Author: Karen Piper
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This book is "The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists...", and if it's all true, it's truly scary.
Since author Karen Piper is professor of post-colonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri, I'm going to come down on the side of veracity, backed up by the extensive end-notes in this book. Karen Piper has received a Carnegie Mellon Fellowship, a Huntington Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Award, the Sierra Nature Writing Award, and a Sitka Center residency. I'm guessing she knows what she's talking about!
For a planet which is 70% larded with it, you wouldn't think water shortage would be an issue, would you - but it's more than just water - it's clean, potable (and portable!) water that's the issue, and that's where the contention and cost come in. Talking of contention, it's long been mine that energy and water will be serious flash-points in the near future and that's why my blog, which is mostly about fiction writing, takes time now and then to review non-fiction books that I consider important. This book is one of them.
This was an advance review copy, which means one doesn't expect to be perfect, but I have to report some serious formatting issues here and there. I don't know what the original typescript looked like, but it didn't seem to have transitioned well for my Kindle. Unfortunately, there are no location or page numbers in this edition so I can't quote them, but Kindle search will find them.
One problem I found was "This dust has been shown to cancer cause cancer..." (too much cancer!) and a little bit later, "...his own p e ople" (spacing within the word 'people'). There were some other instances of this nature )oddball line breaks and so on) which I hope will be eradicated before the final version goes to the press (as it were). Other than that, it's very well-written, and the photographs accompanying the text looked good in the Kindle version, but the serious problem here is not the errors: it's that cancer. This is one side-effect of water shortage which you do not typically expect.
The cancer issue was raised as part of a report about the San Joaquin valley, which is drying up because the local water has been pumped out and nothing has been done to replenish it. This is an increasing and common problem with water tables. When places like Tulare Lake and Owens Lake are pumped dry, it exposes things like heavy metals which were - not so much safely, but at least held - in the lake bed, and they began blowing all over, particularly into people's lungs. Another issue with parched land is dust storms which can not only completely block visibility, hampering transport and causing accidents, but which can also unleash disease vectors, such as "Valley fever" which has quadrupled in the area over the last decade.
That's not even the scariest part of this book, believe it or not. The scariest part for me came in the beginning - not the introduction (I don't do introductions or prologues), but the beginning of the book proper, where we learn that uncomfortable and disturbing facts of water privatization. In 2001, five water corporations controlled three-quarters of the world's privatized water - but how much is that really? Well, a decade from now, a fifth of the world's population will be dependent upon corporate water and in the US, it will be more like double that. That frightens me.
The book comes with extensive end notes, and a conclusion which offers numerous solutions to help alleviate water problems. One of these which is not so obvious is one which I embraced a long time ago: become vegetarian. Eighty percent of the world's water is expended upon agriculture, and as the author quotes Sunder Lal Bahuguna saying,
If you use one acre of land to grow meat...then you will get only 100 kg of beef in a year. If you grow cereals, you'll get 1 to 1.5 tonnes. Apples you get 7 tonnes. Walnuts 10-15 tonnes.
The bottom line is that we're wasting water by feeding grain to animals so we can, in turn, eat meat - and we're robbing people of water in doing it. Here are some articles (URLs were good at the time of posting this blog) featuring or by this book's author to give you a little taste of what you can expect from the book itself:
Revolution of the Thirsty
No money, no water - not in Africa, but in Detroit!
People without water are more likely to become extremists
Water is the new oil
Explore the frightening landscape where water and thirst are political, and drought is a business opportunity.
Water Privatization Overlooked as Factor in Egypt's Revolt
