Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

Every four months, I participate in one or more university-sponsored, Osher Lifelong Learning In Retirement (OLLI) discussion groups. Each deals with an important contemporary world issue. For the coming Fall 2008 trimester, I've signed up for the course "Water and the Politics of Water," and our textbook is "Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource," by Marq de Villiers. We are supposed to read and discuss the book slowly over the course of eight two-hour-long discussions. That was the plan...but as soon as the book arrived, I started reading it and couldn't put it down! The course won't begin for another two weeks, but I've already devoured the entire book. I don't know when I have ever come across such a compelling and captivating work of popular nonfiction! For the purpose of our discussion group, I cannot think of a better starting-off point. The book provides an outstanding introduction to a critical contemporary concern. Each chapter focuses on a set of related issues. Taken by themselves, each of these could serve as the basis for thousands of detailed academic articles and books. It is a testament to the author's enormous skill that he was able to condense each set of issues down to a manageable summary, and give these topics just the right balance of fact and human-interest stories to make a page-turning work of can't-put-it-down nonfiction. Since I was reading the book for a future discussion group, I read it pen-in-hand, liberally highlighting the text and writing notes to myself in the margins. The most frequent note I wrote was: "Needs update!" Typically, before each discussion, participants research the issues in order to bring new and updated material to the forefront. This book is an excellent catalyst for sparking interest for further research. The book was first published in 1999 and republished in a revised and updated version in 2003. Even with the revised version, most of the issues still require significant updating some five years later. Accomplishing this research on the Internet is easy; of course, there is also an overwhelming amount of popular, academic, and technical information available on these issues in public and academic libraries. Don't get the impression that this book is out-of-date. The emerging water crisis is one of those "slow emergencies" that's happening just outside our range of day-to-day human perception. The vast majority of the damage has been accomplished in the past 100 years--an infinitesimally tiny length of time for any geological process, yet on our human perception scale, still profoundly slow...so slow that many people still do not know that a problem even exists. The book is a real eye-opener, and a first-rate springboard for discussion groups. I recommend it highly.

This is an excellent overview of the water problems plaguing the globe at the moment, as Marq de Villiers travels far and wide to show just how precious a resource water really is. Most importantly, he does so in a very accessible style of writing that personalizes so many of the issues surrounding the rapid depletion of aquifers by drawing on childhood memories of his home farm in South Africa and first hand sources in the current geopolitical battles. Of note is the Middle East and North Africa where the battle over water is entertwined with the ongoing political disputes. He notes how carefully Israel has managed its water resources yet is heavily reliant on sources in the West Bank to sustain its agricultural industry. Needless to say this has made the issue of Palestinian statehood that much more difficult. He also explores the thorny relationships along the Nile where downstream Egypt has threatened to go to war with the Sudan and Ethiopia over any divergence attempts with this great river. And, Kaddafi's attempts to create a massive underground river from aquifers deep below the Sahara to coastal Libya, in order to restore badly depleted sources. But, even in seemingly water rich nations like the US and Canada, water battles persist, mostly to do with the contamination of rivers and aquifers that are the result of industrial waste and poor farming practices. More thorny are precious water rights in dry states like Wyoming and Montana that often end up in court and sometimes settled using frontier justice. For those not familiar with the looming water crisis, this book will be a real opener, for others it will provide valuable information regarding disputes from the Yellow River in China to the Colorado River, which has long since quit flowing to the Gulf of California. While de Villiers avoids being the doomsayer, he does make one exceedingly worried about the future of this most precious resource.

This book is by far one of the most interesting, can't-put-it-down non-fictional books I've ever read. I know, I'm speaking in superlatives, but I can't say enough about this book. I made my thesis topic water-related after I read Water. And yet Water reads like a novel, even though it's packed with information and statistics; de Villiers does an amazing job of making the scientific research information palatable to the average (non-science inclined) reader by weaving in his own experiences and stories. You can feel his passion for this issue come through in his writing style. He integrates quotes very well and makes the subject come alive. For example, when writing about a severe chemical spill along the Rhine River, he quoted Bertram Muelle, saying: "The river ran red... Otherwise, it looked no different...But I knew that as I watched, its creatures were dying. It was the most terrible feeling. I was frozen, sickened..."He makes turns a very technical and scientific topic into a page-turner. A must-read! P.S. Pay attention to the Canada-US Great Lakes issue, along with the Rhine and Danube Rivers (the subject of my thesis!).

After reading this book I have a slight compunction with each visit to the faucet or garden hose. I must admit I was somewhat incredulous about reading a book about water. However, the author captured my attention early in the first chapter and I found the book difficult to put down thereafter. My expectations of reading material suggestive of an impending water shortage were quickly cast aside. The author demonstrates significant evidence that the world is currently embroiled in a crisis of which most individuals are unware. The mere thought that countries may be led to war to secure a water supply, no matter how realistic, is disheartening. My conscious level of awareness regarding our current water supply has been heightened as a result of reading this excellent book. For more specific details see the reviews by Robert Steele and Charles Sharpless, they are both excellent summaries.

I rank this book as being among the top ten I have read in the decade, for the combined reason that its topic concerns our survival, and its author has done a superior job of integrating both scholarly research (with full credit to those upon whose work he builds) and what must be a unique background of actually having traveled to the specific desolate areas that comprise the heart of this book-from the Aral Sea ("the exposed seabed, now over 28,000 square kilometers, became a stew of salt, pesticide residues, and toxic chemicals; the strong winds in the region pick up more than 40 million tons of these poisonous sediments each year, and the contaminated dust storms that follow have caused the incidence of respiratory illnesses and cancers to explode.") to the heart of China ("According to China's own figures, between 1983 and 1990 the number of cities short of water tripled to three hundred, almost half the cities in the country; those who problem was described as 'serious' rose from forty to one hundred." The author provides a thoughtful and well-structured look at every corner of the world, with special emphasis on the Middle East, the Tigris-Euphrates System, the Nile, the Americas, and China; and at the main human factors destroying our global water system: pollution, dams (that silt up and prevent nutrients from going downstream or flooding from rejuvenating the lower lands), irrigation (leading to salination such that hundreds of thousands of acres are now infertile and being taken out of production), over-engineering, and excessive water mining from aquifers, which are in serious danger of drying up in key areas in the US as well as overseas within the next twenty years. The author provides a balanced and well-documented view overall. His final chapter on solutions explores conservation, technical, and political options. Two statements leapt off the page: first, that it is the average person, unaware of the fragility of our water system, that is doing the most damage, not the corporations or mega-farms; and second, that for the price of one military ship or equipped unit ($100 million), one can desalinate 100 million cubic meters of water. The bottom line is clear: we are close to a tipping point toward catastrophe but solution are still within our grasp, and they require, not world government, but a virtual world system that permits the integrated management of all aspects of water demand as well supply. This book should be required reading for every college student and every executive and every government employee at local, state, and federal levels; and every citizen.