Our World

FACULTY/STUDENTS Ukraine, Russia

Breaking Down the Conflict

Faculty discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This spring, many Americans watching distressing images of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wanted answers. Why is Russia waging war on Ukraine? And how can other countries help?

To examine the issues at stake, the USC Global Policy Institute — a student-run foreign affairs think tank and education institute — teamed up with USC Dornsife’s Department of Political Science and International Relations, Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to present three crisis briefings on the situation in Ukraine.

Thomas Seifrid, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, explained that although many countries have accepted Ukraine as an independent state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Vladimir Putin and other Russians have continually regarded the country as culturally, historically and geographically tied to the former USSR.

“Putin has now made a clear decision to go for it at all costs, which is why this fear of a Grozny-like outcome is well-founded,” said Robert English, associate professor of international relations, Slavic languages and literatures, and environmental studies, referring to the damage Putin inflicted on Chechnya when the republic sought independence in the 1990s.

The experts agreed that sanctioning Russia and opening borders to Ukrainian refugees are good first steps in terms of countermeasures, but that time will tell whether these initiatives will prove sufficient. —M.M.

FACULTY/STUDENTS Uzbekistan, Worldwide

For years, Steve Swerdlow, associate professor of the practice of political science and international relations at USC Dornsife and a human rights lawyer, has been researching and advocating for the release of political and religious prisoners in many former Soviet states, including Uzbekistan. Now, he is giving his students an insight into human rights work through his international relations courses by providing them with profiles of prisoners and encouraging students to investigate their cases.

“There are thousands of nameless, faceless religious prisoners out there who we know were largely innocent and not connected to terrorism,” he says. “They need someone to advocate for them.”

Swerdlow recently presented a report to Congress on the state of religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. He hopes that his classes will impart to students the necessity of human rights work.

“My students are the next generation of human rights defenders,” says Swerdlow. “I hope these experiences will inspire them to fight for an end to the phenomenon of the political prisoner, or at least to ensure that political prisoners around the world will always have an advocate.” —M.M. ALUMNUS California

The indigenous Patwin people have lived in California for more than 1,500 years, but after decades of forced assimilation, their language is nearly extinct. Thanks to Lewis Lawyer ’05, the Patwin language finally has its first grammar book.

Lawyer’s love of linguistics was first sparked in an undergraduate class at USC Dornsife. It inspired him to switch from jazz studies to a linguistics and music major.

While working on his PhD at the University of California, Davis, Lawyer realized his dissertation topic felt too esoteric. “I really wanted to take all these years of linguistics training that started at USC Dornsife and write something that people could actually use,” says Lawyer.

He reached out to the UC Davis Native American Studies Department and discovered that the university was situated on the site of a former Patwin village. The tribe’s language was severely endangered and tribe members were working to revitalize it.

Using archival records, Lawyer wrote the first book on Patwin grammar. It’s work that reflects his belief in the power of linguistics, first sparked at USC Dornsife.

“Language is an essential part of the cultural fiber of a people,” says Lawyer. —M.C.

ALUMNUS/FACULTY Southwestern Los Angeles County

Giving Poetry a Home

The first poetry library in the state of California exists today thanks to the efforts of alumnus Hiram Sims.

Located in a small building in Inglewood, the Sims Library of Poetry opened in 2020 and features 7,250 books of poetry, several computers with internet access and a small, private writing room.

“I wanted to give poetry a home, a space where people from the neighborhood could come to read and write, to think,” says Sims, who graduated from USC Dornsife with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2005 and a master’s degree in professional writing in 2007.

Most of the books in the library are by poets of color to reflect the diversity of the neighborhood.

Sims wants the library to serve as a neighborhood resource — a place for community and creativity.

His idea for a poetry library came while teaching lowerincome students who couldn’t find poetry books at local libraries.

“So, I decided to put 80 of my own books in a suitcase and brought it to class every week,” Sims says. “Students brought a book in and took one out.”

When one student referred to the bookbag as the “Sims Library,” the idea was born.

An adjunct assistant professor of the practice of English at USC Dornsife, Sims is now working on expanding programs at his library, including after-school and children’s workshops. —M.M.

FACULTY Bolivia

Two indigenous groups in the Bolivian Amazon have among the lowest rates of dementia in the world, a new study led by USC Dornsife’s Margaret Gatz has revealed.

The international team of researchers found that only about 1% of older Tsimane and Moseten people suffer from dementia. In contrast, 11% of people age 65 and older living in the United States have dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

The research adds to evidence that healthier, preindustrial lifestyles may hold clues to preventing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

“Something about the preindustrial subsistence lifestyle appears to protect older Tsimane and Moseten from dementia,” says Gatz, professor of psychology.

Researchers used computed tomography (CT) brain scan images, cognitive and neurological assessments and culturally appropriate questionnaires to diagnose dementia and cognitive impairment among the Tsimane and Moseten.

The roughly 17,000 Tsimane remain physically very active throughout their lifespans as they fish, hunt and farm with hand tools and gather food from the forest. The 3,000 Moseten also reside in rural villages and engage in subsistence agricultural work. Unlike the more isolated Tsimane, they live closer to towns and have schools, access to clean water and medical services, and are more likely to be literate.

Higher rates of dementia among indigenous populations in other parts of the world may be due to more contact with — and adoption of the lifestyles of — their nonindigenous neighbors, the researchers said. —J.M. ALUMNA India, Middle East, North Africa

Madina Zermeño, a Muslim who is Latina and Filipina, draws on her multifaceted identity to promote societal change.

Zermeño, who graduated this year, majored in political science at USC Dornsife. Her passion lies in education, equity and access — identifying ways American youth can use education as a tool to break societal patterns that have adversely affected minority groups.

She has volunteered abroad several times. She spent winter break of her sophmore year in Rajasthan, India, where she tutored children in the impoverished Dalit community. She says that her experience revealed many similarities between the historical factors preventing the Dalit community and United States minority groups from emerging from poverty or climbing the social ladder.

She spent spring semester of her sophmore year interning for the nonprofit Jossour Forum des Femmes Marocaines. Founded and led by women, the organization works on behalf of women and youth in the Middle East and Northern Africa region.

Zermeño hopes to attend law school and become either a civil rights attorney or a criminal defense lawyer. Her ambition “comes from a love and a passion for societal change,” she says. —M.D.

Simply Complex

The formula is simple, but H2O is one of the most remarkable substances in the universe.

By Darrin S. Joy

It’s something of an enigma: a compound composed of just two chemical elements, one of which is the simplest in the known universe. A pair of hydrogen atoms, holding firmly to a single oxygen atom, create a deceptively minimalist arrangement that belies its enormous versatility and importance.

The value of water, as a resource, is commonly understood. Without a steady supply, civilization as we know it wouldn’t exist.

But as a substance — as a molecule — water tends to elude most people’s sense of wonder. Which is too bad, really, because it’s quite remarkable.

SHAPED AND BONDED The basic molecular formula for water, H₂O, suggests a simple structure of three atoms in a straight line. But the physical properties of the three atoms force another arrangement — a “V” shape with oxygen at the point. This nonlinear shape transforms water into a remarkable substance with astounding abilities.

The “V” shape arises from the arrangement of electrons in the molecule, which causes an imbalance in electrical charge, with the oxygen point of the “V” slightly more negative than the opposite end near the hydrogen atoms. This slight separation means the water molecules are polarized — one pole positive and the other negative.

Polarity of electrical charge is at the root of water’s fascinating properties. The slightly negative end of one water molecule attracts the slightly positive end of another and vice versa in what scientists call hydrogen bonding.

Hydrogen bonds between water molecules are exceptionally strong, giving them a propensity to cling to each other, a behavior that manifests most commonly as surface tension. For instance, water in a container that is filled to the brim appears to bulge out of the vessel in a convex shape when viewed from the side due to surface tension. And some creatures, such as water striders, can take advantage of surface tension to skim across the surface of ponds.

