The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman

The United States experienced a major change in energy in the 2000s. Prior to the boom in oil and natural gas production, the nation was concerned  with declining production—oil production peaked in 1970—increasing demand and increasing reliance on foreign oil. New technology, particularly horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made previously challenging sources of oil and gas economically feasible to access. The result is increased energy supply, lower prices for natural gas, and less reliance on foreign sources.

 The story of this turnaround is not founded on government policies or one of the massive energy companies. These energy resources from shales and other difficult rocks have been made available by players who started out as small time wildcatters and landmen. They took the risk on developing difficult resources in the United States and developing the technologies that made them economically feasible. As politicians wrung their hands and big companies sought greener pasture oversees, these men held onto hope and kept digging until they found solutions.

 Gregory Zuckerman recounts the story of some of these men and the businesses they built in The Frackers. This is a book of business journalism. That is more interesting than it may sound. It is a story with some drama as players face ups and downs that sometimes lead to ruin and sometimes to outrageous wealth. It has had a significant impact on the American economy as well.

 It may be a uniquely American story, too. The United States is one of the very few countries in which individuals own the rights to the minerals, including oil and gas, that are under their land. This meant people could try even when it seemed they were likely to lose, and have little interference in their losses. A few of them lost and lost until they won and won big.

 Zuckerman acknowledges concerns related to fracking. He finds that the environmental concerns have been somewhat overblow, and that it can be done safely if appropriate measure are taken, though that hasn’t always been the case. Appropriate environmental regulation can protect human health and the environmental while continuing to give us access to these energy sources.

 Another concern is that low energy prices may reduce the impetus for developing alternative and renewable energy. This is still the best long-term option. Zuckerman finds some hope in the story of the frackers though. Their belief and persistence resulted in big changes, but it took time. The developers of the next generation energy sources may have their breakthrough, too, in the next couple of decades if they keep at it.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Contents Under Pressure by Sylvia F. Munson

 Zuckerman, Gregory. The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

The Mississippi River is powerful. I’ve seen it. I grew up in the northern tip of the river’s delta and now live near one of its major tributaries. John M. Barry’s history of the 1927 flood of the Mississippi, Rising Tide, is only partly about the power of the river. It is more about the power of men, particularly the political power of the men who have tried to exert control over the river.

The first political battle related to the river took place in the 19^th Century. It was a conflict between the nation’s military engineering establishment and their increasingly influential civilian counterparts over who would control Mississippi River policy. The principal actors and figureheads for the two sides were Andrew A. Humphreys, chief of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and James B. Eads, St. Louis-based civil engineer. The Corp largely won this battle, maintaining a controlling voice in river policy, but the resulting agency, the Mississippi River Commission, adopted a theory of practice that neither Humphreys or Eads supported. It would lead to floods on the river becoming increasingly bad.

That conflict doesn’t completely disappear, but it is overtaken by the greater flow of money, politics, society, and race, mostly centered in New Orleans, Mississippi’s Yazoo Valley, and Washington, DC. It is hard to give each player his due in a brief review of Barry’s book. Barry focuses on Leroy Percy, who had great influence on river policy before, during and after the flood. He was a planter in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta and, briefly, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. He was also a relative of Walker Percy, one of my favorite authors.

The flood made political careers and had lasting effects. President Calvin Coolidge appointed his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to lead relief efforts after the flood. The publicity and public goodwill that accrued to Hoover during this period helped to usher him into the White House as Coolidge’s successor. Hoover’s lack of follow-through on promises to black leaders created a crack between in the relationship between African-American’s and the Republican Party that led to a serious split.

