Customer Reviews

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

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British author Fred Pearce has collected together some of the most interesting, nerve-wracking, disappointing, and infuriating stories and statistics on water politics worldwide into this gripping volume, titled When the Rivers Run Dry. The depth with which Pearce treats the subject and the diversity of angles from which he approaches the issues facing water management (and rather more often the appalling mismanagement) makes this book required reading for those who wish to be environmentally literate.

Actually, let me elevate that statement to say instead that this book should be required reading for anyone over the age of 15, regardless of their language or nationality or cultural background. Many people think that water comes from the tap in the same way that milk comes from the carton, and this simplistic ignorance is dangerously impermissible in a supposedly educated society. Pearce's work is illuminating and educational while also being an engaging read, and given the fact that water is even more fundamental to life than oil is, everyone should know much more than they generally do about the water cycle. More to the point, we need to know how that cycle supports human life and civilization, and how it is being disrupted and abused for selfish political gains, economic control, and narrowly commercial self-interest.

This abuse is being perpetrated by a handful of breathtakingly arrogant government bureaucrats, working in concert with wonkish engineers disconnected from ecological realities and corporate thieves seeking to commandeer common and collectively-held resources for their own private empires. Prepare to be shocked, dismayed, and appalled as you read about what has happened to the world's rivers, lakes, marshes, and estuaries. Worse yet, you'll likely be disheartened by what is planned for the future. Said future looks grim unless the world's people wake up to what is happening and disallow the destructive centralized planning that is threatening to wreak massive negative change upon what remains of the world's freshwater ecological systems.

No nation is exempt from the potable fresh water crisis, although the most immediate and well-publicized dilemmas are occurring in arid and semiarid regions. It is indeed logical that water is one of the most embattled resources in arid regions, but Pearce demonstrates that even rivers in abundantly wet areas suffer under environmental strains as varied as climate change, hydroelectric projects, and pilfering for export to drier neighboring climates. From Cambodia to Israel, and from Mexico to Germany, Pearce dedicates chapters to specific types of water-related problems that will astound you and will hopefully act as a wake-up call to action before it is too late.

Lest I give the impression that the book is nothing but doom and gloom, it is important to state that the final few chapters end on a positive note, with success stories and reversals of major and catastrophic disruptions giving a glimpse of light at the end of the dark water tunnel. Solutions with widespread applicability to many neighborhood situations are explored, and there is always the possibility of small local movements turning into global grassroots phenomena. One can take heart in the tentative steps towards sustainable water use being made in places like rural India and downtown Los Angeles even as the looming specters of unparalleled water shortages cast long shadows over those regions.

Anyone who has ever read Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner's seminal book on water politics in the Western United States, will want to read Fred Pearce's When The Rivers Run Dry. This is a definitive work on worldwide water issues, and ought to take its place in the annals of environmentalist and social justice literature as the message filters through the aquifers of the public's subconscious. Tapping the well of knowledge where water is concerned is going to be critical to global survival. We are all in the same boat, so to speak.

This book deals with a very important subject and describes the author's first person observations with passion in a very readable manner. However, the book suffers from several glaring flaws.

First, almost every page has a discussion based upon at least one major statistic. Unfortunately, the source of none of these statistics is provided. There is no bibiliography, no footnotes or endnotes. A critical reader is given little help in following up on the issues raised. From a policy perspective, this book will not be helpful to anyone attempting to persuade non-believers.

Second, the discussion eventually becomes repetitious. I don't mind that he is clearly extremely biased, but after a while the diatribes grow tedious, and detract from an otherwise impressive presentation.

It is a real shame that such passion and effort should result in a book that doesn't share the sources of the research so that others can verify its contents and persuade others to take action.

This is a good book if you like first-person accounts with no notes that fail to mention other stellar works. I confess to being spoiled by Marc de Villers "WATER: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource," and by David Helvarg's "Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness" as well as William Langewiesche's "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime."

It also falls second to "The Winds of Change" and to "The Weather Makers" (I tend to read books in sets to tease out varying perspectives), and ties with "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum."

