Surrey, perhaps, is familiar with the parched-brown cricket pitch look, and Kent has long been golden yellow with barley and wheat in summer. But for most of us, England really was, until recently, a green and pleasant land. Dark green oak trees, set in hazel-green hedges and edging shadowy green lanes, created a patchwork landscape of lush fields. Now, though, lots of England looks like Normandy, and I’m struggling to adapt. 

Yes, some people like to catastrophize. Yes, extreme weather isn’t proof of climate change. And yes, some summer droughting is to be expected. But England’s problems are about so much more than the views. Harvest would normally be in full flow about now. But with the sunshine and the heat, and the Environment Agency saying we have had just 3% of the average rainfall for July, across most of the country it happened a month ago, when the fairly pitiful crops all ripened early. No wonder reports suggest this could go down as the worst cereal harvest since records began in 1984, with farmers already reporting yields way below average. All told, they’re projected to lose some £390 million in crop value.

If crops wither in the fields, grass dries up too, meaning livestock farmers have to bring in harvested forage or buy feed from elsewhere. And, again, the impact is stark. Milk production fell by 18.5 million liters across the UK in July, as farms struggled to feed their cows and keep them cool. You might ask what all this has to do with you. You will find out when you go shopping in the next few months, and the prices are higher and products more scarce. Farming is a service industry, and we work for you. 

That is the big picture, but the details are equally stark. Jake Fiennes manages the Holkham Estate in Norfolk, where they graze cattle by the coastal marshes. Holkham has traditionally benefited from a chalk aquifer that fills the farm’s drainage dykes with clean, fresh water. But as drought dries up the aquifer, sea water seeps in below, forcing farmers to bring their cattle inside their barns for shade and piped water. And Fiennes is far from unique. Hannah Campbell and her mother Joy Dawson farm in south Lincolnshire. They have spent weeks carting water to their sheep after the usual ponds and river dried up. The irony, they say, is that after three months of drought each summer, they are likely to face six of winter flooding.  

Water — too little or too much — is only one problem. Hattie McPhee is growing a herd of milking sheep in Cumbria, to make cheese. She says the drought has made things hard: the sheep aren’t filling the tank with milk because their summer diet is so poor. The drought doesn’t end for farms when it rains, but when its effects and costs pass. Hattie is worried about making it through the next winter, as sales will be lower, and because the hay she has made is too dry and unpalatable. 

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Tom and Tess Darlington have money worries too. They are tenant farmers on the Little Dalby estate, in Leicestershire, growing crops and rearing livestock. Collapsing summer yields have left a shortfall in their budgets of 300 tonnes of wheat, worth about £60,000. It means they will be extending their overdraft to buy next year’s seeds. Tom jokes that he might have to sell a kidney to carry on farming, especially when the costs of machinery only ever seem to rise, pointing out that a combine harvester for harvesting wheat now costs £600,000 or more. The investment required to make food “cheap” is insane.

On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods. If it doesn’t rain for long enough, then every farming system grinds to a halt. But the severity of how drought affects a place is shaped by how it has been managed before. And the fact is that a lot of British farmland is now being farmed so efficiently — in monocultures, and fed with synthetic nutrients — that often it has quite low levels of soil organic matter. Now, this can work fine in years where there is plenty of moisture. But over time, we also know that degraded soils dry out quicker in droughts. 

The Rothamstead Institute estimates that every 1% increase in soil organic carbon raises the soil’s water holding capacity by about 354,000 liters per hectare: enough to fill five swimming pools. It isn’t how much rain falls from the sky, in other words, but how much we can hold in our soils that really matters.

Systems, in short, can be too efficient; fields need some buffer, some untapped potential, that they can call on in periods of stress and exhaustion. But our farming systems are being asked to run flat-out all the time. There is no slack, and very little resilience. The basic problem is that the economics of agriculture don’t pay for soil organic matter, or for farmers to rotate crops, or to let land have periods of recovery. In practice, that means that most of our arable landscapes are now poorly adapted for extreme weather events. 

