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| When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Fred Pearce
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (28 reviews)
Sales Rank: 10065
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 324
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0807085731
Dewey Decimal Number: 333
EAN: 9780807085738
ASIN: 0807085731
Publication Date: March 7, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Enlightening and horrifying January 14, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As long as humans have farmed and had cities, they have had water management programs that arguably, as the author notes, lie at the basis of the need for the first central governments. Failures of management have often been the cause of social collapse. The book makes painfully evident the fact that in much of the world we have engineered ourselves into similar predicaments that are unsustainable.
Some of the stories of mismanagement and its consequences are truly wrenching, such as that of the people around the Aral Sea (which has disappeared) or of some people in South India using water that is chemical industry effluent to drink and to water their fields. The book is well worth reading, and eye opening. On the negative side, the author mixes the relatively benign with the truly tragic, the small scale incidents with the enormous tragedies unfolding, without much distinction of scale. In many instances, the story revolves around mismanagement and engineering blunders. In other instances, the story is really that there are simply too many people for the water available in a particular place, with the consequence of forcing the land and water to perform what it can't, or of people forced to drink water laden with arsenic and fluoride in Bangladesh, as there is no alternative.
There are massive water management projects underway in China and India, and the real possibility of disaster on a massive scale if things go wrong. With respect to the Yangtze river project, things can go very wrong, given the high silt content of the river. The present problem of Pakistan is a good example of unsustainable practices with increasingly terrible consequences unfolding.
The concept of "virtual water", that is, shipment to dry regions of crops that require much water to grow, is well worth noting.
The last fifty pages of the book are a book in itself. The topic changes from dire realities to solutions for living in dry conditions. Some are ancient, some recent, some exist in the natural world. Dew ponds, fog harvesting, qanats, or runoff collectors, porous cities. The future, the author suggests, will require local remedies rather than mega-projects. He makes a convincing argument that the local remedies work.
The author does not pay much attention to the consequences of global warming on the redistribution of water in the coming century, an omission remedied in the excellent book he has recently published on the topic of global warming.
Some things that the author or editors should have corrected: water is all about volume, but the volume measures are not defined in a meaningful way. I am sure the original literature refers to values in terms of "per square meter", but the author routinely uses "per 10.8 square feet" instead. Metric measures would have been easier to understand (they give round numbers). An acre-foot of water is the most common measure in the book, but is not defined. The important thing about acre-foot, I learned from Wikipedia, is that it is approximately the water usage of a person per year in advanced societies. The author would have done well to tell his reader this. For those readers who need to be enlightened (as I did) an acre-foot is a cubic measure of an acre (which is one chain x one furlong) x one foot. Good luck defining a chain and a furlong. Far easier to visualize an acre-foot as roughly 1,200 cubic meters, or in terms of usage per person.
A reference list would have been welcome.
Altogether a terrific and alarming book that has its small flaws.
 Fine Environmental Journalism November 27, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Recounting a series of hydrological disasters past, present, and imminent, Fred Pearce makes a compelling case for rethinking water management from the local to global level. Unlike some other reviewers, I don't find the book's lack of notes and detailed references particularly bothersome because, much like newspaper articles, many sources are unpublished. Likewise, much of the material covers current events and the best sources now postdate the book.
I would consider this an essential introductory read for anyone interested in water resources and environmental policy.
A broad view of water scarcity around the world October 31, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The story of this book is summarized well by the titles of the ten parts into which Pearce organizes his 34 chapters: "When the rivers run dry . . . the crops fail . . . we mine our children's water . . . the wet places die . . . floods may not be far behind . . . engineers pour concrete . . . men go to war over water . . . civilizations fall . . . we go looking for new water . . . we try to catch the rain . . . [and, most hopefully,] . . . we go with the flow." Pearce tells the story from many locations around the world, on every continent except Antarctica. In every place, people are using water in an unsustainable way.
There is plenty of water - - we live on a blue planet, after all. Unfortunately, we use water wastefully, inefficiently (growing cotton in deserts), and the things we do to get water through dams or pumping aquifers make a lot of other problems worse. For example, people destroy wetlands and then build a dam to control the floods that result when high water no longer collects in the wetlands, rushing down the main channel instead. As a result, a sizeable chunk of these problems are self-inflicted.
Pearce tells a compelling story. My only complaint is that he consistently sacrifices depth for breadth. With 34 stories to tell in 311 pages, that is inevitable. His approach to both the problems and solutions is also overly voluntaristic: people don't have to make these bad choices, and people can simply decide to stop making them. If that were true, why are the same bad choices made everywhere?
Clearly, there are structural reasons why everyone tries engineering solutions to problems, "solutions" that just make things worse. Just as clearly, Pearce misses a political economy story here: small groups manage to get governments to spend public money on water projects that take water from large numbers of people and give the water to large farmers, urban consumers, and industry. If that's the central issue, as I think it is, then Pearce really should have analyzed the problem as such - - and thought about how to redesign politics so that this doesn't happen.
Encouraging everyone to behave better, sadly, does not work.
The book deserves 4.5 stars, but for its accessibility to a wide audience I'll round up to 5. If you're looking for treatment at the level of an upper-level undergraduate or above, round down to 4.
Just as scary as global warming September 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this book back to back with the author's book on global warming, With Speed and Violence, and I was very impressed with the way both books cover all the bases in concise, thorough chapters that are compelling and engrossing, not just because of the interesting subject matter, but because the author is a terrific writer who knows how to clearly present the science while telling a good story. Although climate change has the potential to remake our planet in the longer term, water scarcity has the potential to affect hundreds of millions of people's lives in the shorter term, yet it doesn't get as much coverage in the media. So I was glad to come across Pearce's book, and I hope it brings more attention to this important issue.
 No Notes,No Sources, Sadly Flawed August 9, 2007
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating story, it really is. But how much is true, how much is exaggerated, how much is down right false? The author left no way to verify what he reports, not even his own research notes. I personally believe the main theme of disappearing water supplies due to watering of thirsty high yield crops. But I certainly wouldn't use Pearce's specific facts without double checking them. Too bad, it is a very readable book with many possible insights. If his sources had been included this would easily be a 5+ book.
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