Huey P. Long also owed some of his success to the flood and its aftermath. New Orleans business leaders promised to provide relief to neighbors who would be flooded by the dynamiting of levees to protect the city. Afterward, these men did everything they could to minimize their liability and did not even pay one-tenth of the cost of damages caused by the flooding. Long rode a wave of resentment against New Orleans aristocrats into the Louisiana governor’s office. Once there, he used his position to strip the New Orleans elite of as much power as he could. As the city elites became more insular and focused on protecting what they had, rather than growing their businesses and community, New Orleans lost its position as the leading city of the South as other more welcoming cities grew.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Barry, James M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

London is an ancient city. The Romans established a settlement their a thousand years ago, but they weren’t the first inhabitants of the valley. It sits on soil into which everything slowly sinks. Rivers that brought life to the valley became choked with filth and were buried. The ground under London is thick with history, and the infrastructure of a modern metropolis mingles with the remains of its ancestors. Peter Ackroyd describes what is beneath the surface of that great city in London Under.

Ackroyd goes back to the earliest settlers of the area and the archeological remains of their lives. Their holy places were overbuilt by Roman temples. The temples dedicated to Roman gods were overbuilt by churches. Old paths became Roman roads. The filth of a city covered these roads and turned them back into dirt paths. Modern people paved them anew with brick, and later asphalt or concrete. It’s all still there, though, one thing layered over the other, but often still following the outlines ancient paths.

As you might expect from a man with who has worked with water, some of my favorite chapters relate to the rivers and sewers. London was built around rivers. As the population grew, these rivers became open sewers, carrying away all manner of waste until they were too filthy and stinking to bear. These rivers were enclosed and became underground sewers. As the city grew, it overwhelmed the sewers and turned the Thames into a stinking mess. Eventually it inconvenienced Parliament enough that they engaged the problems seriously in the 19^th Century, putting in place interceptor sewers that carried the waste away from the city. Many of the sewers that are now more than a century old are still in use.

Another feature of London that fascinates my engineering side is the Underground. The city has the oldest underground railway system. The first lines are more than 150 years old. It was built in bits and pieces by competing private companies, though now it is a unified system. The Underground has become such a part of London life that a literature related to it has developed. The tunnels have been the settings of novels and the inspiration for poems.

World War II and the Cold War were another significant phase of buried construction. The British government built many tunnels and bunkers to protect government resources threatened by war. During World War II, so many people sought shelter in the Underground that the government was forced to provide shelter space for people escaping the bombs.

Like any modern city, London now has an extensive underground infrastructure. Pipelines carry drinking water, sewerage, electric and telephone wires, fiber optic cables and all the other things that connect people to services in their homes and workplaces.  These important systems are hidden underground, out of site and possibly too often out of mind, where their work apparently does not disturb the sleeping remains of the many things that had come before.

If you are interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under: The Secret History beneath the Streets. New York: Anchor, 2011.

Elixir by Brian Fagan (245)

Fagan, Brian.  Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Unlike other authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.  In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely associated with ritual, often considered sacred.  Fagan’s interested in the human relationship with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.

Fagan describes three phases of the human relationship with water.  In the first stage, water is an unreliable, often scarce, and highly valued resource.  This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of water.  In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity, little considered and treated as if it were superabundant.  In the emerging stage, water is a finite resource we need to conserve.

*

Most of the book is covers the first stage.  He discusses the historic relationship and management of water from around the world.  Some of these were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans.  Others are lesser known, like the highly ritualistic and religious Balinese system that is still operating.  Some we know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.

Because of this approach, Elixir is also a work of cultural and physical geography.  The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their environment.

The commodity stage is covered much more briefly.  To be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.  It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more difficult and remote sources of water.  Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant water.  Fagan points to arid and semiarid regions of Africa and Asia as locations poised on exhausting their water.  This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest, where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for more than a century.

For the stage we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.  Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have sustainable water supplies.

When it comes to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology and human ingenuity.  Even so, he implies that we should look to our past.

In the early stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it, immensely.  It is time to place a high value on water again, even without religious aspects.  Also, in the past water management was a very local affair, and surprisingly democratic.  Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies, they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the community.  Even in empires with powerful central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Top Books I Read in 2011

It’s been my custom on KBR to pick the top 20 percent of the books I read every year. Here are the best of what I read in 2011.