Hydrogen bonds also enable water to adhere to foreign substances. This adhesive quality enables plants to draw water from the ground, through their roots and up to the tips of their leaves, defying gravity’s pull.

The polar nature of water and its resulting shape cause it to be lighter as a solid than as a liquid. That’s because the molecular Vs form airy crystal structures as they freeze, making ice less dense than its fluid form. So, ice floats on rivers and lakes, forming a shield against the cold air above and keeping the water below from freezing, which allows fish and other aquatic species to survive in colder climes.

Water’s hydrogen bonding also results in another critical characteristic — a higher than expected boiling point, explains Jessica Parr, professor (teaching) of chemistry. Parr earned her PhD in chemistry at USC Dornsife in 2007 and has taught general chemistry to undergraduates ever since. Her dissertation research centered on understanding how hydrogen bonds react under exposure to intense light.

“If water wasn’t capable of such strong hydrogen bonding, it would boil at minus 200 degrees Celsius,” Parr explains, far below its actual freezing point of 0 degrees Celsius. That means it would exist on Earth by and large as a gas, making life as we know it impossible. Instead, our planet sloshes with water, about 366 million-billion gallons in all.

A UNIVERSAL SOLVENT Water’s polar nature also makes it an exceptional solvent, capable of dissolving a wide variety of substances.

“We refer to it as the ‘universal solvent’ because it can dissolve, not everything, but so much stuff,” Parr says. “A lot

of other molecules are choosy about what they interact with and how they work together, but water will interact with just about anything.”

For example, its positive and negative centers attract and easily coax apart charged atoms, called ions, that make up salts such as sodium chloride, commonly used in cooking. The positively charged sodium and negatively charged chloride atoms find a comfortable home drifting among water’s polarized molecules.

But water can also dissolve substances that aren’t composed of ions, such as sugars. Rather than separating individual atoms of a sugar molecule, however, water molecules work their way between each sugar molecule, finding lightly charged parts to hydrogen bond with. This loosens the connections between the sugar molecules, drawing them away from one another and eventually into a solution.

“As long as there’s one atom present that makes the other molecule want to interact with water, water will do that,” Parr says.

IT GETS WEIRD Water doesn’t always behave as expected. While it most often transitions from solid (ice) to liquid to gas (steam or vapor) and vice versa as its temperature rises and falls, it can make the leap straight from ice to vapor under the right conditions.

“If you’ve ever noticed that your ice cubes get smaller over time, it’s because they’re sublimating in your freezer — the ice turns straight into a gas,” explains Parr. This sublimation is due to the low humidity within the freezer, which allows a few water molecules to escape from the ice into the air without melting first.

In the reverse process, called deposition, gaseous water suddenly freezes without ever becoming liquid. This is how snow forms. And when conditions are right, snow may skip the melting stage and sublimate right back into the atmosphere, a particular conundrum for drought-prone areas such as California, which rely on melting snowpack as a water source.

But water can be even weirder.

“Ice has lots of different crystal forms, but it can also exist in a form that resembles glass — an amorphous solid that is somewhere between liquid and solid and which can still flow,” Parr says. When water molecules coalesce at very low temperatures and pressures — think outer space — the resulting ice also can behave like glass, Parr says. Scientists suspect this may be among the most common forms of water in the universe.

THE MYSTERY AND WONDER CONTINUE Despite its prevalence in the universe and on Earth, and humans’ long familiarity with it, water continues to surprise.

Scientists recently discovered a form called “superionic ice.” Existing at extremely high pressure, such as in the core of planets, it appears to play a role in maintaining Earth’s magnetic fields.

And though water in pure form is not an electrical conductor, it behaves unexpectedly when exposed to an electric field. USC Dornsife’s Alexander Benderskii, associate professor of chemistry, and Stephen Cronin of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering recently found that water molecules near an electrode line up differently than those farther away.

“We were able to see how the molecules interacted with the electric field in a way no one had previously understood,” Benderskii said. The finding could change how chemists control reactions, including processes for making medicines and for purifying water for drinking.

As researchers continue to explore this versatile, unexpected substance, potentially revealing more strange characteristics, water may just prove to be the most complex simple molecule in the universe.

The history of Los Angeles is inextricably intertwined with the city’s insatiable thirst for the water it desperately needed to sustain its growth. The early 20th-century “Water Wars” that made L.A. possible also mired the city in a shadowy saga of corruption and lies that inspired one of the most celebrated noir movies of all time: Chinatown.

By Meredith McGroarty

In Los Angeles, the historians know the truth: The water here is anything but clean.

Like many areas with relatively high temperatures and paltry precipitation, water has always been a matter of life and death for L.A., a city that sits on a semi-arid coastal plain with desert on three sides and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth. The city resorted to drastic, at times deeply unethical — and occasionally even criminal — means to secure the vital resource that enabled it to grow into a major world metropolis.

“Water invites all kinds of shenanigans in the American West. It invites all kinds of deals: smoke-filled room deals, quiet deals, corrupt deals. And people need to know these histories,” says William Deverell, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies at USC Dornsife.

The conflicts over water were waged on two fronts. There was the freshwater battle that involved, among other skirmishes, the struggle over procuring drinking water and irrigation. And there was the saltwater battle, involving the development of the Port of Los Angeles and control over its lucrative shipping and trade potential.

DARK HARBOR If you watch enough television and movies, you might get the impression that nothing good ever happens down at the docks. Of course, that’s not true, but thanks to its depictions in popular culture, from On the Waterfront to The Wire, the American port has gained a reputation as a place associated with graft, dead bodies and illegally trafficked goods. And the Port of Los Angeles is no exception — from its origins as a site of some highly questionable land-grabbing to its lowest point in the 1960s, when bribery scandals and the mysterious death of its board president blackened its reputation.

The history of the port, located in San Pedro Bay, is the tale of a muddy tideflat that during the course of the 20th century grew to become the largest shipping container port in the Western Hemisphere. Alumna and former executive director of the port Geraldine Knatz chronicles the battle to control the waterfront in her book Port of Los Angeles: Conflict, Commerce, and the Fight for Control (Angel City Press and the HuntingtonUSC Institute on California and the West, 2019).

“For L.A. to become an important city it needed a harbor, and so it was the water’s edge, what we call ‘the Tidelands,’ that was the focus of the struggle,” says Knatz, who holds a joint appointment as professor of the practice of policy and engineering at USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Knatz earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from USC Viterbi in 1977 and a doctorate in biological sciences from USC Dornsife in 1979. Her book traces the port’s history, from the 1890s, when several railway barons saw its potential to yield lucrative freight shipping contracts, to its dominant role today. Dubbed “America’s Port,” the Port of Los Angeles now occupies 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront.

In the late 19th century, Southern Pacific Railroad agreed to link L.A. to its transcontinental railway in exchange for a monopoly on transporting goods from the port to the city, a move that brought an influx of tourism and business to the fledgling town. But around the turn of the 20th century, a dispute arose as to whether the state of California had been authorized to sell the land around the harbor to private individuals and companies, including Southern Pacific. Thomas Gibbon, a member of the first Board of Harbor Commissioners for the port, argued it had not. He used his position — as well as his media muscle as publisher of the Los Angeles Daily Herald — to fight for the city’s right to reclaim the land in order to expand the port.

“The city of L.A. was aggressive, ruthless,” Knatz says. “They would blackball people who did business with the private property owners and tried to undermine those businesses because, from the city’s perspective, the property should be in public ownership. When it was privately owned, the city got no rent.”

After gaining control of the surrounding land, the city expanded the port to meet the needs of a growing nation. Although whispers of corruption and underhand dealings plagued its rise in the early 20th century, it was in the ’60s that the Port of Los Angeles “really hit rock bottom,” Knatz says.

“There was a scandal over leasing — without competitive bids — a large portion of the port’s Terminal Island for construction of a World Trade Center to a developer whose only assets were liens against his failed projects,” Knatz says. “Los Angeles Harbor commissioners were indicted, and in 1967, the Harbor Commission president was discovered floating facedown in the main channel. No evidence of foul play or suicide was found, however, and his death was ruled an accident.”

