Customer Reviews

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though few people realize the significance of water, it's quickly becoming one of the most important issues of our day -- not just for governments but for people themselves in their daily lives. As a business journalist, I was fascinated by the way Solomon lets readers in on what is rarely discussed in the media. Robert Kennedy Jr. was right when he said that this book sheds new light on crucial challenges that water has created. Anyone who enjoyed "Cadillac Desert" will be even more interested in what Solomon has to say about the relentless struggle for economic and political power shaping our society.

You don't have to be a history buff to enjoy sections of the book that explain how water played a key role in shaping past civilizations -- and that's a part of history that readers will rarely discover anywhere else. If I have any criticism, it's that this section isn't even longer. Solomon tells an important and fascinating story that will lead readers to think about tomorrow's challenges every time they turn on the tap.

Don Ediger

donediger@aol.com

"Water" should be included as a standard textbook in every high school. I think I learned more about history in this one book then in most of my college and grad courses combined and actually enjoyed it.

Solomon writes in an almost novel-like way through cavemen up to today and hints at some future trends as well. By using water as a combining thread throughout history, Solomon manages to make one civilization after another follow each other in a very logical, exciting and connected way.

Did you know that the first civilization to have flushing toilets started around 2700 BC in the Indus River Valley in India (Harappans)? Forget the decadent Romans. I was so flabbergasted and unbelieving that I had to Google it several times. Yup, it is true. So the USA got widely flushing toilets in the 18-1900s. Hmmmm, pretty cave Manish, aren't we?

"Water" is filled with fun bits of knowledge like this.

For suggestions for improvement, I would suggest adding a more detailed chapter on how water might affect us in the future. Sure, Solomon hints lightly that China and India are going into a near crisis mode as they run out of ground aquifers and river water as their glaciers melt. However, except for stating that the free market system in liberal democracies is shifting to better efficiency, he writes little of the USA's water future. Issues such as the Ogallala aquifer's future and its implications for the future USA and American river water, snow melt and huge reservoirs disappearing (which they are) seem to be lightly dealt with. Solomon ends on a seemingly very upbeat and perhaps blindly optimistic vision of the USA's water future while ignoring some very unsettled thoughts of some current US government hydrologists.

However, as a book describing civilization's past up till the present, it is in the class of Jared Diamond's classic "Collapse" and I highly recommend it. You will never be the same when you finish this book.

Steven Solomon has done us all a great service. We take water for granted. If you read this book, you won't. Water is new oil and unless we pay attention to this issue the future is a dim, dry, place.

Don't presume this is a depressing book. It isn't. You will learn a remarkable history, have stories to tell at the dinner table, and you will leave the experience with some concrete ideas on how to change the future of water.

Stven Solomon's water contains a vast amount of information and should be required reading. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with required reading, the book is not the entirely positive experience that it should be. The fundamental problem is a lack of editing. Solomon's text is--at the very least--one-third longer than it should or needs to be.

A capable copy editor (there is no sign even of an incapable one) could have done much to enhance the value of the text. Despite the fascinating content I was sorely tempted more than once to give up on slogging through repetition, redundancy, bloviation, repetition, redundancy: you get the idea. The publisher should issue a public apology.

And then there are the typos, the graceless framing of sentences, and other scriptorial infelicitations that drive a person like me (who loves language and the clean, lucid exposition of facts and ideas clearly expressed) in the direction of the liquor cabinet.

Perseverance and sobriety carried the day in the end. I pressed on against the odds, and I recommend that others do so too. But I can't tell you this isn't going to hurt a little.

Steve Solomon's book does for water what Daniel Yergin's THE PRIZE did for oil several years ago -- it gives us an historical framework to better assess what water means to us now and what the future holds for it. And not a moment too soon, because if Solomon is right water is going to be THE major issue of this century, replacing oil as the main geopolitical focus. Why? Because water is more crucial to us even than energy and its supply, like that of oil, is not limitless. In fact, some parts of the globe are already facing serious water shortages.

Once you read this book, you all of a sudden notice how many stories there are about water -- whether in the impact of the earthquake on Haiti or the ongoing water stress in Southern California, not to mention problems in places further away. I know the next time I contemplate relocating, one of the first things I'll check is the water situation!

Simply put this is the best book ever written about the contemporary and historical global persepctive on water! Log on to Google Earth and trace the commentary of this book around the world as you read. Your view of global water will be superior to anyone who has not read this book.