No farmer looking across their once-green landscape wants to hear that they might have done something to minimize the drought. But the evidence is pretty clear that, somehow, we need to prioritize soil health. 

Andy Cato, one half of the electronic music duo Groove Armada, is also a regenerative farming champion, and has been preaching this mantra for years. He thinks our conventional farming systems are not yet adapted to the realities of the dry summers we are getting. This year, his farm, in the Thames area, has had yields for winter sown wheat as high as eight tons per hectare. There may be drought, but Cato has also spent years raising soil carbon, encouraging deep-rooting plants, growing cover crops, and keeping them nutritionally balanced. 

The ability of Britain to feed itself in the future may therefore depend on whether our farmers can learn to farm in ways that pack the living soil with organic matter. This might mean a return to mixed farming, with arable rotated with grazing. Green plants are especially useful here, eating sunlight — photosynthesis — then pumping carbons and sugars down into the soil. The animals themselves are vital too: half the country needs more sheep and cows, not less, as we are often told by well-meaning but profoundly ignorant environmental campaigners.  

Britain, of course, is far from alone. In July, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that their food price index had risen to its highest level since 2023, even as the OECD’s Global Drought Outlook suggests that economic losses to drought are growing from between 3% to 7.5% per year. Altogether, some 1.7 billion people worldwide now live in places where crop yields have fallen by at least 10% due to human-induced land degradation. 

All the same, the UK is especially vulnerable. Until a decade ago, we were part of the EU’s food system, which subsidized farming, and gave us access to alternative sources of food if ours failed. The risks were spread across mainland Europe, with access to arable heartlands like Ukraine beyond the EU’s borders. We ended that relationship, and now need a food system that reflects our post-Brexit isolation, one that can feed us in bad years as well as good. Economists say we can import what we need, from across the globe, but they seem curiously naive about the risks. 

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Once again, Ukraine is vital here. One of the bread baskets of the world, it produced 80 million tons of grain and oilseeds before Putin’s invasion, or the equivalent of about 10 kilograms for everyone on Earth. But, in case you’ve missed it, Russia is bombing the port of Odesa, from which this bounty leaves to reach our plates. It will be a good result if 50 million tons of Ukrainian grain gets to global markets this year. 

In short, the old assumptions on which we built our food system no longer hold. Geopolitics has changed. The climate has changed. Rainfall patterns have changed. Food production technologies have changed. The risk-sharing balance of old, between state and farmer, has vanished. Where we source vital synthetic nutrients from has also changed: much of Britain’s came through the Strait of Hormuz. All the while, our population is growing fast, and our available farmland now has alternative uses — from solar farms, to growing biomass for biodigesters, to rewilding — that gobble up vast acres.

Yet despite the urgent need to change ourselves, we are refusing to support thousands of farmers who have applied to government schemes designed to make our landscapes more resilient. Our political class, especially in the Treasury, seems either too agriculturally illiterate or just plain indifferent. Either way, we aren’t investing at anything like the levels we did before 2016. 

Political indifference and bureaucratic sluggishness is even more unfortunate given these are not things that the market, left to its own devices, makes happen. The market, after all, pushes farmers to get the efficiencies-of-scale that come with growing thousands of acres of one or two crops. That’s how you do cheap food — via mechanized monocultures — but it isn’t how you do food system that is resilient and robust, yet alone healthy. 

Beyond ensuring shelves are stocked, a farming revolution could offer benefits too, not least in spreading the risks and costs of feeding the British people. Already, about 20% of us, the poorest, struggle to access and afford healthy food, which has massive implications for the NHS and straining government budgets. 

All that’s for the future. For the moment, the drought continues. In my corner of Cumbria, the hillsides are withering, and the cattle stand by the water troughs huddled in whatever cover they can find. Some of our pastures have no piped water, so we will be moving the cattle nearer home in the next day or two. Even the crows look ragged and hungry, as they can no longer peck for worms. Our Southern friends have had it much worse, and are having to learn how to farm in such harsh conditions. And now, perhaps, our time is coming too.