IS ALSO THE TALE

OF THREE RIVERS.

THE STORIES OF

THESE RIVERS —

THE LOS ANGELES,

THE OWENS AND

THE COLORADO —

ARE INTERWOVEN WITH THE FABRIC OF THE CITY’S HISTORY.”

A TALE OF THREE RIVERS If L.A.’s battles to control its waterfront were comparable to the plot of a noir movie, then so were the city’s legendary struggles to obtain sufficient freshwater to secure its expansion.

“The tale of L.A. is also the tale of three rivers,” says Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. “The stories of these rivers — the Los Angeles, the Owens and the Colorado — are interwoven with the fabric of the city’s history.”

The rivers also serve as a handy yardstick to measure the city’s expansion, Deverell notes. The Los Angeles River, the smallest, was adequate for a small pioneer town but quickly proved insufficient for the city’s aspirations.

“It supplied the city’s fresh water needs until about 1900, but it was a temperamental little river that was prone to flooding,” Deverell says. By the early 20th century, the city had decided to solve the problem by creating a concrete channel that whisked water from the mountains to the ocean as speedily as possible.

“We wouldn’t do that quite the same way today, because we’d be worried about sending all that water out to the ocean without trying to capture it. But back then they didn’t think that way,” Deverell says.

The Owens River powered the city’s rise in the early 20th century. The population of L.A. more than doubled in size from 1920–29, reaching 1.2 million by 1930. This dramatic population explosion prompted local officials to turn to another, larger source of water: the Colorado River. That aqueduct was completed in 1939.

“L.A.’s history with water is that of chasing a bigger river each time,” Deverell says. “The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is dependent on the Colorado River, now has about 19 million customers. It’s an absolutely gargantuan water delivery, storage and distribution system.”

But it was the scurrilous behavior involved in the pillaging of the Owens River to feed the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the first decades of the 20th century that has been immortalized in film. It provided the inspiration for Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown, acclaimed as one of the best films ever made about L.A.

“LOS ANGELES IS DYING OF THIRST!” This doomsday warning is discovered by private eye Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) in an early scene in the movie, when he returns to his car after spying on Hollis Mulwray, the fictional chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), and finds a note tucked under his windshield wiper. It prophesizes drought and ruin for the citizens of the city.

A classic noir movie, Chinatown features all the usual suspects, including a femme fatale, as well as the familiar tropes of the genre: corruption, murder, a gumshoe and a dark secret. Though it is set in the 1930s (an artistic decision to showcase that era’s visually striking cars and clothing), the movie’s central theme has its roots in the real-life scandal that took place decades earlier when a rapidly expanding L.A. needed to secure more water to power its industries and provide for its burgeoning population.

“The conflict in the film, as in real life, is about water being taken away from the Owens Valley to be used in L.A.,” says University Professor Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature.

As early as the late 19th century, L.A. was experiencing growing pains as it found its expansion hampered by a lack of water. In 1905, LADWP Chief Engineer William Mulholland, Mulwray’s real-life counterpart, oversaw the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which diverted water to L.A. from the Owens Valley, more than 190 miles north of the city.

The rights to the water and land in the valley had been acquired through some less than ethical maneuvers on the part of L.A. officials and other investors. The aqueduct, which was completed in 1913, ended up sucking the valley dry, devastating the lives of its residents, who were mostly farmers and ranchers. Yet the aqueduct project was expanded several times over the following decades.

“Basically, L.A. sticks a giant straw in the Owens River and sucks the water down to L.A.,” Deverell says. “Then it puts another straw in it, and another. The Owens Lake dries up, and not only have the people lost their water but the dust in the lake bed is kicked up and gets into the air, causing a lot of health problems for residents.”

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS In both L.A.’s saltwater and freshwater battles, the city’s politicians exhibited a ruthless single-mindedness that left many casualties in its wake — both human and environmental. In the early 20th century, the Owens Valley was transformed from fertile farming land into a parched, arid region where little would grow. Starved of water, local farms and ranches failed. Since the mid-20th century, air pollution from ships and cargo trucks has plagued neighborhoods around the Port of Los Angeles, with health consequences for local residents and workers.

An early scene in Chinatown warns of the humanitarian costs, showing L.A. officials gathered at a town hall meeting to discuss a water project. An angry farmer walks down the center aisle with his sheep, yelling at the bureaucrats that he no longer has enough water for his livestock and asking what they plan to do to help him. He is quickly shooed out of the building.

“Owens Valley is a situation where big, brawny L.A. decided they would push around a small community,” Deverell says. “And before L.A. came, white Americans had seized the land from the Paiute Indians. So, there’s this recurring story of the powerful snatching up water resources.”

Braudy, professor of English and art history, agrees, noting that L.A.’s so-called “Water Wars” illustrate the city’s loss of innocence, foreshadowing its rapid rise to become a major metropolis with all the power, corruption and lies that entailed.

He points to one particularly symbolic scene in Chinatown that encapsulates the growing divisions in class and privilege in the city. After the disrupted town hall meeting during which the embattled farmer’s pleas for water for his livestock are dismissed, Gittes drives to Mulwray’s house in Pasadena. The shot pans out as his car enters the long driveway, flanked on either side by a carpet of bright green grass. Gittes walks past a man hosing down one of Mulwray’s cars to reach the backyard, where well-tended plants and trees surround a rock pool with a running waterfall.

“We need to grapple with the fact that water is obviously critical to our survival, but it invites people who want to monopolize water resources,” Deverell says. “We have to make sure that the decisions we make about water in the 21st century are as democratically derived as possible. We’ve got to push water out of its dark past in L.A. and into the sunshine.”

Water Works

USC Dornsife scholars make a splash as they address challenges — from local to global — centered around water.

Compiled by Margaret Crable and Darrin S. Joy

Original stories by Michelle Boston, Emily Gersema, Nick Neumann, Gary Polakovic and Kathryn Royster

Water is the great primordial home; the incubator of all life on the planet. It has been and continues to be the single most important resource for all known living things.

So, it’s not surprising that water is the focal point of an array of efforts by USC Dornsife researchers, students and alumni to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. From building resilience in farmed marine species to charting the ocean floor to ensuring homeless Angelenos get the water they need to survive, USC Dornsife scholars are finding innovative ways to quench the world’s thirst for solutions.

STRONGER MUSSELS In March, USC President Carol L. Folt cut the ribbon at the opening of USC Dornsife’s Nuzhdin Lab in San Pedro, California.

The lab focuses on regenerative aquaculture — the breeding, rearing and harvesting of macroalgae and shellfish — that can help produce seafood resilient to climate change. It also centers on commercializing new green technologies such as biofuels, made from kelp, that could reduce fossil fuel demand.

“Our research has the potential to reduce global warming, produce biofuels from the ocean, restore kelp populations, and provide a natural solution for the security of the California shoreline,” says Sergey Nuzhdin, professor of biological sciences.

Nuzhdin started with a handful of tanks on USC’s University Park campus in 2007. Now he has 6,000 square feet of laboratory space at Altasea, the West Coast’s largest center for researching the development of ocean resources.

PhD student Jordan Chancellor is already working at AltaSea, growing mussels and oysters under stressful conditions to identify the genes that make them resilient to the impacts of climate change or pollution.

Researchers at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies based at USC Dornsife may have unlocked kelp’s potential as a major biofuel source. Raising and lowering the kelp on a “kelp elevator” dramatically accelerates its growth, demonstrating the potential for mass-produced seaweed to power vehicles with biofuel harvested from the ocean.

QUENCHING THIRST In 2020, Catherine Cummings ’21, then a law, history and culture major at USC Dornsife, spent an afternoon handing out burritos to people experiencing homelessness in downtown Los Angeles. Frequently they also asked her for water.

Cummings learned there were few public water fountains downtown and many of the unhoused didn’t have money to buy water from stores. The COVID-19 pandemic had also closed the cafes where many had turned for a free drink.

