The Balaa sinkhole, the Afqa waterfall, the elegant Jezzine cascade, a slender yet powerful plume that shows the measure of the cliff it drops from.
The Berdawni River in Zahleh, evoking feasts and arak, green scents of watermelon and cucumber, amber notes of hookahs mingling with the aromas of meat grilling over pine charcoal. The nebeh in Ehden, now walled in. Nahr al-Joz, the Hasbani rising from Mount Hermon, the Leonte, or Litani, the “river of lions” that waters Lebanon’s lands from the Bekaa to the south.
The Orontes, so gentle in name yet meaning “the Rebel,” rendered in Arabic as al-Assi because it is the only river in the Middle East that flows north. The Orontes that inspired Maurice Barrès to write a medieval love story between a Christian and a Saracen. A garden on the Orontes ... if only.
Two hundred springs, 40 waterways, sinkholes hollowing the summits through which melting snows pour, feeding so many underground rivers, so many deep sources. The porous earth receives and makes them rise. The beautiful miracle of streams coursing down the mountainside after a generous winter. The tresses of algae along red rock swaying with the current, the rumble, the murmur and the song of the earth, perhaps the only one.
In this scorching season, the sea serpent of climate change raises its head with menace. Since April, the earth, deprived of water, has withdrawn into a heavy silence.
The waterfalls hold back, the rivers are clogged with mud. This green land, beyond which stretch thousands of kilometers of desert, has hit low water three months earlier than usual.
Assumption Day brings the dangerous prospect of wildfires, sparked each year at that time by the carelessness of picnickers or the criminal designs of developers exploiting the chaos.
Apart from the blaze that recently devastated the forests of Akkar, one can be grateful for the prevention and heightened vigilance of municipalities that have managed to contain this seasonal scourge to a single event.
But water is already running short for irrigation and domestic use. Access to drinking water, recognized since 2010 as a fundamental human right, is available across much of the country only in plastic bottles and jugs. In response to NGOs calling for the nationalization of water, former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck declared in 2005 that “water is a foodstuff, and like every foodstuff, it has a market value.”
His words continue to spark outrage. Can one really hold it against him? So many wars have been fought over access to water, so many are still being fought and so many more will be waged in the future. Egypt and Ethiopia have long clashed over control of the Blue Nile. Lebanon fears that Israel will one day seize the Litani by force, a river the Zionist movement was already eyeing when Israel’s borders were drawn. Canada suspects the United States of siphoning off its groundwater.
More precious than all the earth’s gems, water once blessed our small country. What have we done with this treasure?
Dams that cemented over vast stretches of greenery that had managed on their own to retain underground reserves. Diversions of rivers that produced nothing but desiccation.
A steady, dismal waste, seen in the washing of cars and the watering of sidewalks — gestures plainly superfluous when the essentials are lacking. The habit of leaving taps running for no reason, the proliferation of restaurants that are in themselves gulfs of consumption, the small villages that once lived self-sufficiently now turned into tourist destinations with all that implies in pollution and pressure on resources … if rainfall continues to decline and the aquifer to run dry, we will not last more than a decade.
The exhaustion of water will erase for good what remains radiant in the face of Lebanon. The problem has been dodged for far too long. The time has come to recognize it and address it collectively, if that word still means anything in these latitudes.
This article was originally published in French in L’Orient-Le Jour. It was translated by Sahar Ghoussoub.
Israel continues attacks on southern Lebanon, demolishes buildings in Bint Jbeil