We arrived in the evening and went to the El Cortez downtown, where we’d booked a cheap room. I was not prepared. The lights, the noise, the ping-ping-pinging, the fake sound of coins coming down a metal chute, the Ghostbusters theme tune inexplicably clanging out at regular intervals, the gamblers with their plastic buckets of change feeding the machines, the lack of windows and clocks. An image has stayed with me: a woman in a motorized wheelchair wears a credit card attached to her wrist with what looks like an old telephone cord. The card is stuck in the machine like a baby’s pacifier. She is aggressively pumping the arm of the slot machine as money is being sucked from her bank account. There appears to be no end to her losses.

After crossing the casino floor and walking up a couple of flights of stairs, we found our room. The leaking air conditioning unit had left a small puddle in the carpet. The window wouldn’t open and everything smelled of cigarette smoke. But it was the grim yellow lighting that slightly undid me. Normally, I can do crappy hotels — in fact I quite like them — but because this was Vegas, where you are supposed to have fun, I couldn’t do it. I left the room, ran down the stairs, walked through the casino, back to where we’d left the car and collapsed in a sobbing heap. We left the next morning and headed to Los Angeles.

Three years later, Jason got the idea to make a documentary in Vegas and got some backing from Channel 4. In the early 2000s, it was the fastest-growing city in the US. Homes were being built at record speed. Every month, thousands of people were showing up looking for work, mainly in construction and hospitality. Between 1970 and 2000, its population went from 270,000 to 1.3 million, and it looked set to continue rising. It was a boom time, a new kind of gold rush, and Jason wanted to see what this kind of explosive urban growth looked like. I ended up accompanying him on his shoot.

We arrived in early spring. Unlike our previous trip to Vegas, it was chilly when we landed — that night-time desert cold hit us as we stepped onto the airport tarmac. We found a cheap room in an America’s Best Value Inn & Suites. The apartment block was aiming for bland, corporate clientele, but judging from the shouting and the regular appearances by the police, they weren’t hitting their target demographic. In the grounds was a small swimming pool where kids would play in the daytime and where adults would gather to drink in the evenings. The parking lot of the nearby 7-Eleven was where the prostitutes and rent boys lined up under the streetlights. In the darker corners, people bought drugs.

Jason had placed an ad in the local newspapers asking for people who’d just arrived in Vegas to get in touch. He wanted to make sense of this place through the stories of those who were arriving to start a new life. One of the people who called us was a young woman who had escaped an abusive home and had hitchhiked to Vegas from a small town in California. She’d been picked up on the highway by a much older guy called Robert. She ended up moving in with him. They invited us over to their house for a drink so Jason could interview them. The young woman had just found a job in a bar off the Strip. They lived in one of those cream-colored L-shaped bungalows with metal siding, so familiar to me and my Canadian childhood. It was a tract house, a cookie-cutter home, straight out of a Robert Adams photograph. The streetlights, the sidewalks, the rows of tidy bungalows facing each other across a newly paved street — they all just ended where the desert began.

This extreme interface between the built-upon and the wild recalled a passage from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour’s 1966 book Learning from Las Vegas: “Beyond the town, the only transition between the Strip and the Mojave Desert is a zone of rusting beer cans.” Here there were no rusting beer cans. Here there was only air and the lemony-yellow glow of the streetlights in which the wings of tiny moths fluttered.