Cummings and Kate Montanez ’20, who majored in environmental studies and political science at USC Dornsife, and Aria Cataño ’20, who majored in public policy and law at USC Price School of Public Policy, founded Water Drop LA two years ago. The organization distributes 2,000 gallons of water to the unhoused from a church parking lot each week. Hundreds of fellow USC students have volunteered for the cause, which is still going strong.

SEAFOOD SAVIOR Dungeness crab meat and uni, the soft innards of sea urchins, are coveted seafood delicacies. They’re also big business in California — crabbing alone brings in up to $80 million a year. Both industries are threatened by climate change.

As oceans warm, the water becomes more acidic with less oxygen. This makes it harder for crabs and urchins to form their protective shells.

“There are ocean conditions so caustic that the animals’ shells are essentially liquified as soon as they form,” says Andrew Gracey, associate professor of biological sciences.

In research funded by USC Sea Grant, based at USC Dornsife, Gracey and Nina Bednarsek of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Program are finding out how the species are impacted by these conditions at their most vulnerable point of development, the larval stage. If they can pinpoint the “tipping point” at which larvae fail to thrive, fishery managers will have more success monitoring the sea creatures’ health — and, hopefully, keeping our tables supplied with delicious and nutritious seafood.

UNCOVERING HISTORIC WATERWAYS Much of the Los Angeles Basin’s original water pathways, from the once grand Los Angeles River to its seasonal arroyos, have been altered by concrete and rerouting. In recent years, a movement to restore segments of the L.A. River to its original state, with a focus on preserving local ecology, have renewed interest in the basin’s natural ecological environment.

Researchers from a variety of institutions, including USC Dornsife, are working on a 3D map that draws from old aerial photos, indigenous knowledge and historic maps to synthesize the first complete model of the basin’s natural landscape, before urbanization.

Blue-line streams and contour lines from old maps, along with input from indigenous groups, help researchers like Beau MacDonald, a GIS project specialist at USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI), find out where water once flowed, pooled and flooded across the basin.

“Our research can inform thoughtful restoration efforts, map potential patterns of vegetation and allow us to better

“The goal of our program is to open doors for students who otherwise may not have considered or pursued science, technology, engineering or math careers that involve scientific diving.”

understand human resource use,” says MacDonald, who is working on the project alongside fellow USC scholars John Wilson, professor of sociology, civil and environmental engineering, computer science, architecture and preventive medicine and director of SSI; Phillip Ethington, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences; and William Deverell, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies and director of the HuntingtonUSC Institute on California and the West.

DIVERSIFYING THE WATERS A large majority of professional divers are male and white and many are over the age of 40. A new program hosted by the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, based at USC Dornsife, aims to diversify the field of diving by providing training to people from historically marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds.

This summer, program participants will head to USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island, where they will receive training, mentoring and equipment. The program is designed to help participants work toward earning an American Academy of Underwater Sciences diving certification.

“Scientific diving has a lot of barriers to entry. The goal of our program is to open doors for students who otherwise may not have considered or pursued science, technology, engineering or math careers that involve scientific diving,” says John Heidelberg, director of the Wrigley Marine Science Center and professor of biological sciences and environmental studies.

The program is funded by an Ocean Exploration Education Mini-Grant from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

IN UNCHARTED TERRITORY There’s still so much we don’t know about our planet. The ocean covers some 70% of the Earth’s surface. But more than 80% of the ocean floor remains unexplored.

In October 2021, USC Dornsife alumnus Nick Foster, an environmental studies major who minored in GIS and sustainability science, boarded the E/V Nautilus to help change that. Foster was part of a small crew that spent 10 days sailing from California to Hawaii to map a portion of the ocean floor. The group worked around the clock, processing data in pairs. On breaks, Foster would sit on the ship’s deck, rocked by the waves and looking at the stars.

The excursion was led by the Ocean Exploration Trust, a nonprofit devoted to uncovering the ocean’s mysteries. For Foster, a scuba diving enthusiast, it was the dream outcome for his educational journey.

“This experience has given me an actual physical connection to the mapping of the seafloor,” he says. “It’s something I learned about in school, and now I’m a part of it.”

CARBON CRUNCHERS An international team of scientists led by researchers at USC Dornsife has found that the speed of carbon transfer in the ocean — the rate at which carbon dioxide moves from the atmosphere to the water — is influenced by the size and type of bacteria that latch onto the carbon particles.

The discovery sheds greater light on how carbon — including CO2 generated by cars and other human activities — moves from the atmosphere into the ocean and ultimately makes its way into the deep ocean, says Naomi Levine, associate professor of biological sciences, quantitative and computational biology and Earth sciences.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to build a model to predict ocean-scale carbon-cycle dynamics that account for these microscale processes that have been observed in the lab,” Levine says. “We show that the processes matter a lot.”

Healthy colonies of bacteria raise the likelihood that the carbon — released when these hungry hitchhiking bacteria munch on particles — will stay on the ocean’s surface and then return to the atmosphere.

Knowing which bacteria live in which ocean locations, and whether they’re thriving or not, could also help scientists better predict local rates of carbon transfer or release.

CLEANING HOUSE IN THE HARBOR Santa Catalina Island’s Avalon Harbor, 22 miles off the Southern California coast, receives upward of a million tourists each year. Visitors enjoy kayaking, paddleboarding and other water-centric activities.

What’s not allowed in the harbor? Scuba diving — with a single exception.

Each year, divers flock to the bay and spend one day removing debris from the harbor during the annual Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup.

This year marked the event’s 40th undertaking, with USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber and Catalina Conservation Divers co-hosting.

Nearly 100 volunteers catalogued more than 2,700 pieces of debris — totaling nearly 1.7 tons — taken from the harbor by divers, according to Avalon Environmental Services.

Participants in USC Dornsife’s Scientific Diving Program were among 561 divers who also freed nearly 130 creatures that were entangled with debris, including 18 crabs, 15 sea urchins, 10 brittle stars and three octopuses, according to event officials from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors’ PADI Aware Foundation. (For photographs of the event, see page 44.)

SPILL PATROL Early last October, the United States Coast Guard received an alarming report: An oily sheen was floating on the water off Huntington Beach, California. By the following day, tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil had spilled from an offshore pipeline in the area, contaminating the surrounding waters and much of the Orange County coastline.

As officials and conservationists scrambled to respond to the spill, they leaned heavily on data supplied by USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. The institute is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Ocean Observing System, a 24/7 monitoring program that uses radar and other sensors to track ocean currents and the color of the water along the U.S. coastline.

The Wrigley Institute maintains six of the program’s high-frequency radar installations.

“The data we get goes directly into supporting the decision-making process,” says Wrigley Institute Project Manager Matthew Ragan.

“The oil is going to be on the surface, so wherever the current is going is where the oil is going to go,” he says.

“The oil is going to be on the surface, so wherever the current is going is where the oil is going to go”

Officials use this data to decide which beaches to close and where to send boats to deploy booms, the floating barriers that corral the spilled oil.

According to Ragan, the Wrigley Institute’s radar data also delivers benefits beyond oil spill warnings. The Coast Guard uses the information in search-and-rescue operations, and the city of L.A. uses the data to help determine the safest times to perform maintenance on outfall pipes, where treated wastewater is discharged into the ocean. The information is also important for safely piloting large vessels to shore, tracking blooms of toxic marine algae that may make beachgoers and wildlife sick, and finding the source point of illegal dumping in the ocean.

FIXATED ON FIXATION Nitrogen constitutes about 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere, where it exists mainly in its most stable form, a gas made of two atoms, or N2. A significant amount also resides in the oceans as dissolved nitrogen.

Most animals and plants can’t use N2. They need the nitrogen to be converted into a more biologically useful form through a process called nitrogen fixation. But only certain microorganisms can do that, and many of them live in marine environments.

The process is crucial to life on Earth, so understanding its role in the ocean and the organisms that perform it is essential, according to Doug Capone, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife.

