Water
The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning, alarming account of “one of the central challenges facing civilization” (The Washington Post Book World).
Offering ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives, this “well-researched and thought-provoking book” (Minneapolis Tribune) explains how we are using, misusing, and abusing our planet’s most vital resource.
Reporting from hot spots as diverse as China, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, where swelling populations and unchecked development have stressed fresh water supplies nearly beyond remedy, this account reveals how political struggles for control of water are raging around the globe, and rampant pollution increases already dire environmental threats. This powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations is “a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers, and water drinkers everywhere” (Publishers Weekly).
Winner of the Governor General’s Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water. More than half of the world's rivers are now so polluted that they pose serious health risks. One-third of Africa's people already endure conditions of water scarcity, and water supplies are in jeopardy in China, India, Japan, Spain, southern France, Australia, the southwestern U.S. and many other parts of Asia and Europe. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction in Canada, de Villiers's important, compelling, highly readable report on the looming global water crisis sounds a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers and water-drinkers everywhere. In water matters, he finds the U.S. "both profligate and caring, rapacious and thrifty," and he cites studies that warn that the Ogallala Aquifer lying beneath six Great Plains states will run dry before 2020, imperiling U.S. agriculture as well as grain exports and posing the risk of a global food crisis. For sheer travelogue pleasure, his informal survey hops from the Sea of Galilee to Victoria Falls to a Russian boat ride down the Volga, as he delves into the science, ecology, folklore, history and politics of water. The news he brings back is ominous: rapidly growing populations, ever-increasing pollution, desertification and falling water tables endanger a fragile, finite resource. Avoiding a gloom-and-doom outlook, his spirited report remains determinedly optimistic, calling for a bold combination of solutions: conservation, technological innovation, desalination of sea water, demand-reducing devices like low-flow faucets and toilets, public policy to reduce water wastefulness and international cooperation to resolve transnational disputes over water. Rights sold in seven countries; documentary rights sold.
