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Title: Every Drop for Sale: Our Desperate Battle Over Water by Jeff Rothfeder, Jeffrey Rothfeder ISBN: 1-58542-114-6 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 11 October, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Every Drop For Sale, a "colorful" novel
Comment: I was prepared to like this book and be convinced of its premise, but was sorely disappointed. It is mostly undocumented and seems to reflect only the author's opinion.
I call it a "colorful" read since the writing consists of yellow journalism, purple prose, and white lies.
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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Overall Look at Water Shortages, with the Latest Trends
Comment: How much would you pay for water to sustain your life? Obviously, you would be willing to pay a lot. That fact concerns Mr. Rothfeder because he fears that water is about to become prohibitively expensive . . . or just not available for more and more of the world's people. As a case in point, Bechtel took over the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia and raised water prices to the level equal to what the poorest people paid for all of their food. Soon, the town was in revolt, martial law was declared, and events would have only gotten worse if Bolivia had not terminated the contract. If you remember your French history, the end of the monarchy coincided with a period of rapidly rising bread prices.
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.
Rating: 4
Summary: Going Under the Third Time?
Comment:
This is an hysterical title, but nevertheless offers a good overview of the methods by which potable water makes it to where the people are. We should always remember the wise words of Sam Kinison about living in the desert. Of course, when he said that, he was a resident of Los Angeles.
According to this author, desalination is no cheaper than delivery by floating bags. Apparently he hasn't got up to date info from the eastern Mediterranean. Desalination (many methods are available, as he notes) is the way of the future.
The biggest problem area in water distribution is the use of open canals in hot, dry areas. Most significantly, Los Angeles gets its water supply that way, and Egypt is losing arable land every year in part because of a failure to arrest evaporation losses.
The Med-Dead project (to bring water from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea, as a way to supply Jordan; instead, Jordan wants a canal from Aqaba, along the Saudi-Israeli border for political and military reasons) and the Med-Qattara project will probably never materialize for economic reasons.
The Aral Sea basin was devastated by Soviet land use and water use practices, making the contested valley along the Afghan border significant to the world at large.
The Kuwaitis and Iranians are building a way (Japanese contractor I believe) to move water from western Iran to oil-wealthy Kuwait, via a pipeline under the Persian Gulf. The Turks intend to build an anchored pipeline from a hydro project to the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (the Turkish enclave of Cyprus, an independent nation recognized only by Turkey). If brought to fruition, each of these projects will have political and military significance.
The hysteria of the title is a bit much precisely because water doesn't go away; no matter how tainted, it can be filtered and reused. The world is people, and people aren't short of water. Agricultural irrigation uses something like ten times as much water as other uses, but requires less treatment. Obviously we need agriculture, and the other uses can be easily satisfied using current sources merely by cheap methods of conservation.
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Title: Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource by Marq de Villiers ISBN: 0618127445 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly and the Politics of Thirst by Diane Raines Ward ISBN: 1573222291 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters by Robert Jerome Glennon ISBN: 1559632232 Publisher: Island Press Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water by Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke ISBN: 1565848136 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva ISBN: 089608650X Publisher: South End Press Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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