“The oceans are becoming an ever-increasing source of food for humanity, and nitrogen fixation is critical in maintaining many marine food webs,” says Capone, who holds the William and Julie Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies. His research includes studying how ocean microbes affect the movement of nitrogen through plants and animals and from land to sea to air and back.

A thorough understanding of the factors involved in nitrogen fixation in the oceans could help future generations safely and sustainably farm the seas, Capone says.

Capone co-wrote Marine Nitrogen Fixation (Springer, 2021), which summarizes the extensive research and current understanding of marine nitrogen fixation.

Primarily intended to help scientists and students as they advance the field of study, the book gives a detailed overview of topics such as which marine microorganisms are fixing nitrogen, where they live and what environmental factors — including human-caused changes such as ocean warming and acidification — affect microbial activity including nitrogen fixation.

BEQUEATHING RESILIENCE Scientists have long known that coral and algae live in mutual harmony. The coral provides algae safety and supports photosynthesis; the algae produce oxygen, help remove wastes and supply the coral with energy (as well as beautiful color).

They live together amicably — until environmental stress, such as climate change, disrupts the partnership. When this happens, some coral lose their algae and become bleached. But others are capable of “shuffling” their algae, meaning they change the environment within their cells to favor some algae over others, depending on water conditions, competition or available nutrients. Shuffling algae within their cells can help the coral cope with the changes in the surrounding water.

USC Dornsife biologists who study coral’s ability to shuffle the algae in their cells have shown that adult coral can pass along this ability to their offspring.

“What we’re finding is that corals can pass their shuffled complement of algal partners, or symbionts, to their offspring to bestow a potential survival advantage, and that’s a new discovery,” says Carly Kenkel, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences.

Kenkel traveled to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Orpheus Island as part of a team studying a particular coral, Montipora digitata, during two spawning seasons: one under normal conditions and the other during a global mass coral bleaching event.

Montipora digitata coral can package algae in their eggs when they reproduce. In looking at the eggs between the two seasons, the researchers discovered that rearrangements of the algae communities in the adults were also reflected in the coral’s eggs, indicating that they could be passed down to offspring from the parents.

The findings show coral may be more adaptable than thought, but will that be sufficient for survival?

“Corals have more mechanisms than we thought to deal with climate change, but they’re fighting with a tiny sword against a foe that’s like a tank,” Kenkel says. “Their adaptability may not be enough. They need time so they can adapt.”

IMMEDIATE RESULTS While traveling the world in 2008, three years after graduating with a degree in international relations from USC Dornsife, Justin Arana visited Morrungulo, Mozambique, on the southwest coast of Africa. A fateful walk accompanying a local family to collect drinking water altered the course of his travels — and his life.

After an hour on foot, the group arrived at the family’s water supply — dirty, shallow pools of water around which cows had defecated. “The experience was a stark eye-opener,” Arana says. “I was really confronted with the lack of access to clean water.”

A day later, Arana passed by the local hospital where long lines of women and children were waiting to be examined. “They couldn’t keep any supply of medicine in the hospital because people just kept coming in with ailments from unclean water,” he says.

That evening, he contacted former colleagues, describing the situation and suggesting a solution: The village needed a water well. For about $6,000, Morrungulo residents could tap into freshwater aquifers, he says. Children who previously stayed home from school to help their mothers collect water could be back in class learning. Diseases could be prevented.

The next morning, a donor came through with the funds, and before long, a new well located at the local school allowed families easy access to clean water.

“When you bring clean water to a community, you see results right away,” says Arana.

That project has since grown into Water Underground, a nonprofit that installs wells in places where they are desperately needed and helps communities learn to maintain them and distribute the water equitably, establishing selfreliance and dignity in the community.

“We have the capacity to touch people’s lives in a very powerful way,” Arana says.

“Water is a wonderful example of that.”

Water, simultaneously vital to human life and one of our deadliest foes, has inspired the human imagination in compelling ways since before the written word. By Margaret Crable

In the summer afternoons of 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir set up their easels overlooking La Grenouillère (The Frog Pond), a picturesque outdoor floating bar and restaurant on the River Seine, not far from Paris.

In short, quick brushstrokes, the two artists captured the play of sunlight on the water and Parisians enjoying the idyllic surroundings.

The water changed minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour as the sun sank and shadows dappled the river’s surface. Monet and Renoir painted the same subject from almost the same perspective, but their canvases showed very different depictions.

This was the start of a groundbreaking artistic movement eventually dubbed “impressionism,” which tossed out long-cherished rules about precision and realism in art and ushered in an era that instead valued an artist’s individual perception.

It was such compelling work that the formerly allpowerful French art institution L’Académie des Beaux Arts, which initially rejected these paintings, saw its influence decline as the impressionist movement eventually gained enormous popularity, leaving its detractors in the dust. Water was the catalyst for this emerging technique. Monet’s depiction of water reflections heralded a new way to think about brushwork and painting.

“When a painter paints water, they are studying the in-between of things. Water helps you to understand a new vision, a fresh way of understanding your own particular perspective,” says USC Dornsife’s Hector Reyes, associate professor (teaching) of art history. “Water complicates what we think we know about the world.”

STURM UND DRANG Humanity’s relationship with water has never been easy, which perhaps explains why it has played such an outsized role as a creative muse.

“Water is ambiguous. We need it to live, but too much of it can kill us,” says USC Dornsife’s Kristiana Willsey, lecturer of anthropology and folklore expert. Good rains make for fertile harvests. Too much rain and seeds, homes — even people — can be washed away.

This duality has inspired storytelling and art for millennia.

“Our earliest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains a great flood. The Bible’s Book of Genesis tells of a universal flood in which humanity gets washed away,” says Anthony Kemp, associate professor of English at USC Dornsife. Modern works like the 1995 film Waterworld or J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel The Drowned World depict post-apocalyptic civilizations choked by rising water levels.

We’re equally gripped by the threat of water scarcity. In Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, water shortages help spark a planetary revolution while the neo-noir film Chinatown dramatized the heated fight for water rights in Los Angeles.

“WATER COMPLICATES WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD.”

E F

LEGENDS OF THE DEEP Stories about water can be found in some of our earliest legends and folklore.

A substance that is often believed to have a mind of its own, water is also mysterious, cloaking what swims beneath its surface and reflecting and distorting faces in confusing shimmers. So, it’s hardly surprising, Willsey says, that water — and the weird creatures that inhabit it — have often inspired stories of disguise and impish independence.

The Scottish “kelpie,” a mythical river-dwelling horse whose hooves face backwards, is believed to be able to shape-shift into human form, perhaps taking the guise of a beautiful young woman who then seduces a man to follow her into the depths.

In Celtic and Norse mythology, “selkies” are seal-like creatures who can turn into women if they shed their sealskin and it’s stolen by a man looking for a bride. The selkie may marry the man and bear him children, but if she ever finds her skin again, she will turn back into a seal and return to the sea.

And, of course, there are mermaids, which appear in the folklore of many cultures and are believed to either warn sailors of impending disaster or lure their ships to run aground on rocks.

“Water is more than just a purely positive or purely negative force,” says Willsey. “Mermaids, for example, were sometimes playful and sometimes evil.”

THE BARREN SEA Ambiguous relationships with water are also found in the culture of the ancient Greeks who, despite their vast maritime achievements, surprisingly never felt fully at home on the sea. In his epic poem The Odyssey, set as a nautical voyage, Homer describes the ocean as “barren,” “boundless” and ominously “wine-dark.”

“The Greeks’ idea of the worst death was a shipwreck. It was considered a horrifying death, especially the fear of being eaten by fish,” says Vincent Farenga, professor of classics and comparative literature at USC Dornsife.

Despite their fears, the ocean still called powerfully to the Greeks. They constructed a vast fleet of ships and explored the Mediterranean, building colonies and empires that stretched from Russia to Egypt to Spain. “The Greeks felt most at home on land, but the sea was the medium of their expansion and, in many ways, of their wealth and power,” says Farenga. “It’s also why their ideas could travel so rapidly and why they could absorb ideas from other cultures.”

