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"Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource" Overview
Water is a thought-provoking, eloquent look at the importance of this vital resource to humankind, encompassing ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives. Marq de Villiers reports 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. Political struggles for control of water rage around the globe and threaten to erupt into military conflicts that will decide the fates of governments and nations. Rampant pollution poses an equally dire ecological threat - every year Canadians dump seven times more used motor oil into our waterways than the EXXON VALDEZ spilled in Alaska. With one eye to these looming crises and the other to the history of our utter dependence on this, our planet's most precious commodity, de Villiers has crafted a powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations, the global consequences of human thirst, and solutions that may avert the coming water wars. Informative, insightful, and entertaining, de Villiers's work will be the standard book on global water issues for years to come, and it deserves to be read by everyone who has ever turned on a tap.
"Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource" Specifications
Water is a curious thing, observed the economist Adam Smith: although it is vital to life, it costs almost nothing, whereas diamonds, which are useless for survival, cost a fortune. In Water, Canadian journalist de Villiers says the resource is still undervalued, but it is becoming more precious. It's not that the world is running out of water, he adds, but that "it's running out in places where it's needed most."
De Villiers examines the checkered history of humankind's management of water--which, he hastens to remind us, is not a renewable resource in many parts of the world. One of them is the Nile River region, burdened by overpopulation. Another is the Sahara, where Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi is pressing an ambitious, and potentially environmentally disastrous, campaign to mine deep underground aquifers to make the desert green. Another is northern China, where the damaging effects of irrigation have destroyed once-mighty rivers, and the Aral Sea of Central Asia, which was killed within a human lifetime. And still another is the American Southwest, where crops more fitting to a jungle than a dry land are nursed. De Villiers travels to all these places, reporting on what he sees and delivering news that is rarely good.
De Villiers has a keen eye for detail and a solid command of the scientific literature on which his argument is based. He's also a fine storyteller, and his wide-ranging book makes a useful companion to Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert and other works that call our attention to a globally abused--and vital--resource. --Gregory McNamee
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