Alongside the proliferation of large water infrastructure projects such as dams and storage reservoirs, the pursuit of desalination materialized at a moment when an unwavering belief in the power of technology to shape the future existed, when international scientific collaboration increased, and when political concerns about water as a limited resource accelerated. Its potential as a new, untapped source of fresh water for municipal, agricultural, and industrial purposes carried promises of modernization and development, and especially appealed to governments looking to develop, diversify, and decentralize sources of supply. Yet, while initially hailed as a cheaper and more flexible alternative to centralized infrastructure, desalination ended up requiring the same major investments in capital and energy. It also portended a set of similar environmental impacts. By the early 1970s, the pursuit of desalination ground to a halt owing to government cutbacks and a lack of institutional support, as priorities changed from finding new sources of fresh water to protecting already-existing water sources from contamination.
This dissertation presents a multilayered view of desalination thought and practice in the 1950s and 1960s: national, intergovernmental, and transnational. A loosely allied group of scientists, politicians, and officials firmly believed in the potential of desalination, and constituted examples of the midcentury “hydronaut”: a person who considered existing water scarcity as one of the most important impediments to future economic growth and prosperity, and approached the quest for water with a sharp sense of mission. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, hydronauts in the United States, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Chile, the United Kingdom, and within the United Nations system considered desalination as a new and innovative strategy to achieve interrelated policy objectives, all with the ultimate goal of creating a new source of fresh water free of the impediments created by water variability and availability, and able to compete with more
conventional sources of supply.
While not as successful or visible as the proliferation of dams, the pursuit of desalination in the 1950s and 1960s nonetheless illustrates that the hydraulic paradigm took hold in different and multiple forms. As governments, stakeholders, and development partners looked to confront water-related challenges from the supply side,
and aimed to maximize the efficient use of water resources through new technological interventions, desalination offered an alternative means to transmit ideas about national identity, development strategies, economic progress, technological prowess, and the material realities of water itself. By uncovering how several countries and international organizations imagined the potential of desalination, and tried to jumpstart its widespread adoption, “Pipe Parity” complicates and adds additional layers to understandings of the development era. / 2027-06-30T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44793 |
| Date | 13 June 2022 |
| Creators | Hameeteman, Elizabeth C.M. |
| Contributors | Phillips, Sarah T. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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