history revealed is, in fact, the evolution of a unique hydraulic society, a cultural adaptation as essential then as it is today, and an example for us all.
This success was achieved by the development of an ongoing legacy: the maintenance of traditional systems of novel engineering, governance, and communal participation based on construction, maintenance and extension of hydraulic infrastructure, collection and distribution, and the resolution of conflicts through regulation, sanction, and customary law. Basic principles guided the way: the right of a neighbor or traveler to water, the right of property to whoever harvests the water, and the right of a community to manage the water to enhance, not impede, survival. Customary law was, and is still, applied through the Jemaa, a traditional assembly to regulate access and management, to guarantee equality, and to avoid or adjudicate conflicts of use. Each locality has its Habous, an administrative body, in cities, towns, and rural districts to oversee property rights and to protect an infrastructure of wells, canals, mills, farms, factories, and mosques – all of which depend on adequate available supply for human consumption, sanitation, energy, manufacture, public services, and ritual. Over time, scale increased both demand and intervention: oases and the use of underground springs, rainwater collection, mini-reservoirs, aqueducts, water towers, dams and other methods for flood control, terracing, flow rates and times, and ever-evolving “rules for sharing”.
It is important to note that this traditional approach to water governance remains today, across the country with the full endorsement and participation of the national government.
The museum celebrates “the civilization of water,” and was opened in 2016 to present “the spiritual dimensions of water, to introduce the Moroccan genius in water management; to make known the historical role of the religious foundations in the governance of water; to recall the sanitary uses and water rituals; to call to mind the economic uses and traditional water technologies; to make known the legal heritage and negotiation in the field of water; to appreciate the traditional wisdom in saving water; and to honor the contribution of the late King Hassan Il and of the present King Mohammed VI to the preservation of water as a national resource and international exemplar.” It is the first such museum in Africa and is part of a UNESCO International Network of Water Museums that collectively document the hydraulic focus of societies, past and present.
But what of the future? It may be that the museum was empty because the Moroccan people are already fully aware of the presence of water in their daily lives: There are public gardens, old and new, in every city. There is the ritual cleansing requirement to enter the mosque to worship. Moroccans are bounded by the snow-capped mountains, significance of plenty; by the desert, significance of scarcity; by the ocean, significance of, inevitably, future supply. Water is already embedded in their idea of civilization, just as it is taken for granted by so many of the rest of us. I was astounded by many beautiful and evocative things in Morocco, but of all the sights and sounds, of all the cultural aspects of a wonderful place, this idea of water as the essential sustainer of life, of body and soul and civilization, is what I have taken home as transcendent souvenir to share with you today.
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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