When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century
by Fred Pearce
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Book Summary Information
Author: Fred PearceEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-03-15
ISBN: 0807085731
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Book Reviews of When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century
Book Review: A broad view of water scarcity around the world
Summary: 5 Stars
The story of this book is summarized well by the titles of the ten parts into which Pearce organizes his 34 chapters: "When the rivers run dry . . . the crops fail . . . we mine our children's water . . . the wet places die . . . floods may not be far behind . . . engineers pour concrete . . . men go to war over water . . . civilizations fall . . . we go looking for new water . . . we try to catch the rain . . . [and, most hopefully,] . . . we go with the flow." Pearce tells the story from many locations around the world, on every continent except Antarctica. In every place, people are using water in an unsustainable way.
There is plenty of water - - we live on a blue planet, after all. Unfortunately, we use water wastefully, inefficiently (growing cotton in deserts), and the things we do to get water through dams or pumping aquifers make a lot of other problems worse. For example, people destroy wetlands and then build a dam to control the floods that result when high water no longer collects in the wetlands, rushing down the main channel instead. As a result, a sizeable chunk of these problems are self-inflicted.
Pearce tells a compelling story. My only complaint is that he consistently sacrifices depth for breadth. With 34 stories to tell in 311 pages, that is inevitable. His approach to both the problems and solutions is also overly voluntaristic: people don't have to make these bad choices, and people can simply decide to stop making them. If that were true, why are the same bad choices made everywhere?
Clearly, there are structural reasons why everyone tries engineering solutions to problems, "solutions" that just make things worse. Just as clearly, Pearce misses a political economy story here: small groups manage to get governments to spend public money on water projects that take water from large numbers of people and give the water to large farmers, urban consumers, and industry. If that's the central issue, as I think it is, then Pearce really should have analyzed the problem as such - - and thought about how to redesign politics so that this doesn't happen.
Encouraging everyone to behave better, sadly, does not work.
The book deserves 4.5 stars, but for its accessibility to a wide audience I'll round up to 5. If you're looking for treatment at the level of an upper-level undergraduate or above, round down to 4.
More When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century reviews:
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Summary of When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century
In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce travels to more than thirty countries to examine the current state of crucial water sources. Deftly weaving together the complicated scientific, economic, and historic dimensions of the world water crisis, he provides our most complete portrait yet of this growing danger and its ramifications for us all.Named as one of the Top 50 Sustainability Books by University of Cambridges Programme for Sustainability Leadership and Greenleaf Publishing.
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