1. Romans
2. Second Corinthians
3. The Pentateuch
4. Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller
5. The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
6. Water by Steven Solomon

You may also be interested in
Best of What I Read in 2010

Best of What I Read in 2009

Best of What I Read in 2008

Best of What I Read in 2007

Top 15 Books of the First 200 Reviewed on KBR

Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

After 40 years of wondering, the Israelites are about to enter the land God promised to their forefathers. Their leader and prophet, Moses, won’t be entering with them because of his sin in the wilderness, God ordained that he would not go in. He appoints Joshua to lead the people.

This is the setting of Deuteronomy. The name means “repetition of the law” because Moses takes the opportunity to reiterate to this generation the history of Israel and the law God has given them. Much of the Deuteronomy is a reiteration of the laws found in the books that precede it.

The law, recorded by Moses in writing, was comprehensive. The ecclesiastical law covered religious ceremonies. Other laws dealt with crime and punishment, dealing with accidental deaths, sanitation, construction, safety, marriage, family, commerce, foreign affairs, war, property, inheritance, contracts and other issues of importance to a people who are to live together peaceably. It was not he first recorded law, and it contrasts with its antecedents in its relative humanity, value of life, and emphasis on God. The Israelites were to eradicate the inhabitants of the promised land, God had proclaimed it as a judgment for those nations’ wickedness, but otherwise they were to treat law-abiding foreigners who live among them with fairness, even generosity, which was rare in ancient times and certainly not what they were experiencing when they fled Egypt.

Deuteronomy is not necessarily boring or devoid of new material. It is full of hope and warnings for a nation that was finally coming into its own. God, speaking through Moses, foretold that the people would fall away from the law and that trouble would follow. He foretold that they would seek a king some 400 years before they put a crown on Saul’s high head. The coming of Christ was also predicted.

Moses also composed a song. It was intended to help the people to remember their God, their history, and the law. After teaching them the song, he blesses the tribes of Israel.



It seems sad that Moses, who led Israel out of Egypt and in the wilderness, and who was faithful in comparison to his fellows, would die before he could enter the promised land. God led him up on a mountain to see the whole land that another generation of Israelites, raised in the hardships of the wilderness and fed from God’s special provision, would take. With this vision in his eyes, alone with God on a mountain, he died.

Even at this moment of Moses’ death, we see a picture of God’s justice and mercy mingled. It was just that Moses should not enter the promised land. However, Moses had the unique privilege to have is body laid in a grave prepared by God Himself. The funeral may be the most sparsely attended in history, but the Almighty officiated.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Exodus
Genesis
Leviticus
Numbers

Google

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Policy makers seem to love science. I can see why. Science provides a sense of specificity, certainty and consensus. It contrasts with the vagueness, variability and competition that policy makers usually have to deal with. That is more like the world engineering.

This interrelation of policy-making, science and engineering, especially the latter two, is the subject of Henry Petroski’s book, The Essential Engineer. In particular, Petroski emphasizes the important, and often overlooked, role of engineering is solving pressing problems.



I doesn’t help that people conflate science and engineering, especially by thinking of engineering as branch or application of science. Petroski is clear about the differences. Science is about increasing knowledge. Engineering is about invention. Sometimes scientists do engineering, especially when they create a devise or process to help them in their work of discovery. Sometimes engineers do science, especially when their engage in research and experimentation to gain a better understanding or problems that are not well understood.

The movement of knowledge from science to engineering practice is well understood. Petroski describes how this became ingrained in American research and development policy. Engineering often precedes science and engineers often must invent solutions in areas that are not well understood by science. Galileo’s improvements to the telescope made possible his advancements in astronomy. The science of thermodynamics grew almost entirely out of the desire to understand steam engines, which engineers had been building and improving in the absence of scientific understanding.

