The Ripple Effect
The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud’homme’s vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century.
The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure—both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil—and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water?
Like Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story, Prud’homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant—and sometimes shadowy—characters through whom these issues come alive. Prud’homme traversed the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource—from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud’homme will change the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prud'homme, a journalist and the coauthor with Julia Child of My Life in France, examines crucial issues concerning the world's finite supply of fresh water pollution, water quantity (drought and flood), waste, and governance. Focusing on the U.S., he explores how water scarcity, population growth, and environmental degradation are forcing the country to a moment of reckoning on a scale not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. And he notes how woefully obsolete laws designed to protect drinking supplies in the 1970s are becoming, when hundreds of untested new chemicals enter U.S. waterways every year, and the majority of water pollution now comes from unregulated storm-water runoff, where insecticides, fertilizers, paint, and motor oil are washed into the water supply. Prud'homme offers ample and eloquent warnings of a looming water crisis: intersex fish in Chesapeake Bay, the poisoning of water wells in Wisconsin from agricultural runoff, Lake Mead's record-low waterline in Nevada, decaying dams and levees. Prud'homme's eloquence and local focus will help this book rise to the top of the recent flood of water-themed books including Elixir by Brian Fagan and The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman.
Customer Reviews
Great Book but has a real typo problem
This book is great but somehow the letter "F" is dropped in many many places, particularly where it precedes the letter "T". The "environmental left" becomes the "environmental let" and "paradigm shift" becomes, well, you get the drift. I can't tell you how many times the vernacular for feces appears in the book because of this problem. If I search for the term, it turns up everywhere. Somewhere between the book's publisher and Apple, this problem occurred. They need to fix it. if it weren't for the typo problem, I'd give the book four stars.
(FWIW, I have no idea if this problem occurs in the Kindle version of the book.)