I did not collapse into a sobbing existential heap on this return trip to Vegas with Jason in 2005, because I was there to be part of his documenting of the city; I was not there to have fun. I was an observer, and through this act of mediation, I was able to see Vegas in a different light. We were not living in the post-modern town described in Learning from Las Vegas, nor were we engaging with the city ironically, as a joke, as a flimsy cardboard cut-out, a Pop Art construction, the wet dream of populist pleasure makers, or a simulacrum of a city. I could and still can appreciate the “messy vitality” of the Strip that the authors of Learning from Las Vegas exalt in, along with their enjoyment of the unselfconscious creation of a popular aesthetic. I was also aware that this city is a place where people live, work, write poems, worry about their greying hair, their lack of exercise and their kids’ college fees. And yet, I simply couldn’t — and still can’t — shake my view of Las Vegas as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe.

The spring and summer that Jason and I were living in Vegas coincided with the 100th anniversary of what some referred to as the “founding” of the city in 1905. Birthday celebrations had been brewing for months, culminating in the baking of what would be the largest cake in the world. The seven-layer, 130,000-pound vanilla cake measured 102 feet long, 52 feet wide and contained 23 million calories. On the day of the great cake slicing, Jason and I lined up outside Cashman Center, a large building which looked like a cross between a storage facility, convention center and a high school gym. We were with Matt, one of the people we had been filming with. He was a soft-spoken and thoughtful gambling addict who’d been cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for falling in love with a non-Mormon. He was currently homeless and often slept in one of the storm sewers or in the Salvation Army shelter when they had a bed.

Thousands of people showed up for cake. Some clutched Tupperware containers, others cardboard boxes, suitcases, even giant plastic garbage bags to lug their chunks back to their kitchens, offices and rented rooms. The scene was like a demented children’s picnic directed by Tim Burton. The planners of this birthday celebration had wildly overestimated how many Las Vegans would want to queue up in 40-degree heat for free cake. On that evening’s news, I watched in horror as dump truck after dump truck brought mountains of leftovers to a local pig farm and shovelled it into pens for the animals to “pig out” on. If there were ever a film clip needed to illustrate overabundance and society-as-spectacle in the US, this would be it.

Consumption is one of the engines fueling the Vegas that many people come to the city to experience. The year Jason and I were there, the hotels, casinos and restaurants alone were creating over half a million tons of garbage a year — enough to fill an American football field 10 meters high every day.

Like all built environments in the American West, you cannot talk about Vegas without mentioning the element on which its existence depends: water. When I think about Nevada, my mind immediately moves towards that 100th longitudinal meridian first observed by John Wesley Powell in the 1870s. This east–west divide runs from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Powell had been commissioned by the government to explore the western territories to see if it were viable to continue carving up and handing out 160-acre parcels for farming and homesteading in the West.

After years of traveling, Powell argued that due to its aridity, it was almost a separate country from the East. A lack of fresh water and rainfall would not sustain high levels of population or intensive agriculture. The government ignored him and, ever since, precious waterways across the West have been dammed, reshaped, exploited and poisoned in the service of progress, development and unsustainable human activity.

The vast Colorado River, the major waterway in the West and Southwest, became the irrigation source for cities and communities springing up in deserts and on arid lands. Its water was so in demand that in 1922 something called the Colorado River Compact was created, which essentially divided the river into two parts, allocating set amounts of river water to the seven basin states. In order for this to happen, the Colorado would need to be dammed. This is where the Hoover Dam comes in, and the creation of Lake Mead. This body of water is called a “lake” but really it acts as a reservoir and a site for recreation. In America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir describes it as

“a large sheet of fake blue water that clashes sharply with the pink rocks. This water is as out of place in the desert as a grove of orange trees on a moor, as a fresh stand of birch trees in reddish sand dunes. It’s an unreal landscape … and it has the deceptive colors of Gauguin.”

Lake Powell (note the ironic name), a reservoir 300 miles away in Utah, is supposed to provide the more northern states with water, but it functions as a holding tank for Lake Mead. No one really understands why we’ve ended up with this set-up. All we do know is that these enormous reservoirs are running out, and at least four million people rely on Lake Mead for their water. There is now a “bathtub ring” running around the rock walls of the lake, showing how much the water level has dropped in recent years.

