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By Root 1118 0

than it has ever been; and all of the old border disputes are now settled (Damansky Island is now Zhenbao Island). Even the huge demographic contrast does not predicate a territorial takeover, a political act. But over the long run, given its geographic remoteness and thinning economic ties to the west, the pressures for the Russian Far East to integrate with eastern Asia are obvious. Its 3,000-kilometer border with China is roughly triple its physical distance from Moscow. This region has a huge natural resource base, shrinking labor pool, and dire need for capital investment. Neighboring China has a huge resource demand, bottomless labor pool, and is well on track to become the world’s biggest economy in 2050. Somehow, over the long run, these two things must converge.

A NAFTA-like free economic zone in this part of the world seems the most obvious outcome. Indeed, there are plenty of signs that the Russian government strongly desires this direction, for example, through consistently strengthening its ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade bloc including regular ASEAN-Russia summits since 2005, and a pending petition for membership in the East Asia Summit. In 2012 Russia will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vladivostok. However the far-out possibility of military seizure or outright sale—as Russia did long ago with nearby Alaska—cannot be ruled out. Just as I once learned in school about the U.S. Alaska Purchase of 1867, perhaps one day schoolchildren in Beijing and Moscow will be reading about the Yuandong Purchase of 2044. If either of these things happens, the economic opening of the Russian Far East, spurred by the demand of Asian markets for its abundant natural resources, would not be far behind.

Blue Oil

Demographic models tell us that billions of new people are coming around the hot, dry southern latitudes of our planet, places water-stressed today that will be even more stressed in the future. With a few notable exceptions the water-rich North, in contrast, is expected to become even wetter. Given this obvious mismatch, might northern countries one day sell their water to southern ones?

The idea is not crazy. International bulk water sales have been popping up elsewhere, for example from Lesotho to South Africa and from Turkey to Israel. Indeed, Turkey built a $150-million water export facility at the mouth of the Manavgat River to sell water to regional buyers by tanker.520 A French company is considering an underground canal to send Rhône River water from France to Spain.

The most ambitious example of all is in China, where a massive, decades-long reengineering of its river networks to shunt water from its wet south to the parched north is now under way. This “South-to-North Water Diversion” megaproject will link together four major drainage basins and build three long canals running through the eastern, central, and western parts of the country. Its costs will include at least USD $62 billion—more than three times the cost of China’s Three Gorges Dam—the relocation of three hundred thousand people, and many negative environmental impacts. When finished, the amount of water artificially transferred from south to north each year will total more than half of all water consumption in California.521

Might another megaproject emerge to redirect water from north to south, say from Canada to the United States, or from Russia to the dry steppes of central Asia? There are certainly some precedents, and not just the one going on now in China. The last century saw the construction of many major engineering projects in the Soviet Union and North America, including two huge schemes to transfer water from one drainage basin to another: Canada’s James Bay Project for hydropower, and California’s State Water Project, a massive system of canals, reservoirs, and pumping stations to divert water from the northern to southern ends of the state.

Most audacious of all were two megaprojects designed in the 1960s but never built. Both proposed the massive use of dams,