Shopping for Water by Culp, Glennon, & Libecap

Title: Shopping for Water
How the Market Can Mitigate Water Shortages in the American West
Author: Peter Culp
Author: Robert Glennon
Author: Gary Libecap
Publisher: Island 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!

It began to pour with rain last night where I live, which makes it deliciously ironical that I'm reading this today! It’s long been my feeling that within the next fifty years there are going to be two major crises in the USA (and elsewhere in the world): water shortage, and energy shortage (this ignores more unpredictable problems such as acts of terrorism and disease outbreaks), so when I saw this book which addresses one of these serious issues, I was very interested in reading it.

When I say water shortage, Earth doesn’t have a water shortage per se - seventy percent of the planet is covered in the stuff for goodness sakes, but clean fresh water with no salt in it? Not so much! As the authors point out in a great summary which opens this book, the USA southwest is in major crisis, and has been for well over a decade.

Living in Texas (home of the Rio Sand) as I do, where we have routine water restrictions every single summer, they didn’t have to remind me of a problem which, as they point out, has over time caused nearly thirty billion dollars worth of economic damage, but perhaps for others it has been far less front and center. It certainly hasn’t been a major talking point in politics or in the news.

As the authors make clear, it’s not just ranching and agriculture which are hit by the shortage. Silicon valley is right in the middle of the dry zone, and their water needs are dramatic. Of course, with a lot of US electronics manufacturing going to the sweat-shops (nay, sweat cities!) of China and other so-called "low cost" areas, the problem is nowhere near as large as it could be, but there is still significant electronic production here in the USA, and it requires copious amounts of water. There is also, as the authors highlight, a significant demand (in both water and energy) in the growing use of "server farms" - massive facilities containing nothing but Internet server and storage computers for corporations like Google

California is worse off than Texas and unlike Texas (and as the authors note), California produces about half the USA's fruit, nut, and vegetable needs, yet their water shortage is far worse even than Texas. There is no sign of improvement. The authors seem to look forward to a time when the crisis will alleviate ("Even after the current drought ends…" p8), but personally, I'm far from convinced that it ever will! Climate change is now in the driving seat, and all bets are off, but whether this drought ever does alleviate or not, the water shortage is not going away. Like the energy shortage, it needs to be addressed now.

The authors give a disturbing example on page nine, of how ridiculously bad the situation is. They relate that the level of the Sacramento river became so low this year (2014) that salmon fry could not navigate it downstream to reach the sea. Believe it or not, thirty million fry were transported in climate-controlled tankers, hundred of miles to the ocean! How they'll ever find their way back, having had their exposure to their home river severely curtailed, is anyone's guess. The authors also offer more heartening examples of cities (such as Phoenix, Arizona, the Yuma area, and Santa Fe, NM), which have sustained growth by expertly managing their water use, so it's not all bad news.

The text deals only with what is, not what could be, and by that I mean the authors admirably address current issues and offer examples of solutions that are already being explored or in place. One thing which they didn’t cover was the obvious one: those areas in the southwest which are experiencing the worst of the drought, also receive copious and regular sunlight, and are next-door to the ocean. Solar-powered desalination plants would be expensive to build, but economical to run, and would solve the water crisis in these areas.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can ignore other solutions, or that we should do nothing but build desalination plants, but it would have been nice to have seen this option explored and put on the table. Some 16,000 desalination plants throughout the world already provide water for 300 million people - coincidentally, about the population of the USA. Israel produces 40% of its water from this method. A plant in El Paso, Texas, produces over 27 million gallons a day at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant which is, this being Texas, the world's largest inland desalination facility, but it produces only 4% of El Paso's water. California has 17 plants "in the works". Texas has 44 such plants and is planning on building ten more, and these don't even use sea water, but saline ground water. This isn’t prototype or experimental science any more.

However, this book does a great job in exposing and exploring a real problem, and in considering real solutions to it. I recommend it. Right now (as of this blog post) the book is free on Amazon. Go get it!!!