As a snowbird, I live in Yuma, AZ in the winter and near Superior, Wisconsin the rest of the year. The Colorado River is critical to the Yuma area, its life blood, and there has been contraversy about sharing Lake Superior water. So I bought the book for those reasons.

But "Water" is much more than an analysis of current water problems, it is a well written history of water since before Mesopotamia. The book gave me wonderful information about the many major rivers and their watersheds and an intriguing world history tour.

This book should be read by all, especially politicians.

Excellent scholarship.

Steve Solomon's 500 page book is subtitled "The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization," and it's quite an impressive achievement.

[I sent a draft of this review to Steve, and he gave me quite a bit of informal feedback. I will be adding a summary of his responses in brackets below.]

Solomon tours the world, describing the role of water in civilizations past and present, and how their water management fits into his thesis, i.e., "societies that find the most innovative responses to the [modern water scarcity] crisis are most likely to come out as winners, while the others will fall behind" [p. 5].

This book is very helpful in helping us understand the similar and disparate ways that water has been used and managed across many cultures. I learned quite a bit about canals in England, the eastern US and China, for example.

The book is divided into four parts: Ancient History (from Ur to the Greeks to the Chinese to the Islamic conquest), the Ascendancy of the West (from early water wheels to voyages of discovery to the rise of steam power), the Modern Industrial Society (sanitation, canals and big infrastructure), and the Age of Scarcity (the new oil to the Middle East to Asian shortages to water politics in the West).

Here are a few notes that I took, more or less in order:

* Hammurabi's 53rd law said that the owner of badly-maintained dam (or levee) will pay the costs from flood damage, should the dam break.

* Solomon highlights a 2,500 year old water tunnel on Samos and 2,200 year old aqueduct/siphon to Pergamum (now near Bergama in Turkey) as marvels of engineering. I have visited these :)

* The Chinese character for politics is derived from characters that mean flood control.

* "Taoist engineers designed waterworks to allow water to flow away as easily as possible, exploiting the dynamics of the natural ecosystem... Confucians... believed that rivers had to be forced, through dikes, dams and other obstructive constructions, to do man's bidding as defined by rulers and technocrats" [p. 101]. The Confucians ended up dominating both engineering and politics, as we see with Three Gorges and the Communist Party, respectively.

* "Shari'aa" means "the way" or "the path to the watering place."

* "societies that passively live too long off old water engineering accomplishments are routinely overtaken by states and civilizations that find innovative ways to exploit water's ever-evolving balance of changes and opportunities [p. 151]. Solomon uses the example of the Portuguese cutting Muslim middlemen out of trade with India.

* Northern Europe's population doubled between 700 and 1200 (to 70 million) because improved plow technology increased food yields (more food leads to more people). Civilization, technology and trade also expanded rapidly. [Steve was pleased that I noticed a point that many readers and scholars have missed, on how institutions for good governance arise and evolve.]

* Political and economic development in Northern Europe was decentralized because small rivers flowed in many places, leading to stronger rights for individuals and property than those found in centralized hydraulic empires.

* In the twentieth century water use increased by 9x and energy use increased by 13x. Our good life may be costly in terms of sustainability. Mining water, like mining energy, cannot continue indefinitely.

* Politicians dithered and delayed spending money to rebuild London's water and sewer system, until The Great Stink of 1858 caused them to face facts (the horrible smells into Parliament from the Thames).

Although I enjoyed the historical narrative in Water, I was less-compelled by Solomon's thesis, that success and failure is determined by good water management. Yes, of course, good water management is necessary for continued success, but it is not sufficient.* Success and failure can come from many directions (poor leadership, for example). It would perhaps be more correct to claim that civilizations with good governance also manage water well.**

[Steve clarifies that causality runs both ways: good institutions also lead to good water management. I am happy to concede this point and also concede the he was trying to make it, except that the text was not as clear as we all might like. Although he holds that "good water management is a necessary condition for success" in managing a civil society, that is not true in places where water is to abundant to worry about waste yet not abundant enough to worry about floods. That said, good management can hardly hurt.]

This is not nit-picking as much as clarifying the difference between the causes and effects that drive development (per Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Schumacher, Sen and others) and failure/collapse (per Carson, the Limits to Growth, Diamond and the Mafia). The causes -- as laid out by Nobel Laureate Douglas North -- are good institutions. Hammurabi was an innovator in the rule of law, just as the English had the Magna Carta and America has the Bill of Rights. From these foundations came sound policies that included sound water management. (These policies were not always implemented as quickly as we'd like, but they were implemented more quickly when governance was better.)

