Connecting threads

While we don’t usually theme issues at Geographical there is a thread running through some of our features this month. The world’s great rivers are the skeleton of its nation states. It is rivers that encourage human settlement, offering the fresh water essential for life, combined with a convenient disposal mechanism out to sea. We have not repaid them well. We hear so much about plastic in the ocean that it’s easy to forget where so much of it comes from, yet pollution of many kinds are reaching catastrophic levels in the world’s rivers.

To explore some of these problems, as well as burgeoning solutions, Justin Jin took to the waters of the Yangtze, China’s longest river (page 18). There, he met the finless porpoise, the chubby ‘kung-fu master’ of the river, just clinging on to survival, and discovered a country slowly coming to terms with its poor record on pollution. On page 51, charismatic adventurer Spike Reid dipped into another river whose importance can’t be understated. Becoming the first person to paddleboard the length of the Ganges, he encountered a river crushed under the weight of its people’s love. Elsewhere in India, high up in the mountains of Ladakh, it is lack of water that is fast becoming a problem, as once abundant glaciers dry up. Academics Nick Dudley Ward and Nishant Tiku share the fascinating story of the region’s ice engineers (page 66), villagers who compete to build the grandest ice stupas – a new invention that can store millions of litres of water for future use – just going to show that humans are forever balanced between the tendency to destruct and the ability to construct solutions.