The sea for the Greeks was also a place of passage, of moving from one zone to another. “Sometimes it represents going from one place that is very real and concrete and then arriving at another which is otherworldly,” says Farenga.

In The Odyssey, the entrance to the underworld was believed to lie beyond the sea. Thus, a passage over the ocean could also transport one from the living to the dead.

“We also see in the heroic stories male figures who grow from adolescence and immaturity into a mature hero, and it’s a sea voyage that is necessary in order to achieve that transformation,” says Farenga. “Poems like The Odyssey and Argonautika manage to utilize these motifs in infinite ways.

“Odysseus journeys to places that have an unreal quality, fantastic places that are inhabited by nonhuman creatures and beasts like the Cyclops. The Odyssey is the masterpiece of Greek storytelling when it comes to exploiting the symbolic potential of the sea.”

DARK PASSAGEWAYS Fast-forward approximately 2,600 years and the ocean as passageway is still a stalwart fixture in storytelling — this time peopled with swashbuckling pirates.

The book Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, first serialized in a children’s magazine in 1881, told the story of a teenage boy who finds a map leading to buried pirate treasure and embarks on a quest.

If a 15-year-old running off to sea sounds nerve-racking to modern parents, it was par for the course in the 1880s. Boys as young as 12 were routinely drafted to serve in Britain’s Royal Navy, and books like Treasure Island helped romanticize these voyages.

Universally considered one of the world’s greatest works of literature, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick is the sailor Ishmael’s narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off Ahab’s leg at the knee on a previous voyage. D. H. Lawrence called it “the greatest book of the sea ever written.”

In the end, all the crew but Ishmael perish in the quest,

G H I J

a somber reminder of the ocean’s power to vanquish even the most courageous of men.

“The sea becomes a testing of manliness, a place of adventure. It can be a place of horror, as in Moby Dick, or you can return again to your own realm after you’ve been through this baptism, transformed from timid to heroic,” says Kemp. “Or, as we see in the work of Joseph Conrad, the sea is the medium that takes us to colonialism.”

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an English sailor grapples with the immorality of colonialism in Africa while working as a ferryboat captain. Conrad’s story was inspired partly by personal experience: He had been placed in command of a steamship on the Congo River after the captain fell ill.

As in ancient Greece, the conceptualization of the ocean as a passageway was also tied to the expansion of empire. Much of Europe had spent several centuries using the seas to build extensions of their nations abroad, moving ideas, goods and people through ocean routes. This included the use of slave ships to transport captured Africans to colonies in the New World.

“The phenomenon of slavery was not possible without control of the oceanic ‘Middle Passage’ from West Africa to the United States or to the Caribbean,” says Farenga. “This, too, was a journey from life to death — quite literally, as many did not survive passage.”

The passage has become a source of inspiration for some Black artists. The 1990s Detroit electronic duo Drexciya developed an Afrofuturist mythology tied to these watery depths.

The Drexciyans, the duo declared, were the descendants of enslaved pregnant women who had been tossed overboard. Their unborn children swam from the womb and grew into a powerful underwater civilization.

“Drexciya’s Black speculative, aquasonic concept albums were radical and transformative when they emerged in Detroit’s rich electronica scene, and have been key in Afrofuturist theorizations in art and scholarship since,” says Jonathan Leal, incoming assistant professor of English and currently a post doctoral scholar and teaching fellow.

This mythos has since been depicted in books and graphic novels, and has inspired painting, poetry and calls for proposals to memorialize the 1.8 million Africans who perished while crossing the Atlantic as a result of the slave trade.

IMAGINE THE UNIMAGINABLE Nowadays, we’re less likely to encounter new novels about plucky young people finding maturity at sea. Authors of such tales tend to write nostalgically about the past, rather than record present cultural beliefs. Patrick O’Brian’s popular Aubrey-Maturin series, the inspiration for the 2003 film Master and Commander, is set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century.

Perhaps in some ways this focus on the past is because, until relatively recently, we felt we had largely conquered water. Dams keep rivers contained, radar and satellites help guide us to port, and rain is tracked weeks ahead of time.

David Hockney’s 1960s and ’70s paintings of L.A. swimming pools portray water as blissful rectangles of orderly blue we can dive safely into. It is art that is more about poolside contemplation than the stormy voyages depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s dramatic 19th-century seascapes.

“For Hockney, the Hollywood swimming pool is a metaphor for our interest in reflection — the philosophical introspection at the side of a pool — and the filmic scene, made tangible and also illusory in paint,” says Reyes.

But water — one of Earth’s most powerful forces — is not so easily tamed. It now presents a greater risk to humanity than ever before. Climate change has heated our oceans, melted glaciers, intensified storms, increased the risk of tsunamis and turned once gentle streams into surging rivers.

The art world is responding. In 2014, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson transported 24 blocks of glacial ice, discovered floating near Greenland, to London, where he installed them in front of the Tate Modern to call attention to the melting ice caps. The Chinese American visual artist Mel Chin developed an app that enables users to see how New York City’s Times Square would look if it were flooded by rising seawater.

A recent painting, The Unimaginable by USC Dornsife Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts Enrique Martìnez Celaya, depicts an iceberg on fire.

Will this collision of water and art, like impressionism, help us construct a new vision of our world — one that this time will also inspire us to take the crucial steps we need to avoid disaster?

Our planet surely hopes so.

INDEX

A Bathers at La Grenouillère by Claude Monet, 1869.

B La Grenouillère by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1869.

C

D Part of a neo-Assyrian clay tablet from the seventh century BCE, recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh

Poster for the 2021 film Dune.

E The Kelpies, 98-ft-high steel sculptures near Falkirk, Scotland, by Andy Scott, 2013.

F A Mermaid by John William Waterhouse, 1900.

G Odysseus und Polyphemus by Arnold Böcklin, 1896.

H An 1899 edition of Treasure Island.

I A Bigger Splash by David Hockney, 1967.

J The Unimaginable by Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts Enrique Martínez Celaya, 2022.

PIPE DREAMS

From the communal baths of ancient Rome to the Great Stink of London and the fortuitously named Victorian sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper, USC Dornsife scholars trace the rocambolesque history of plumbing through the ages. By Susan Bell

Today, those of us living in first-world countries mostly take plumbing for granted, barely giving it a second thought unless we encounter the inconvenience of a blocked drain or leaking tap. But throughout most of Western history, plumbing was an alien concept. People lived surrounded by filth — their own and other people’s — and rarely, if ever, bathed, preferring perfume to mask the stench over contact with honest soap and water. Many paid the price, living shortened lives as a result of poor hygiene.

Perhaps then it’s no surprise that if we do pause to think about plumbing, we tend to consider it as a relatively modern invention. And yet, sophisticated plumbing systems actually first existed more than 6,000 years ago.

AN EARLY START Two ancient cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan and northeast India, had advanced forms of plumbing by 4000 BCE that included drainage and sewage systems, sitting toilets and underground pipes to dispose of waste.

More than 4,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians used copper pipes to transport water and waste. Archaeologists excavating ancient Egyptian tombs even discovered toilets, presumably so the dead could relieve themselves. Eternity would be an awfully long time to wait, after all.

By 2000 BCE, the Chinese were transporting water via bamboo pipes. The world’s oldest surviving flush toilet — a stone seat over a channel of water fed by pipes — dates from the same period, and can be viewed on the Mediterranean island of Crete. A full bucket would have provided the flush action. The Minoans also enjoyed the luxury of running water and bathtubs. By 1500 BCE, ancient Babylon boasted drains and a working sewage system.

But the real trailblazers of modern plumbing were — of course — the Romans. Not only did they engineer towering aqueducts to bring water to Rome and the major cities of the Roman Empire, they also instilled a vibrant culture around bathing, building monumental communal baths. Their

plumbing wizardry didn’t stop there. They installed latrines (also communal!) and constructed complex sewer systems to whisk away disease-causing human waste from densely populated urban areas. They even piloted sophisticated underfloor heating.