Climate Peril by John J Berger

Title: The Fine Print of Self-Publishing
Author/Illustrator: John J Berger
Publisher: Northbrae Books
Rating: WORTHY!

My blog is mostly about fiction, but once in a while I come across a book that's non-fiction and too important to ignore. I have not yet reviewed any books on the topic of global climate change, so this seemed like a really good place to start, and I wasn't disappointed.

Be warned that the text is rather dense because it is filled with fact, and detailed extrapolation from that fact, so the reading can be a bit dry - if you'll forgive a climate pun! - but that doesn't take anything from the critical importance of the message which this book delivers, which is that global warming is real, it’s happening rapidly, we are reaching (if we haven't already passed) a tipping point, every month which goes by without anything being done about this catastrophe is a step deeper into a mire which will take a long, long time from which to extricate ourselves, and this warming is caused by humans. These are facts, climate-change deniers be damned.

Here's the contents list:

Global Climate, 2100 AD
Current Climate Impacts
Natural Climate Change
Unnatural Climate Change
The United States in Peril
Tipping Point Perils
Economic Perils
Health Perils
Extreme Weather Perils
Extinction Perils
Oceanic Perils
Conclusions
(7 Appendices)

I hate to be US-centric because global warming is going to affect the entire planet to one degree or another, but the US has such influence and is such a contributor to the problem that it also has a major responsibility to "man-up", so I think the chapter titled "The United States in Peril" is called for, and it does not exaggerate when it uses the word 'peril'. The following paragraph contains some - it’s tempting to use the word 'trivia' here, but there's nothing trivial about it - information about the impact in the USA. Note that temperatures are in Fahrenheit, the items below are paraphrased from the book, which itself takes data from the report titled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (GCCIUS).

While the Earth has warmed, on average, by about 1.4 degrees over the last century, the US has warmed by 2 degrees.
Coastal waters around the US could become as much as 8 degrees hotter over this century.
Temperatures in the Great Plains could be as much as ten degrees hotter.
US Coastal sea level rise could be as high as three or four feet. This will kiss-off coastal wetlands and marshes.
Most grains and vegetables do not do well in significantly increased heat.
With each percent drop in stream flow in the Colorado River basin, power production there will drop by 6% - 9%.
Two-thirds of California's native plant species could experience range reductions of up to 80%
(Note that this is only a limited summary of some of the points raised in this chapter)

Clearly the cost of global warming and climate change isn’t simply that summers are hotter and winters colder. It’s more complex than that, because the planet is a complex system, so costs will come in a variety of (sometimes unexpected) forms in terms of things like land loss, weather extremes, crop and property damage from these extremes, increased prevalence of exotic diseases, and species extinctions on an unprecedented scale.

So there's a monetary cost, too and this is explored in this book. The question is, do we want to pay a relatively small cost now, to try and prevent or at least mitigate this disaster, or are we going to do nothing now, and simply defer a much larger cost to our grandchildren? It's your choice and you're making it now. Read this book and do what you can.

The Last Beach by Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper

Title: The Last Beach
Author: Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper
Publisher: Duke University 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.

Note that this book has a lot of interesting and disturbing photographs illustrating the author's case. I don't have permission to post any of those, though I wish I did. However, I have substituted two images tagged as free to re-use on Google to illustrate the same concepts. To substitute for one related to sand (or beach) mining which I would have liked to share, please take a look at this website. To substitute for the images showing the difference between a beach which is driven on and one which is not, check out this page, in particular the images at middle right (which looks just like the one used in the book) and the one at bottom left.

This book, which is available from November 2014, isn't fiction. It's our future. In a no-nonsense, if slightly dry tone, this densely-packed book takes you through the facts of what we are, as a civilization, doing to our beaches through mismanagement, horrifying pollution, and our appalling dependence upon oil.

It takes a few pages to get to the meat. There are several pages of drawings before the foreword, three pages of that, and then five pages of preface, all of which I skipped as I routinely do with prologues, etc. This message is too important to delay. When you have a story to tell that's this powerful, preamble just hobbles it.