There is another lake in Vegas that isn’t being drained at such an alarming rate. Lake Las Vegas in Henderson, a well-off southern suburb of Vegas, has its water replenished from Lake Mead. In 2020 it provided 1.2 billion gallons of water to the people of Vegas. Some of this went on golf courses, some for the canals in the Venetian and some went to private residences, like the mansion in Spanish Trails owned by a prince of Brunei, which used 12,327,000 gallons of water in 2020. All this for one single house in the desert.

Back in 2011, after eight years of drought, golf courses started waking up to the problem of keeping their lawns green. In a 2012 article called “Water Hazard” in Golf Course Management magazine, Mark Leslie talks of the water police who can fine you for misusing the precious commodity, and how even watering lawns at the wrong time of day can land you in trouble. He mentions the fact that the evapotranspiration rate in and around Las Vegas is probably the highest in the country and that golf courses in Vegas pay over a million dollars a year for their water. Golf courses are trying to minimize evaporation by making use of the correct nozzles on their irrigation systems and covering remaining bodies of water with something called Aquatain, “a silicone-based product from Australia”. Basically, using Aquatain is a bit like spraying liquid saran wrap onto your pond. According to the company who makes it, it is harmless to people and aquatic life.

Despite the pretence that “much of our waste gets recycled”, most of it ends up in landfill. All across Nevada, the stuff we no longer need or know what to do with has been sent into the desert to be incinerated, buried, left to rot, decompose or, in the case of plastics and forever chemicals, left there to sit out the end of time. It isn’t just the “normal” waste — the Styrofoam cups, chicken bones, water bottles and candy wrappers — that are exiled to the desert near Vegas: there is plenty of the more insidious stuff, the stuff which decomposes over hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Mojave Desert has been blown up, blasted and poisoned by the US military since the first aerial atomic bomb was detonated there in 1951 in a place called Frenchman Flat. There are two tourist reviews of Frenchman Flat: “Not the best hiking spot,” one reads. “Felt nauseous for some reason and now I’m slowly losing my hair. Would not recommend.” A more recent review reads, “Nice hiking spot, felt nauseous but later my muscles started to grow and I didn’t need to wear my glasses anymore. Only annoyance, my skin is getting greenish when I get angry.”

The famous Nevada Test Site, in which Frenchman Flat sits, is about an hour’s drive from the Vegas Strip and occupies an area slightly larger than Rhode Island. Over the span of 40 years, almost a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated here. This land belongs to the Western Shoshone — a fact often overlooked when people talk about the atomic programme in Nevada.

Between 1951 and 1992, nuclear testing on Shoshone lands created 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout. As a point of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 created 13 kilotonnes. In a 2020 Al Jazeera article, Ian Zabarte, the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation, lists the people he knows with cancer — some of whom are toddlers. “Every family is affected,” he writes. “I watched my uncle suffer from horrible cancer that ate away at his throat and my grandfather die of an auto-immune disease that is known to be caused by exposure to radiation. They say he had a heart attack, but when your skin falls off, that puts stress on your heart.”

Incriminating documents were discovered in 1978 in the state archives of Utah. These documents revealed that 18,000 sheep were grazing only a few miles to the north and east of the Nevada Test Site in the early Fifties. None of the ranchers or shepherds were alerted to any dangers before bombs were detonated, and their concerns since have mostly been dismissed. In 1979, The New York Times reported that, after grazing in Nevada, “the sheep were returned to Utah in the spring of 1953” where “ranchers noted that many were sick and dying. Ewes had spontaneous abortions and showed burnlike lesions on the face, neck and ears. The majority of lambs were born dead and stunted, and ewes died either during lambing or a few days later, according to the documents.” Two autopsies on sheep showed that the concentration of iodine-131 — a radioactive isotope — in their thyroid glands exceeded “by a factor of 250 to 1,000 the maximum permissible concentration of radioactive iodine for humans”. None of this was enough to convince the US Atomic Energy Commission that these illnesses and deaths were related to atomic testing.