The author's most exciting idea, absolutely worthy of global implementation, is to call for the marking of all products with their "water content." He is stunningly education, truly original within my reading as reviewed at Amazon when he itemizes the amount of water needed to create a pound of rice or any of a number of other products. I would advise any future leader to demand that products be labeled as to their water content, their oil content, and their chlorine content (see my review of Joe Thorton's "Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy."

The author notes that the US is exporting ONE THIRD of its water in the form of products that consumed that amount of water.

Other highlights from this book, for me personally:

Six water winners are Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Russia, with Mongolia as a water wild card.

Treaties about water are out of date. Technologies, including cement as an answer for re-directing water, are mis-directed.

97% of the world is sea water--this suggests that we need a MASSIVE global desalination program to protect aquifers from further salination and deterioration (from my own experience: $100M will buy a desalination plant capable of desalinating 100M cubic meters of water a year, or Navy ship or an Army brigade with tanks and artillery, or 1000 diplomats, or 10000 Peace Corps missions, or a day of war over water. It's about trade-offs, and we and not making them wisely.

Kashmir is about Pakistan's Achilles heel, water.

India is on a path to destruction. "Water mines" are selling water for $4.00 (four dollars) a TRUCK TANKER LOAD, and basically mining India dry. When the author comments about a "spate of suicides" among Indian farmers, he fails to mention that this number runs toward 2,000 a year dead by their own hand. He predicts aquifer busts in India and China within 20 years, at which point, as other authors discuss more ably, disease, migrations, crime, and poverty will be as plagues unto those two nations.

Dams produce methane from rotting vegetation, with 8X the greenhouse effect of a coal powered plan of the same capacity. This should in the author's view change the Kyoto calculations. The author is very strong on this point, and suggests that breaking down dams and not building more (e.g. China) should be right up there with global warming as issues for action.

He notes that the 6 day war in the Middle East was about water, but neglects to mention that Israeli agriculture is using up 50% of the water stolen from the Arabs through underground pipes, yet produces less than 5% of Israel's GDP.

I was most taken with the author's discussion of "barefoot science" which emerging during his discussion of toxic or poisoned water such as found in Bangladesh. He cites with great admiration one individual who went from village to village testing wells, with very crude tools, providing reliable estimates of toxicity for 10 cents per well.

A fine book, some excellent insights, but it did leave me a bit cranky. Marq de Villier's book is still the best in class.

Fred Pearce has traveled the world researching and documenting water issues for over 20 years and in this alarming book, he has spelled-out current trends of misuse of our precious water resources. Aquifers, lakes, and rivers are being drained faster than can be replenished. Worse yet, these bodies of water in many areas are being infiltrated by sewage, toxic chemicals and sea water rendering them useless for future use. Unnecessary dam construction, lake and river diversions goes on despite an abundance of historical and scientific facts demonstrating the adverse effects they cause-- displacing millions of people; flooding useable land while drying-up downstream environs and altering historic weather patterns.

Pearce finishes the book on a lighter note by relating the many sustainable alternatives to depleting aquifers, dam building, and lake diversions, although at current usage, one wonders if this will help reduce the rate of depletion and escalating environmental damage. Pearce makes it clear that we humans must immediately come up with a new world-wide ethic on water consumption and distribution before we hit the point of no return.

After reading this fine, in-depth expose' of the world water crisis, I was reminded of the potent quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "When the well runs dry, we shall know the value of water" (one of many variations spelling-out the same profound message).

For those concerned about the frightening state of the world's fresh water supplies, this book is a treasure of information and viewpoints on why humanity should start getting extremely worried about the issue. Fred Pearce has traveled the world to report on water supply horror stories (and a few success stories), with the theme of river health and long-term human usage. This book turns out to have a similar effect for the reader as others on the subject, which dutifully report on who in the world doesn't have enough water to drink and the potential human consequences. (Though this one probably has the most specific examples.) Pearce does give his book a bit of an edge by finding some unique insights into the social and economic problems that are leading us all down a sinkhole of disappearing water.

