The Two Towers - flowing into the digital age
This essay is from AGWA’s September issue of the AGWA Guide Newsletter.
AI-Generated Image
This is a story about two towers and what happens when narratives about them lose touch with reality. Once, I was asked to produce a map that overlays the Asian Water Towers with tiger areas. Water Towers are maps based on simple hydrologic data, that depict in a given landscape where the largest amount of rain falls. The argument would be that since there is a very strong overlap between tiger areas and water towers, tiger conservation should also benefit from water conservation, mainly from the perspective of tapping into funds internationally available for water development. Water Tower color schemes always go from a dull color (dry) to bright blue (wet).
-"What is that bright blue color there on the bottom of the map?"
-"That is Borneo."
-"There are no tigers on Borneo."
-"No, but there is a lot of water."
-"Can you take it off the map, or even better, put something on top of it, like a map legend..."
I am one of the notorious masterminds that seems to have contributed (a wee drop) to the Water Towers narrative. At the time, I did this in order to propagate the importance of water and hydrology to everyday decision-making. I actually still believe water should be everywhere in decision-making, it is at the base of food, energy, climate, life and cultural identity. But the Water Towers narrative went astray when people started attributing economic value to the water towers, directly quantified by the amount of water in the towers.
This water tower valuation narrative ultimately (in 2023) led to the eviction of Kenyan tribes from their ancestral lands, because they were destroying the value of the recently assigned water towers. No, I did not assign that water tower (and have not worked on Kenya), and no, I did not put a map legend on Borneo. I actually argued that we are looking at a signal of remaining tiger areas; those areas might have been too wet for human settlement or activities. Water does not grow tigers; they once roamed nearly all of Asia, except Borneo.
Putting value on the amount of water in a water tower is wrong. And it all went wrong with that interpretation; I have always fought against it, because it ignored systems thinking. There are rivers, lakes, glaciers and groundwaters that do not show up bright blue as a water producing tower, but are providing clear water services. Next to that, the 'value' of water is much higher in dry areas than in wet areas, and the main issue is not that of 'value' but of 'function', where all areas provide different functions in the hydrological cycle. The famed Water Towers that generate water, can also be held accountable for creating floods. This is where interpretations matter, but who can explain this to the evicted tribe?
And yet, another tower has been rising around us—digital, invisible, and just as precarious. That second tower? I am in it, and you are as well, it is the Silicon Tower; the kind of silicon as is used in semiconductors for computer systems. I am writing reports, blogs, generating AI images, doing some hydrological studies, analyzing water towers, et cetera. Professionally, it is what makes me a technical analyst and personally, I consciously keep up a digital personality that reads news, and sometimes reacts, that shares images, listens to music, streams series and movies, shares opinions et cetera. The Silicon Tower concerns to which level you rely on digital information and tools to get your work (and life) done: I am quite high up in the Silicon Tower; at which floor are you? What, are you an influencer?!
The digital aspects of our work need to be recognized as a tower, since it can function completely detached from the realities we are working on. Working as a hydrologist producing Water Tower maps is a mistake if it does not question the dominant and harmful narrative. Some hydrological humility should be in place, in that the work that hydrologists are delivering is based on assumptions and expectations. I have heard many hydrologist complain that they cannot do their work because there is no digital data available. And often, when you provide constructive feedback on the models and tools they bring to the table for decision support, they find the feedback hurtful and take it personally. I don't know if this is typical about hydrologists, but please keep this among ourselves*. So, let's just assume they are somewhere above the 200th floor in the Silicon Tower.
This Silicon Tower does not stand on its own. It requires infrastructure, it requires electricity and energy, and energy often requires large amounts of water. The digital and AI divide is expanding in the world, where the richer countries are able to keep up with the infrastructural requirements while others are lagging behind, if not being abandoned. This divide will result in a situation where presumably well-informed decisions are being made based on data and AI driven insights, sourced from the Silicon Tower. Therefore, we all should be aware that only certain populations will have access to the Silicon Tower, and even fewer people to the highest floors. As the divide expands, efforts should be aimed at bridging access to all. These efforts should be guided by humility and groundedness and not by presumption.
Both towers represent oversimplified narratives (water valuation, digital omniscience) that risk detachment from reality. Whether water or silicon, towers can only stand if they remain connected to the ground beneath them, while we do not want to end up in the cloud.
Nikolai Sindorf
Delft, Netherlands
* I consider myself only partly hydrologist, so only feel partly insulted by constructive feedback 😜