During the Fifties, Vegas promoted what it called “Atomic Tourism”, with one casino owner declaring that the nuclear blasts were the best thing to happen to Las Vegas. Guests would stay up all night to wait for the spectacular desert sunrise and sip their final highball as nuclear bombs were detonated at dawn. Bikini-clad women jostled for the title of Miss Atomic Bomb. The winner modelled a bathing suit with ruffles up the front emulating the famous shape of a mushroom cloud. It is still possible to experience a simulacrum of all this in the National Atomic Testing Museum, where for a few dollars you can experience your very own imitation bomb blast or learn how to survive an atomic explosion by going beyond the basic “duck and cover” position.

Gone are the days when the Rat Pack and fellow cocktail drinkers would watch atomic testing from the roof of a casino as a form of entertainment, but we are still living in the Atomic Age. The fallout is all around us. Those who grew up downwind of the bomb blasts do not need any of this simulated for them because they are living with the cancers, the deaths and the birth defects. For most people today, the Atomic Age is less of a spectacle or a beauty pageant and more of a slow, poisonous drip, drip, drip.

It took my return to Vegas in 2006 for me to unpick my initial reaction to the place, to put it in the context of a kind of ground truth — the reaction one feels to a place based on observable, or sometimes invisible, information. In my case it manifested physically. Riding in a gondola in the Venetian is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from watching atomic blasts from a casino rooftop. They both spring from the human urge to consume and destroy. Sinking a mojito at the Wynne or playing the slots at the Bellagio is an act of participation in this destruction. Having fun in Vegas is a problem for me. None of it should be here. And that includes me.

***

This is an edited extract from Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

The Egyptians are furious that Ethiopia plans to go ahead without their agreement. For them, the Nile is a matter of life or death. Egypt is mostly desert and so 95% of its 85 million-strong population lives along the river’s banks and delta. Cairo argues that if the GERD operates according to Ethiopia’s plans it will put five million farmers out of work, cut agricultural production by half, and further destabilise a country fighting against an Islamist insurgency. Its sugar cane rice plantations are expected to be hard hit and the northern delta areas, already damaged by saltwater intrusion from the Mediterranean, may suffer greater salination.

This is for Egypt an existential matter: it’s not that Ethiopia intends to completely cut the flow of water into the North African state, it’s that they will have the power to do so. Cairo insists that Addis Ababa comes to the table and signs a treaty agreeing an equitable sharing of the life blood of the Egyptian nation. Ethiopia sees things differently and crucially it has geography on its side. As the upstream nation it is the dominant party in the dispute, and given that the project looks destined to provide desperately-needed power to all of its 110 million population it is not about to back down.

The dam will create so much energy that Ethiopia will be able to export the surplus to Sudan. Eventually the $4.5 billion project may fuel greater economic success for the country as it becomes an even more attractive investment opportunity for international companies. China, the USA, Turkey and the Gulf States are all big players in a country which may soon have the energy supplies to help build joint venture infrastructure projects.

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The passions on each side are understandable. Upstream, Addis Ababa says too many of its regions have to rely on rain-fed agriculture which, given periodic droughts, leaves millions of Ethiopians vulnerable to food shortages. The GERD has become a national symbol of Ethiopia’s resurgence from being the starving and poverty-stricken nation of the 1980’s to East Africa’s economic powerhouse. Many Ethiopians have no time for Cairo’s stance on water flow, viewing Egypt as a colonial power that helped the slave trade, attempted to invade them, and still contributes to poverty in their country.

The negotiating starting points are the colonial era agreements, along with the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that gave Egypt an annual allocation of water, plus veto over any attempt by an upstream state to construct dams along the river. Ethiopia, which remained independent during the colonial period, argues that it is not bound by pre or post-colonial agreements it didn’t sign.