The best example of this is Pearce's broad coverage of the vast inefficiencies in human water usage in most regions of the world, and the misplaced technological hubris of huge dam and diversion projects. Along the way he comes up with some enlightening specifics, such as how much the control of water resources has fueled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how hydroelectricity is not "clean" or "green" power, because rotting vegetation in reservoirs creates methane that contributes to global warming. This book is indeed overflowing with specific examples and a fair amount of new insights, but Pearce seems to have left many loose ends. Most of the book's many chapters are short and self-contained reports on particular technical issues or geographic areas, which function more like a collection of newspaper articles. This results in the introduction of many unique examples, but true conclusions and follow-ups for only a few of them. That makes the book informative but a bit inconclusive. Pearce could have also added some more authority to the enlightening but sketchy ethical considerations that end the book. [~doomsdayer520~]

The only other book I have read about the subject "water" was called "Water: A Natural History," by Alice Outwater. If I had to compare this book with that one, I'd say both are scary but this one is scarier. Many of the world's rivers are near death due to overuse. And, as usual, the main culprits are politicians, bureaucrats and big business. There are many ramifications from the slow death of rivers -- dying inland seas, depleted aquifers, salt buildup on cropland. But Pearce details many cheap and simple ways to reduce our dependence on river water, including catching dew, fog and rainwater. If there is any topic in this book I would have like to have seen covered in greater detail, it would be the low-cost alternatives we have at the ready to continue to meet the needs of people everywhere.

I write this review with some fear and hesitation, because the stakes are so high to do this book justice. It's THAT important.

When the Rivers Run Dry is not just enjoyable to read. It's fascinating, fully engaging, but above all a FRIGHTENING wake-up call how governments, politicians and industry are polluting, mismanaging and squandering the water of virtually all the world's major rivers.

Fred Pearce sounds the alarm with incredible passion and intelligence, presenting an environmental issue that deserves the kind of widespread attention Al Gore has brought to the issue of climate change through his documentary film An Inconvenient Truth.

I highly recommend this book to EVERYONE, with a special request to read this if you can make a difference in the water management policy of your government or your company.

It is impossible to make responsible decisions without decent information. I found this book both readable and extremely informative. On the other hand, it is so filled with information that is a call to awareness of the global crisis facing us that I needed to put it down periodically to avoid depression and/or extreme cynicism. Still, it is an important book to read and I do make better decisions on a daily basis because of it. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who feels that they want to know what's actually going on and doesn't want to be hit with the coming crisis blindsided.

Journalist Fred Pearce's "When the River Runs Dry" (2006 324-page paperback) is a puzzling presentation. On the one hand it presents the contemporary predicament of worldwide water shortages emerging from prior centuries. Certainly, this shortage is a central issue for survival of Earth's varied populations. On the other hand, the book proffers impossible solutions for humanity's "hydraulic civilization".

Touring each of the world's principal rivers, wetlands, lakes, and aquifer zones Pearce seeks opinions from experts, victims, scientists, clergy, activists, business people, and politicians. (Unfortunately, there are not footnotes in this book, and thus no opportunity for follow up reading.) His travels in themselves proffer an interesting narrative. From these field trips Pearce presents a wide range of views and suggestions for solving the world's complex water problems. By the end of each of the 10 chapters, the author is proposing his own solutions.

Pearce's solutions change this text's intent and purpose. He moves from journalist reporting the issue to activist claiming solitary resolution for each water problem. His activism leaves scientific and academic resolutions behind on the dusty dry riverbank.

The author's answers for saving the world from the emerging water problems range from the technically impossible (i.e. taking the gigantic dams out of river valleys and redirecting rivers) to the simply odd (i.e. giving the wetlands to prehistoric native populations). Dam destruction would, seemingly, only invent more environmental destruction while returning water sources already harnessed would deprive those dependent on them including their earliest users. His solutions are too often simplistic and baffling.

Obviously, there are answers for the continuing shortages of water across the globe. Pearce's book is best viewed as a warning message and not a resolution advocate. His water warnings, but not his solutions, should be taken seriously.

This book is recommended to everyone concerned about 21st century water shortages and to all who want to develop answers for the global questions it proposes.

Happy Halloween!

Fred Pearce has captured the dim reality of our global water crises and painted the picture in lay-man's terms. The diminishing fresh water problems are only complicated by the fact that water is not static; it constantly changes form and changes its geographic locations. Although we face dire consequences if our present methods of use are continued, Pearce offers a new water ethic by emphasing conservation and efficiency. Without potable fresh water, life can not be sustained on this Earth. This book is a "must read."