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Title: When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century
ISBN: 0807085731
Author:
Fred Pearce
Publicate Date: 2007-03-07
Publish: 2007-03-07
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.88
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| Customer Review: |
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1: ignores soil surface
Interesting book but it ignores the biggest factor in a functional water cycle: the condition of the soil surface. Plant and litter cover on the soil surface increases infiltration, slows runoff, and slows evaporation. The biggest issue with the water cycle around the world is bare ground. From reading this book, you would only realize that this is a problem in cities, with their impervious pavements.
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2: Interesting and thought provoking
By now, many people have heard of the Aral Sea drying up or the Colorado River not making it to the ocean. However, this book is a good overview of many other issues people may not have heard about. The author seems to suggest that there could be enough water to go around, but that in order to make sure, we would have to change the way we go about doing a lot of things. The scariest part of the book is that large sections of highly populated countries may be living an unsustainable lifestyle with respect to water. What happens when the wells go dry? Whenever I read books about water, global warming, or oil supply, it makes me think that perhaps these are life and death issues that are put on the back burner by modern society. In any case, while this book may leave you wanting a little more, it'a very readable and informative.
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3: Lots of Detail
He makes his point over and over and over again. I had to read this for a class, and the running joke we had was that he could have got his point across in 75 pages and saved alot of water from not having to print as many pages.
Overall, this is a really good book, its nearly impossible to counter his argument due to the enormous amounts of facts he has from traveling the globe.
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4: Enlightening and horrifying
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.
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5: Fine Environmental Journalism
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.
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