However, the Romans didn’t invent public bathing — the ancient Greeks take credit for that with their large gymnasia, where they favored energetic daily workouts followed by public ablutions in communal baths. But if the ancient Greeks enjoyed a brisk rubdown after working up a healthy sweat, it was the Romans who were responsible for turning bathing into a languorous art form.

“In terms of scale, no culture before or since has been as devoted to public bathing as the Romans,” says Ann Marie Yasin, associate professor of art history and classics at USC Dornsife.

Aqueducts delivered the equivalent of 300 gallons of water per person per day to Rome — “seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today,” as author Bill Bryson notes in his history of private life, At Home. One house in Pompeii was discovered to have as many as 30 taps.

And this was true not just of Rome. “Aqueduct technology traveled where the Romans traveled and was considered one of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization,” Yasin says.

SPA DAY WAS EVERY DAY Unlike the no-nonsense ancient Greek approach, daily bathing in the Roman world was more akin to the pleasures of a modern spa experience.

A ritualized practice, it involved passing through a series of variously heated pools, including the frigidarium and the caldarium. Along the way, Romans could stop at the unctorium to have scented oil massaged into their skin or proceed to the laconicum, or steam room, to work up a sweat before the oil and dirt were scraped off with a curved metal instrument called a strigil.

There was certainly no shortage of choices of where to bathe.

Urban census documents indicate that by the end of the first century BCE, there were close to 200 small baths in Rome. That number ballooned to more than 850 by the fourth century CE, including nearly a dozen thermae, or giant public imperial baths. Some of these larger baths were truly palatial in terms of scale and grandeur, accommodating up to 3,000 bathers.

Yasin stresses that bathing was only one part of what happened there. Larger public baths contained libraries, lecture halls, art collections, shops, brothels, gyms, snack bars, barbers and beauticians. People went to the baths to relax, socialize, conduct business, discuss politics, exchange the latest gossip, see and be seen.

“Unlike spectacle spaces, where seating was strictly segregated, at the baths all social classes may have mixed freely, from senators to slaves,” Yasin says.

“In terms of scale, no culture before or since has been as devoted to public bathing as the Romans.”

A NOT-SO-PRIVATE FUNCTION Our modern concepts of privacy weren’t shared by the Romans, who not only bathed together with joyous abandon but were also perfectly happy to use communal public latrines — often featuring at least 20 seats in intimately close proximity. Roman toilets may not have flushed, but a channel for drainage around the seating area did allow waste to be washed away.

“A very important part of the Roman concept of civilization and cities was the attention they showed to the drainage of sewage,” Yasin says. “Waste removal was frequently built into the network of a city, running alongside or under its streets. In Rome, the great drain, the Cloaca Maxima, drained the Roman Forum and ran out into the River Tiber, while other Roman cities boasted complex infrastructure systems that incorporated drainage.”

PLUMBING’S DARK AGES While the Roman legacy of bathing continued to thrive in the East, particularly in the Byzantine and early Islamic worlds, the West was a different story. There, the practice was lost for centuries, replaced by a deep fear of water and mistrust of washing. The Roman emphasis on opening the pores for health and hygiene was superseded by the mistaken belief that pores should remain clogged with dirt to prevent deadly vapors from invading the body.

As the West descended into the Dark Ages, bathing became a rare, deliberately infrequent event — a lifestyle choice that didn’t bode well for peoples’ health, hygiene or olfactory receptors. As a result, life was frankly pretty grim for centuries. Only monks were fortunate enough to enjoy some respite from the ubiquitous filth.

“Plumbing went into pretty catastrophic decline as Roman infrastructure decayed,” says Jay Rubenstein, professor of history and director of the Center for the Premodern World at USC Dornsife.

The vast majority of cities lacked any kind of sophisticated plumbing and were still dependent on wells or fountains for the water they needed to drink, bathe and extinguish fires.

Why did monasteries fare better?

“Central to monastic life were rituals of purification that required access to a reliable water supply,” Rubenstein says. But questions of ritual aside, he notes, managing enclosed communities of a hundred or more people provides a very real incentive to figure out a way to get clean water in and wastewater out.

“As a result, complex water systems began to make a comeback around 1200, developed from knowledge gleaned from rural religious communities and imported to cities,” Rubenstein says. “The techniques they employed harken back to Roman plumbing. It’s just possible they were able to consult technical guides, but more probably they rediscovered the technology themselves or brought it back from Italy.”

Inevitably, as he points out, there’s a lot of guesswork involved where medieval plumbing is concerned due to the lack of poetry and great art being produced on the subject during the Middle Ages.

One exception is the Eadwine Psalter. At the back of this lavishly illustrated book of psalms dating from 1155 is an unexpected document: a detailed, two-page pullout diagram of the plumbing of Canterbury Cathedral. Showing what is probably one of the most sophisticated plumbing systems of the time, the map details how spring water was piped in, irrigating apple orchards and a vineyard, before being raised to a water tower that gave it the necessary momentum to flow through the monastery.

Water spouts from spigots decorated with dragon or animal heads, and a necessarium (latrine block) is topped with a statue of a lion. The infirmary is shown to be sensibly equipped with a separate necessarium for the sick and the monastery with a designated place to wash one’s hands before entering the choir and handling the Eucharist.

“Most of the medieval latrines I’ve seen dropped into tunnels that also served as escape routes. That could make for rather a dramatic escape if you had to get out in a hurry.”

This all begs the question: Why are plumbing plans included at the back of a holy book?

The simple answer is to provide a map for repairs. But Rubenstein argues that it’s there because it’s all part of God’s work.

“The church is a big community. And organizing it is a huge task,” he says. “Building a water system is part of that administrative achievement and is as much an act of piety as building an altar.”

But despite the new water systems, people remained largely steadfast in their resistance to bathing for the next 650 years.

“Wash your hands often, your feet seldom and your head never,” was a common English proverb, while Queen Elizabeth I was said to have bathed once a month “whether she needs it or no.”

Bryson notes that in 1653 the diarist John Evelyn recorded “a tentative decision to wash his hair annually,” while Louis XIII of France went unwashed “until almost his seventh birthday in 1608.” As for one of the first great woman travelers, the 18th-century aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Bryson recounts how a new acquaintance blurted out his amazement at the grubbiness of her hand after shaking it. “‘What would you say if you saw my feet?’ Lady Mary responded brightly.”

“There are two components to the history of bathing in Japan: purification and healing, and they go hand in hand.”

PURIFICATION AND HEALING But if the West was wallowing in its own filth for centuries, this was not the case in the East, particularly in Japan, which has a long and illustrious history of bathing. The Korean spa culture that is so popular today can be traced back to Japan’s influence during the colonial period of the early 20th century.

One reason that Japan became so focused on cleanliness lies in its topography: Two thirds of the world’s hot springs are located in Japan, providing a convenient supply of endless hot water. These springs are traditionally believed to come with the additional benefit of healing properties due to their high natural mineral content.

The other reason for such an early focus on bathing is religious belief.

“These springs have been regarded as a sacred landscape for so long because of the Shinto tradition — the indigenous pre-Buddhist religious culture of Japan,” says USC Dornsife’s Duncan Williams, professor of religion, East Asian languages and cultures and American studies and ethnicity.

“While today we might investigate claims of spring water’s healing powers by using science, back then they were simply viewed as miraculous,” Williams says. “Throughout Japan, many of the oldest hot springs have religious connotations because of their supposed healing powers.

“There are two components to the history of bathing in Japan: purification and healing, and they go hand in hand.”

In Japanese culture, water and salt have long been the two main substances used for purification. Families who have experienced a death will pile salt outside their homes while water will be used to purify the body or the home after a disaster or unfortunate event.

Once Buddhism became established in Japan in the eighth and ninth centuries, Buddhist temples were designed to comprise seven structures, one of which was required to be a bathhouse — a concept that originated in China.

“Buddhist sutras, or sacred texts, devoted to the bathhouse would talk about the cleansing of one’s body, but also what they called the cleansing of one’s ‘moral, or karmic defilement’ — an idea that also came from China,” Williams says.

