Ozymandias: Haftarat Va-era, Ezekiel 28:25-29:21

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.                                                                                       

                                                                                                               – Richard Feynman, 1987

God has plenty of reasons to become enraged at princes (see Psalm 82, for example), but in Haftarat Va-era, the reason seems a little odder than usual:

Thus says the Eternal God:
Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh, King of Egypt
You [are like the] great crocodile, crouching in its river branches,
Thinking: my River is mine, I made it for myself…

Behold, I will bring a sword upon you,
And deprive you of people and beasts.
Because you thought,
The River is mine, I made it,
Egypt will be a desolation, a ruin,
And they shall know that I am the Eternal!

It hardly stretches the theological imagination to see divine judgment coming upon the arrogance of Egypt’s king, and it hardly stretches the intellect to see Pharaoh as arrogant. But Pharaoh’s insistence that he made the river seems bizarre to the point of insanity. How in the world could the Egyptian king think that he made the river?

Did Pharaoh believe himself to be a god? Maybe, but that hardly meant he would believe himself the river’s creator. Pharaoh may have been a god, but he was not the only god: Hapi was the god of the Nile, and caused the annual flooding of the river. Even a megalomaniacal Pharaoh would not have replaced that order.

Instead, we might think a little more carefully about what it means to “make” a river (and the Hebrew verb, asiti, straightforwardly carries the same meaning).

As Sandra Postel explains in her wonderful book, Pillar of Sand:

The Egyptians practiced a form of water management called basin irrigation, a productive adaptation of the natural rise and fall of the river. They constructed a network of earthen banks, some parallel to the river and some perpendicular to it, that formed basins of various sizes. Regulated sluices would direct floodwater into a basin, where it would sit for a month or so until the soil was saturated. Then the remaining water would be drained off to a basin down-gradient or to a nearby canal, and the farmers of the drained plot would plant their crops.

Truly “making” a river, then, means making it usable for human purposes through vast irrigation works. And the Egyptians did a pretty good job of it, creating a relatively sustainable irrigation model in no small part because of Nile’s unique hydrology.

But even in Egypt, God made irrigation risky. Pharaoh’s nightmare of famine came from his country’s experience: low floods led to famine and high floods could wipe out the irrigation works. During the reigns of several kings, wheat prices rose markedly. No wonder Joseph advocated for building a strategic grain reserve. And no wonder Ezekiel warned against the arrogance of assuming that human technology could make natural forces irrelevant.

All this would make for fascinating history but for its destructive legacy in our time. Beginning the 1920’s, the federal government began authorizing dams for irrigation throughout the country, and particularly in the west. For three decades after the first preparations for Hoover Dam, in the words of Marc Reisner’s classic Cadillac Desert, “the most fateful transformation that has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere, was wrought.”

Consider the Colorado River. Before the federal government got a hold of it, the Colorado ran muddy and warm, creating a unique ecosystem that ran all the way into the Gulf of California. After the federal government put a series of dams on it – including Hoover Dam — it became clear and cold, sending hundreds of millions of gallons to develop Phoenix and Tucson and the Imperial Valley, and destroying the region’s delicate ecosystem. And oh – it never gets to the Gulf of California: what used to be its delta is now Mexican desert.

One hundred years ago, central California was crisscrossed by a series of rivers and was dominated by the massive Owens Lake. Now, all but one of those rivers has been dammed for agriculture, and the Owens Lake has completely disappeared, literally into dust.

Now consider the name of the federal agency that has built dams throughout the west: the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Taking hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete; dragging rivers to and fro across the landscape; violently changing ecosystems; and transforming the west into something that would have been completely unrecognizable less than a century ago is merely reclaiming it. Nature does not really exist; engaging in complete upheaval actually does no such thing. Why? Because we made the river.

Make no mistake: tremendous good has come from this extraordinary engineering. Dams produced so much hydroelectric power that they enabled the extraordinary “arsenal of democracy” for building airplanes that won World War II. Reisner acknowledges that “the war would have been seriously prolonged at the least without the dams.” Tens of millions of Americans now enjoy cheap –and renewable — electric power to an extent inconceivable beforehand.

But it cannot last. Irrigation water leads to runoff, which tends to add salt to the ecosystem: when the runoff evaporates, salt stays in the ground. The more irrigation cycles, the more salt. It is “beyond question,” says the leading study, that growing salinity destroyed Sumer and other ancient civilizations. It is a matter of time that the salt curse hits us if we stay on our current course. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of cubic feet of silt are building up behind these dams. They are a wasting asset: within a few decades they will be obsolete relics.

We are not doomed, but we must change. We did not make these rivers: God did, and we cannot simply do with them what we please. We do not need many of them. In the midst of California’s worst-ever drought, one out of every six drops of the state’s water goes to one low-value crop, alfalfa, that can be grown without irrigation in other parts of the country. Agribusiness grows it in the west because it receives heavily subsidized water from massive idols like Hoover Dam. When it rains in Los Angeles, we capture none of the rainwater and let it run into the ocean. American water law promotes wasteful overconsumption, giving water rights to those who grab it first. We squander God’s unacknowledged gift, putting our civilization in peril.

In 1818, the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley published “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Can humans cohabit harmoniously with our environment? Can we understand that we did not build these rivers? Is the current United States ancient Sumer writ large? 3,000 years after the Pharaohs ruled the Nile, the questions linger.