I am pretty sure that Steve would agree with me on this (we chatted over a bottle of wine while I was in DC), but that agreement would not be obvious in the text, where the emphasis is more on "success here" and "failure there" than on the underlying causes. Such an explanation is WAY beyond the scope of a 500 page book, but a little humility on that account (i.e., this is a book on the history of water management) would reduce the numerous "yes but" moments when it seemed that the thesis was driving the narrative instead of letting events declare themselves.

In addition to this big point, I had a number of disagreements with the text. The claim of "a distinctive American system regarded government as an active agent to assist the private development of the nation's resources" on page 321 would be contradicted twice: other governments clearly play that role, and plenty of natural resource development -- with oil, mines, ranching and so on -- has occurred without the assistance of the US government. The discussions of water in the western US and bottled water, for example, are not deeper that those I've seen in newspaper articles that lack depth, get niggling facts wrong,*** and miss some crucial analysis.***

[Steve suggests that "distinctive" does not mean unique, and that the US was not alone in using state power to advance business interests (ironically to a lessor degree than Europe sometimes). I agree, but I am more skeptical of claims that US government support for railroads was either necessary or useful.]

Bottom Line: I give this book FOUR STARS. It's well-worth reading for its wonderful overview of water management around the world and throughout history. Water, indeed, has played a crucial role in our social, political and economic development. That said, our success and failures in water management result from our social, economic and political institutions (not the other way around). Good institutions will keep water in our taps.

* On page 269, for example, Solomon writes: "By the 1940s, America was exploiting its ample natural water resources in a more intensified and enlarged manner than any society on Earth -- a reliable leading indicator and catalyst, in every age in history, of robust prosperity and civilization." This generalized claim is clearly untrue, if we consider how the Soviets over-exploitation of their water resources did NOT lead to robust prosperity. The same goes for the Libyans, Saudis, Egyptians and Chinese, as they mismanage water for no durable benefit. [Steve and I disagree here. He claims that the Soviet society was prosperous for a time, even if such prosperity was not built on sustainable foundations. I claim that it was not prosperous, ever, given the contemporaneous and future costs of the Soviet model, as opposed to what would have happened should Russia had continued on its pre-Revolutionary path.]

** "It is not a coincidence that history's poorest societies often have had the most difficult hydrological environments" [p. 374] is precisely backwards. Ask the Australians, Israelis or Singaporeans. [Yes, this is overstated. Steve is right that societies with poor water conditions face additional barriers to development and prosperity.]

*** Fact check: JW Powell was not head of the "new" USGS; he was the second director; global bottled water sales are not over $100 billion; the Colorado River Aqueduct didn't start deliveries until 1941; etc. I got a laugh out of this sentence on page 341: "As the aquifer emptied and drought conditions prevailed on the surface [in the 1930s], the big farmers of the Central Valley turned reluctantly to the government for relief." Reluctantly. Right. [Steve is right that I am perhaps nitpicking about the first and second points (the difference between what he said and fact -- as best we can guess -- is trivial), but the CRA point is annoying (and representative of a trend of misstatements in an area I have studied deeply). The fourth point about farmers and subsidies seems more propaganda than fact. Steve acknowledges that the farmers are not too consistent in complaining about government at the same time as they take money from the government, but he needed to -- in my opinion -- call them on that hypocrisy.]

Apologies for the 1 month delay in posting. I have been buried in a 500 page tome on the history of the world. Again! But I'm back to the surface, and have much to report. First of all, my work in Asia is in the Water business, and I considered it a huge advantage to keep myself not only informed but extremely well read on future projections and the latest in water technology, so I decided every now and then, I'd get a `Water' book. This is my first. And it's a doozy.

You may remember the "Ascent of Money" was effectively the story of money, going back to the ancient times, well Steven Solomon's "Water" is essentially the exact same scope and timeline, but focusing on water. And it's actually worth it for anyone to keep up on this subject, but I would advise against a novice jumping into this book. While the historical accounts (in amazing detail) of the Chinese innovation, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and eventually, the Steam Engine in Britain, which led to the Industrial Revolution, are amazing,...there's just so much information in here, at times it feels like you're studying for a Final exam. But give the author credit for taking on such an amazing task.