Indeed, bathing was so popular in Japan that by the 17th and 18th centuries, guidebooks were published listing the country’s best bathhouses and hot springs.

By the 18th century, Japanese city planners were already thinking about how to prevent what they saw as the two biggest threats: fire or a pandemic spread through poor sanitation and lack of hygiene.

“As a result, in terms of sanitation, access to bathhouses, and technologies of cleansing and dealing with sewage, Japanese city planning was very advanced in that period compared to other parts of the world, including European capitals like Paris or London,” Williams says.

However, that didn’t mean that people necessarily had bathing facilities in their own homes, he notes.

“From as far back as the ninth and 10th centuries in Japan, when people would visit Buddhist temples to bathe, even up to when I was growing up there in the 1970s, not everybody had baths in their homes. Instead, they would visit a neighborhood communal bathhouse, or sento,” Williams says.

Today, the vast majority of Japanese homes have their own bathrooms. More than 80% are also equipped with Japan’s high-tech sanitation products that frequently include built-in bidets and heated seats. These high-end products have had a global impact, making the country a world leader when it comes to matters of plumbing.

MIASMA All this is a far cry from the early-Victorian era. Before flush toilets, people were dependent upon chamber pots, outhouses, cesspits and the visits of the “nightsoil men” who disposed of human waste, often by selling it for fertilizer, in what must undoubtedly have been one of the least enviable jobs of all time.

The system worked — sort of. But as London grew, so did the city’s noxious odors and the Victorians’ concerns about disease, which they firmly believed was caused by “miasma” that floated over the city like a bad smell.

“They were convinced that something that smelled disgusting could actually produce disease,” says Lindsay O’Neill, associate professor (teaching) of history. “Indeed, leading Victorian sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick insisted to an 1846 parliamentary committee that ‘all smell is disease.’ ”

Thus, cholera, dubbed “the poor man’s plague,” was attributed to miasma when it swept through Europe in the early 19th century. It wasn’t until a deadly outbreak in 1854 in London’s Soho that investigators finally discovered its root cause, thanks to the inspired detective work of one man: John Snow.

A leading anesthesiologist, Snow became suspicious that the outbreak had originated at the Broad Street Pump, source of the local water supply.

“That blows people’s minds because the Broad Street Pump was always thought to be particularly clean,” O’Neill says. “But Snow figured out that the common thread between those who got sick and died was that they had consumed its water.”

A nearby institution that suffered no cases — a brewery where workers preferred their beer ration to water — was the outlier that supported his hypothesis.

Snow’s deduction — a radical departure from the widely accepted miasma theory — caused considerable consternation at the time. But after Snow removed the pump handle, no new cases occurred. The pump was eventually discovered to have become contaminated when the walls of a nearby cesspit disintegrated.

“It’s a great story of trying to control the uncontrollable city through sewage.”

THE GREAT STINK This episode got Londoners thinking more critically about the cleanliness of their water supply, resulting in the creation of a Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855.

Little progress was made, however, until the advent of the wonderfully named “Great Stink” of 1858, which forced the government’s hand.

The problem for the growing city, as O’Neill points out, had always been: Where do you put all the waste?

“Especially as Londoners began to embrace the flush toilet, much of it ended up in the Thames, which went from being a relatively pleasant river to London’s cesspit,” she says.

The unusually hot, dry summer of 1858 caused the Thames to run exceptionally low. Despite dipping the curtains of the Houses of Parliament in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to protect its members from the horrendous odors rising from the refuse- and waste-clogged river, the affront to the olfactory system was so intense that Parliament could no longer work. As The Times reported on June 17, “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench.” By Aug. 2, it had passed a bill to fix London’s sewage problems.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer at the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, was hired to construct a sewage system. “Sanitation has never had a greater champion,” Bryson notes. Between 1858 and 1865, Bazalgette oversaw the construction of more than a thousand miles of pipes to deliver London’s waste far enough down the Thames (although not quite far enough in the opinion of those living near the outfall pipes) that incoming tides wouldn’t send it back toward the city. “A stroll along the Thames in London now entails walking along the Victoria and Albert Embankments, constructed around the Victorian period to hold those big sewers,” O’Neill says. “The physical landscape of London we’re familiar with today is actually due to these pushes to control sewage.” Ornate pumping stations were also built at the tidal outflow. “They were Victorian palaces, built to celebrate their control over steam power, but also their control over waste,” O’Neill says. “It’s a great story of trying to control the uncontrollable city through sewage.”

THE GREATEST NAME IN SANITATION Victorian critical thinking about sanitation and cleanliness also created the impetus to replace cesspits with water closets.

The fortuitously named Thomas Crapper, a Victorian sanitation engineer and creator of the U-bend, has often been erroneously credited with the invention of the modern toilet.

“Crapper is probably not as important in the development of the flush toilet as we would like him to be,” O’Neill says. “But he’s there at the point when its development and plumbing for all is really exploding from the mid-1850s to the 1880s.”

In fact, the flush toilet was actually invented three centuries earlier by John Harrington, godson to Queen Elizabeth I. For centuries, latrines had existed in castles as tiny rooms equipped with a seat that allowed waste to drop into ditches or, alternatively, the moat — the latter option providing an effective additional deterrent to any enemies who might unwisely consider breaching the castle walls by swimming across.

“Most of the medieval latrines I’ve seen dropped into tunnels that also served as escape routes,” Rubenstein says. “That could make for rather a dramatic escape if you had to get out in a hurry.”

When Harrington demonstrated his prototype to the Queen in 1587, Elizabeth was by all accounts delighted with her godson’s invention — until he made the fatal error of composing a humorous essay on the subject. Elizabeth was not amused, and without royal patronage, his invention fell out of favor. It lay forgotten for almost 200 years, until cabinetmaker and locksmith Joseph Bramah revived the idea, patenting the first modern flush toilet in 1778. Twenty-three years later, across the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson installed three of the nation’s first flush toilets at the White House, powered by rainwater cisterns in the attic.

“Bathing … was only one part of the understanding of cleanliness. Neatness and unadorned clothing were as — if not more — important.”

THE GREAT CLEANLINESS MOVEMENT Victorians first encountered the novelty of flush toilets at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where more than 800,000 people patiently stood in line at London’s Crystal Palace to experience them. They proved such a resounding success that by the mid-1850s, some 200,000 had been installed in homes across the country.

But while affluent Victorians enthusiastically adopted water closets, ordinary people still lived in appalling filth. People continued to empty chamber pots out of bedroom windows. Streets and basements were awash. Even after effective sanitation became widely available, many people continued to show considerable resistance to soap and water.

We may forget that until the 20th century, access to water indoors was rare, even in major Western cities. Bathing was not normalized and thus was often seen as unhealthy, O’Neill notes.

“Bathing was done out of the house and, especially starting in the 1500s, bathhouses were often seen as sites of sin. Even when Methodist founder and cleric John Wesley, who is commonly seen as the wordsmith behind ‘cleanliness is next to godliness,’ pushed for bathing toward the end of the 18th century, it was only one part of the understanding of cleanliness. Neatness and unadorned clothing were as — if not more — important,” O’Neill says.

Today, we think of bathing as a pleasant way to relax, but that wasn’t the case for the Victorians.

In fact, Bryson writes what finally convinced Victorians to adopt bathing was “the realization that it could be gloriously punishing.”

Showers were designed to be as ferocious as possible. One model, he notes, required users “to don protective headgear … lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.”

America went on to lead the world in the provision of private bathrooms. Europe lagged behind, largely for reasons of space — and cost. By 1940, Americans could purchase a bathroom suite for $70 — a price within the reach of most. But by 1954, as Bryson notes, only one French home in 10 had a bath or shower, and for many worldwide, a bathroom was — and still remains — an unattainable luxury.

So, the next time you luxuriate in a hot bath, slake your thirst by drinking a glass of safely filtered tap water, or simply flush the toilet, remember our good fortune — and the billions worldwide who still don’t have access to what we in first-world countries take for granted: the comfort and lifesaving wonders of modern plumbing.