The story of our beaches is rich with startling images. It's tempting to use the cliché that it's "lavishly illustrated", but the images, while beautifully photographed are actually horrific because of what they show. They reveal, in the most graphic way, how we are hanging, drawing and quartering our beaches - the locations so many of us claim to love the most.

This is an advance review copy, and hopefully odds and ends will be, unlike our beaches, taken care of before this finally gets published, but the page numbering was sadly off in Adobe Reader. The cover is numbered as page 236, and some other pages are numbered seemingly randomly. Indeed, changing pages by typing a new page number into the bottom of the screen seemed to confuse Adobe Reader completely. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely another indictment of ebooks!

I was contacted by a representative of Duke University Press on this aspect of my review, all but demanding that I delete these comments, but that's not how this blog works. Publishers don't get to tell me what to blog or how to blog, and if that means I get no more review books from that publisher, then that's too bad. My comments stand because we're no longer in the era of literal galley proofs where metal type has to be set by hand and laboriously changed out to correct errors. We're in the era of word processing, desktop publishing, WYSIWIG, spell-checkers and grammar checkers, and there is no longer any excuse for sub-standard "proofs". I will, however, post the comments I got from Duke University press verbatim below

I would very much appreciate it if you would remove your criticisms of the book's design until you can see a final copy. There will be a properly formatted e-book available by the end of the year and a print book in November. The "filler pages" you refer to in your review are standard paper book formatting in order to fit required cataloging information.

Frankly I'm not sure what that last sentence means. There's a difference between pages which contain cataloguing and publication information (i.e. not filler pages), and having several pages of unnecessary drawings (filler pages), but if I see this as a print book somehwere this coming November, I will revisit this review and comment on it again then. Until then, my original comment (pagraph below) still stands and I still recommend this book.

There are several filler pages at the beginning of the book which I felt were unnecessary. This book is about a very serious environmental concern, and to me it detracts from that when we add unnecessary pages, each of which will use up part of a tree in the print version. I felt that this sent the wrong message, but maybe that's just me!.

The content of the book is what really won the day for me. The chapters come thick and fast, every one of them with a indictment of our insanity when it comes to how we treat our beaches. People agonize over rain-forest and wilderness, but beaches, for some reason, are ignored, undervalued, and treated like some vulgar relative.

In rapid succession, the stupidity of beach mining is exposed, along with the insanity of building houses upon sand, the failure of so-called 'beach replenishment', algal blooms, the disgusting trashing of beaches from a variety of sources, including the beach tourists who use those same beaches for recreation, the potential for horrific disease inherent in the misuse of beaches, the abusive driving on beaches of both 'official' and unofficial vehicles, and finally with the extensive and unforgivable oil and tar pollution.

Each chapter is exhaustively documented and supported by research as the appendices detail, and some of the information is as bizarre as it is disturbing. Did you know, for example, that there's an international trade in beach sand? That beach users have died from causes as disparate as flesh-eating bacterial infection and being run-over by a police SUV? That sea walls aimed at preventing beach erosion actually exacerbate it? That debris from the 2004 "St Stephen's tsunami" is still washing up on beaches across the Pacific, and right behind it is debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that took out a Japanese nuclear reactors - a disaster which itself was caused by poor waterfront management and thoughtless construction?

The underlying message, just like the underlying sand, is that beaches are not the static environment we encounter when we go out there on a weekend or once a year on vacation. We think of the sea as restless, and ever in motion, yet we never see the shoreline in the same way. Why not? Beaches are vital and dynamic, and nothing we can do is ever going to change that, or stop it, or overcome it. You cannot control a beach any more than you can really control the activities of beach-goers, and any hard management scheme is doomed to fail. The only thing which works is the realization and appreciation of the value of the beach, and throwing all our efforts into protecting the natural ebb and flow, rather than foolishly trying to make it come to heel.

Pilkey and Cooper have done us all a huge service in drawing this to our attention and I recommend this book.
Update:
Article in NYT on disappearing beaches.