Every Drop for Sale: Our Desperate Battle Over Water (Hardcover)

From there, you will learn that 1.1 billion people each day don't get enough water to drink and to clean themselves and their clothes. Many more don't get enough pure water. No one knows for sure, but it seems like the amount of untreated pure water declines each year while the population grows. If those trends cross, massive water famines will be ahead. Mr. Rothfeder argues for having those in the developed world pay a disproportionately high price for water and use some of that to subsidize making water available to poor people everywhere. A potential benefit of this higher price in the developed world will be to reduce water consumption. An average shower in the United States consumes more water than the poorest people get in water-short areas in two or three days.

The background is discouraging. People are pouring into areas where there isn't enough water to support them (like southern California, Arizona, Atlanta, and Florida). Dam projects make less pure water available, harm wildlife and plants, displace people, and create risk of worse flooding. Draining too much water from areas (like the Owens Valley in California) leaves environmentally devastated areas where toxic wastes from former lake bottoms blow through the high winds harming everyone's health. Almost all of the World Bank money for water projects goes to make just this sort of dam, to create electricity for industry, and steady sources of water for irrigation on large farms.

Recently, companies have been buying up water distribution operations. Often the results, however, aren't very good. Executives may just pay themselves well, raise prices, and ignore quality. The U.K. added regulation (of the sort that we used to have with electricity in the United States) and found the results improved.

Some innovations are more promising. Water is being shipped in bags through the ocean. Desalinization is very expensive, but supplies a lot of the fresh water on the Arabian peninsula. Some harmful dams are being decommissioned. Systems-oriented solutions are being developed in some areas, such as the rehydration of the Everglades in Florida with water that would otherwise go out to sea. Gorbachev's Green Cross has had some successes with helping to broker regional water solutions.

When more water is available, wonderful things can happen. In a village in Kenya, women had to carry 70 pound jugs of water for miles for their families. The men didn't help. Development brought funds for pumps, and water was now only a few feet away. The quality of family life and prosperity of the villagers were much improved . . . for a while. Then thieves stole the pumps one night, and things went back to where they had been.

Overhanging all of this is the potential for regional wars over water. Mr. Rothfeder argues that the Six Day War was primarily triggered by the Arab plan to divert the Jordan River away from Israel. During the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed Kuwait's desalinization plants, Coalition Forces destroyed a lot of Iraq's water infrastructure, and Iraq used water warfare to control southern tribes. More recently, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan have been jockeying to get access to the water that the Kurdish regions in Turkey can supply.

The book is filled with interesting examples that will give you a much better sense of the fresh water situation. Unfortunately, the author's investigation of how to best solve the problem is dealt with in very sketchy terms. Clearly, if substantial funds were available, much more pure water could be provided. The question of who will pay for the poor in developing and underdeveloped countries is the hard question. When former Senator McGovern looked at whether world hunger could be eliminated, he found the cost was a reasonable one for the wealthiest countries to bear and much progress followed. A similar look is needed at making pure water available in the most efficient and effective way for the long-term. Even in the areas where the shortages are the greatest (like the U.S. Southwest) most of the water is still used for agriculture, and very little is paid for that water. So, this issue also requires thinking through price subsidies for agriculture.

Interestingly, Enron (which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy) was cited as one of the leaders in providing more pure water in the future around the world. That reference seemed ironic in light of recent events at the company.

Make part of your sharing with others include making more pure water available! Many charities have programs to help poor villagers install pumps and learn how to maintain them in water-short areas like the drier parts of Africa.

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Though the book provides some interesting "facts and figures", most of its arguments is based on author's own intrepretation and not much independent confirmations. Some of the arguments degenerate to what can be percieved as political agenda, while some of the arguments, ironically, doesnt hold any water. The author does deserve credit for the well thought thesis and discussion on the premises..The arguments on "why" and "what" went wrong could have risen above personal opinion/speculation...

The narration is interesting, and the author spices the discussion with some character sketches..A good read, but will be disappointed if you are looking for the book to live up to the hype its title could convey...

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I compared it most unfavorably with "A River Lost" a wonderfully researched and well written book on the Columbia River. Mr. Rothfeder simply pushes his own ideas and bends the facts to fit his views.

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