This spring the squabbling between them heated up. Egypt’s President Sisi said he would use “all available means” to defend Egypt’s interests, fighting talk that led many analysts to speculate that a major “water war” was on the cards. That can’t be ruled out, but there are many things constraining the Egyptian military.

Here again, geography favours Ethiopia. It is land locked, so reaching it means going through either Sudan or, after a journey down the Red Sea, through Eritrea. Neither option is attractive. The top brass in Cairo know the history of their military expeditions well enough: Egypt’s disastrous attempted invasion of Ethiopia in 1874/5 is a reminder of the dangers of taking on the only African nation not to have been colonised. More recently, its involvement in the Yemen War in the 1960s saw 70,000 Egyptian soldiers head across the Red Sea, but only 60,000 returning alive.

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The option of an air assault on the dam will have been considered, but probably not for long. Hitting it when the reservoir is full risks flooding Sudan and causing international outrage. So the window on that option is closing, and besides, the Egyptian F-16s and Rafael jets are thought not to have the refuelling capability to get them back home — if they survived the attack.

This spring Ethiopia’s senior command visited the missile defence systems surrounding the thick reservoir walls and vowed to “retaliate if there are any attacks”. This tough talking is not a surprise given that this is election year in Ethiopia and the Government has an interest in holding firm on what is a cause célèbre in the country.

Egypt probably cannot afford to risk a conflict. Its military is conducting huge exercises on the Libyan border and warning that it is prepared to invade the country. Cairo has said it will go in to support opposition forces if the Turkish-backed government army crosses Egypt’s red lines and attempts to take Libyan oil facilities currently held by the opposition. Given this crisis to Egypt’s west, Addis Ababa does not expect that Cairo would risk a shooting match to its south. President Sisi has not shown himself to be much of a gambler, and in his part of the world fighting a war risks not just losing it, but losing your grip on power, and even your life.

Another restraining influence is diplomacy. The Saudis and the UAE have substantial investments in both countries and do not wish to see them undermined by conflict, while the African Union (AU) is still trying to get the two sides to negotiate, and American diplomacy, which failed earlier this year, is still involved.

So, the likelihood is that Ethiopia will begin to part-fill the reservoir this year to a depth allowing them to test the first two turbines, top it up again next year to test the remainder, and then fill it to the 74 billion cubic metres (bcm) of water capacity by 2025. It says the Egyptians will come to see that this will not have a significant impact on their supply.

Egypt proposes a 10- to 15-year filling process, and a reduction in both capacity and the dam’s height to give it time to switch some of its agricultural sector to products which are less water intensive. Ethiopia responds that these ideas are a non-starter, but has offered  to guarantee Egypt 31 bcm a year. Egypt insists on 40 bcm.

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Alarm bells rang a few days ago when satellite images showed that the waters in the valley behind the dam had risen considerably but eased slightly after experts said this was probably due only to increased rainwater and not because the dam’s gates had been closed. Initially Ethiopia plans to hold back approximately 10% of the Blue Nile’s annual flow, meaning it will take until at least 2025 before the reservoir is full, at which point it could stretch back about 150 miles.

The way ahead may be for the AU to get Prime Minister Abiy and President Sisi around the same table to agree a compromise, including promises from Ethiopia not to use upstream-stored reserves for irrigation. The Egyptians are open to the idea of a mini-summit hosted by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is the current AU chair. Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told state TV that “the desired goal is to always reach an agreement and it is the thing we are trying to achieve.” So, even as the window for military action closes, the door has not closed on diplomacy.

Water is a matter of national security for all of the countries which rely on the Nile river system. Burundi, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda all monitor the flow of the river through their borders, but none are as at risk as Egypt, and none are less at risk than Ethiopia; 80% of Nile water originates in the Ethiopian mountains.

These facts mean that the Egyptians are going to have to compromise and get used to the idea that after millennia of being the pre-eminent Nile power, times have changed. The Greek historian Herodotus described Egypt as the gift of the Nile — but what the Nile gives, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam can take away.