Water
A Biography
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Spanning millennia and continents, a revealing history that “tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity” (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host).
"Far more than a biography of its nominal subject ... The book stands as a compelling history of civilization itself." —The Wall Street Journal Book Review
Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boccaletti—honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford—shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.
We see with clarity how irrigation’s structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.
Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to—and fundamental reliance on—the most elemental substance on earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boccaletti, chief strategic officer for the Nature Conservancy, debuts with an informative if dry survey of "the overwhelming power of water" and its influence on society. Boccaletti describes how water influenced state infrastructures (such as the development of Egypt's state along the Nile), and how ideas about water evolved into societal norms (for example, Jewish jurisprudence regarding water ownership stems from the "water-scarce" Levant). In China in the fifth and sixth centuries, he writes, Daoists advocated for well-spaced embankments adapted to the annual floods, while conflicting Confucians argued for levees to constrain the waters "into submission." And Rome became "a world of small dams, diversions, and tiny settling tanks, all developed by private individuals." Boccaletti connects political troubles throughout Europe to famines brought on by drought, and suggests America's expansion and economic growth was due to its natural waterways. He brings things up to the present by discussing "modern environmentalism," covering climate change, global water security, and China's Three Gorges Dam, the largest piece of infrastructure in the world when it was commissioned in 2009. But while Boccaletti covers a lot of ground, things never come together into a cohesive narrative. There's loads of information on offer and plenty of intriguing history, but the meandering path doesn't really lead anywhere.
