Lunch Topics: Why the Clearest Water Is Empty

At lunch, we talked about beaches. A colleague said they would only consider going to a beach with clear water.

Curious, I went to look this up. What exactly makes clear water?

The clearest water is empty

Water is not blue the way the sky is blue. The sky scatters light. Water filters it. Water absorbs the red end of the spectrum and lets the blue pass through. What is in the water decides the color you see. Sediment makes it brown. Phytoplankton makes it green.

So what makes water clear and picturesque? Water that has very little in it. Clear water is poor in nutrients, poor in plankton, nearly sterile. The clearest water in the world is an aquatic desert.

It is beautiful, but in the way a clean room is beautiful. Nothing is living in it.

But this is the preference of many people; you will have seen photos of the Bahamas, or of the Dead Sea, and will notice the water is remarkably clear and beautiful.

Similarly you will see photos of nature resorts, lake cabins, mountain views, beautiful, set in nature, somehow a blend of civilisation and natural beauty.

The reality is, civilisation comes at a cost to nature.

This is not new

I am not the first to notice this. In 1995, William Cronon argued that the wilderness we revere is a human invention: a backdrop to visit, not a place to live. Michael Pollan called the American lawn “nature under totalitarian rule”: green, uniform, with any weed treated as dissent. Edward Abbey watched the national parks being loved to death by tourism.

That was 1968; people have not changed much.

To be clear, I do not think the problem is preferring clear water. I do not think it is preferring managed environments either. I am a city person. I like the city, and I like a clean city: clean streets, planned parks, water you can see through.

I am simply under no illusion that a clean city is natural.

Is there a solution?

Singapore calls itself a Garden City. I think the label is right, and more honest than most. There is a lot of nature here, and we manage it well. But it is not nature. It is a garden, man-made and man-maintained.

That is not an insult. A garden is a real thing, a relationship with nature rather than nature itself.

Resorts do not admit it. They market the image as untouched nature, while their dredging and construction remove the mangroves, the seagrass, the reefs that kept the water clear in the first place. That is business, sure, but it is quite sad.

Can’t we just be honest with ourselves? I can appreciate nature and yet not want to coexist with it. I can enjoy a garden and a clear lake, but I won’t call it nature.