Make no mistake, this is not just a timeline of `scientific developments'; what Solomon set out to do with this book is draw connections between the development of water technology, as well as the natural waterways/lakes/oceans, and political power. And that's where the real `Aha' moments come from.

For example, in China, few foreigners (like myself) recognize that the Grand Canal (constructed est. 600AD) which spans from Hangzhou to Shanghai all the way north to Beijing, was actually the start of high volume Chinese communication, transport and trade, and was part of the reason the Chinese were so confident that they didn't need much from outsiders-shutting out foreign contact for hundreds of years thereafter.

In Egypt, the great Nile river, has always been the lifeblood of the country, used for irrigation systems, and eventually power generation (early turbine technology). Amazingly, the transport along the Nile was aided by an incredible bidirectional water flow, which meant traders and merchants could traverse North and South on this amazing highway, with relative ease. They had a very similar system to the Chinese, but naturally.

The point is this, to travel 100 miles by foot was often exhausting and dangerous and tediously slow, while getting on a raft and cruising upriver was much more pleasant in almost every way. This huge efficiency improvement shaped much of the worlds development, even up until the 19th century, when in the United States, investors and governors where pushing for very ambitious Canals for the very same reason. In fact, one of America's great shining moments was the opening of the Panama Canal, a monumental feat of engineering, joining the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, such that trade routes could now pass straight through to Asia from Europe (and vice-versa), with America collecting the toll on every ship.

But there was a turning point, and it goes back to the very first wooden `turbines' in China, and Egypt. We, as a species, have always thought of water as free. You look to the Ocean, and all you see is vast horizons of it. It is everywhere, it pours down from the sky, and gushes down from the mountaintops. The human body is mostly water. So basically this planet, and everything on it, is chock full of water. We've basically treated water as a resource-a commodity of infinite supply-that we can do anything we want with. However, when we started building dams, for Hydroelectric power, we changed something: we started to divert and displace massive volumes of water. It seemed like the Hydroelectric dam would give us everything we ever wanted-free power, using naturally rushing waters to spin huge turbines and store electric power-but it did something else. It changed the environment. We now have incidents in India and China where rivers do not reach the oceans, as they once did. At the same time, our global population is booming, we're expected to hit 9 billion brothers and sisters by 2050. These two elements should have us on the edge of our seats.

And what of the next 40 years until then? More so than Oil ever did, what we are doing now with water will shape future alliances, and wars. Those who have the most resources, and the least population, will be freed of this challenge, and rise to the top in terms of development, power and wealth.

Understand that, unlike Oil, which has been fought over for ages, we cannot live without water. We cannot live without drinking it, and we cannot live without planting crops and irrigating the land. For our cheeseburgers, the farm animals must first be fed and be given plenty of water to drink. These indisputable facts are what is leading to not just power struggles, but wars. Even the most docile and peaceloving nations, without access to drinking water, must negotiate to get it, or must fight for it.

Of course, I'm an optimist so I'll end on a positive note: in developed countries, citizens use about 30 times the amount of water used in developing countries. That's our opportunity. Those in developed countries, in the same way we aspire to give great amounts of money to charities, shall aspire to not only cut down on their own consumption, but donate water/water credits to developing countries. Walking the soft path towards a harmonious existence not only with our brothers and sisters, but also with this planet, is the key to redemption. That's the message. We have 40 years to practice it.

More reviews like this on 21tiger

Michael Robson

21tiger - books/biz/asia

This book provides an enjoyable and accessible overview of the role of water resources in the development of the major civilizations around the world. As a single volume it is necessarily a broad-brush treatment of the subject. The stories of the early Nile River and Tigris-Euphrates civiliations are familiar but enlarged upon somewhat. His discussions of the Indian subcontinent, China, and Europe were less familiar but made more understandable in the context of the near early near-eastern civilazations. Some of Solomon's theories about the shape of governmental systems being derived from the nature of the water resources are instructive and valuable but not rigorously presented. In particular, I thought the focus on the West mastering open-ocean sailing as a critical water-related factor in the fate of civilizations, while interesting, was a stretch for this book. I read the book expecting it to focus on early civilisations, but half of the book chronicles early industrialization and modern times. I was initially disappointed with this, but came away glad that Solomon had brought the issues current, and given a valuable background to current water resoure issues in the U.S. around the world. His discussion on the era of mega-dam construction in the 20th century was very interesting. I found this book a good complement to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, & Steel", sort of picking up where Diamond left off, albeit through the lens of water resources.