This misunderstanding exacerbated by our culture and education. Policy elites and scientist generally have no education in engineering. As an undergraduate studying engineering, I took science classes with students majoring in the sciences. I took classes in political science, economics and other social science and business-oriented classes with students majoring in those fields. I would have been greatly surprised to find in one of my engineering classes a student who wasn’t majoring in engineering.*

Petroski does not try to bring down science. He’s a civil engineering professor at a sizeable university, so he has probably spent quite a bit of time doing science. He does distinguish how science is helpful, mainly as a warning. Science can help us identify and define problems and assess the risks involve. When we begin to devise solutions to those problems, especially when there is no definitive solution and judgment is needed to way the pros and cons of multiple possible answers, we are moving into engineering.

The Essential Engineer is not a technical book. It for anyone who may have an interest in the role of technology in addressing our problems, especially larger societal problems. Petroski draws illustrations from current events and history (he is a professor of history as well as engineering). The book is enlivened with a storytelling feel.

* There were exceptions. I took a course in food processing that was dual-listed in agricultural engineering and food science. It was a required course for both disciplines. Electrical engineering students almost automatically minored in math, and some clever and ambitious students double-majored in those subjects. With a little better planning, I could have swung a minor in agricultural economics, and I almost wish I had. When I got into wastewater engineering, I wished I had taken more microbiology. My pursuit of additional education lead to a graduate degree in public administration. Government agencies have been employers or clients most of my career. It is common for engineers to get a masters degree in business, especially as they become managers.

Henry Petroski also wrote Paperboy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
The Big Necessity by Rose George
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

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November 19: World Toilet Day

World Toilet Day brings attention to the plight of those who suffer disease and death because of lack of sanitation. To learn more about this problems, see the list of links I posted at Infrastructure Watch or read one of the following books.

The Big Necessity by Rose George
Water by Marq de Villiers

What I Read (End)

Date: November 27, 2008
Title: His Excellency
Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Thoughts: A readable and balanced biography of a great man.

Date: December 25, 2008
Title: The Spirit
Author: Darwyn Cooke
Thoughts: Great, fun detective stories.

Date: December 28, 2008
Title: Wisdom from the Batcave
Author: Cory A Friedman
Thoughts: A fun way to look at serious ethics.

Date: January 3, 2009
Title: Blink
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Thoughts: The good, the bad and the hope of snap judgments.

Date: January 5, 2009
Title: The Unfinished Game
Author: Keith Devlin
Thoughts: It’s comforting that someone as smart as Pascal had trouble grasping probabilities, though he was handicapped by having to invent the idea first.

Keith Devlin also coauthored The Numbers behind NUMB3RS.

Date: January 15, 2009
Title: The Water Room
Author: Christopher Fowler
Thoughts: An interesting and enjoyable detective story, but he main draw to me was the underground rivers of London.

Date: January 22, 2009
Title: The Joy of Supernatural Thinking
Author: Bill Bright
Thoughts: A very challenging book.

Date: January 31, 2009
Title: The Big Necessity
Author: Rose George
Thoughts: It’s amazing how many people could have better lives if they could just dispose of their shit, and how hard it seems to be to accomplish it.

Date: February 24, 2009
Title: Why Good Things Happen to Good People
Author: Stephen Post & Jill Neimark
Thoughts:
“The generous soul will be made rich,
And he who waters will be watered himself” (Proverbs 11:25).

Date: March 1, 2009
Title: How to Write Mysteries
Author: Shannon OCork
Thoughts: Lots of good ideas. Now to put them to use.

Date: March 17, 2009
Title: The Emotional Energy Factor
Author: Mira Kirshenbaum
Thoughts: “Worry never comes up with good ideas. It never yields comfort. It never brings your ship to any safe harbor” (quote from the book).

Date: March 26, 2009
Title: Mastering Fiction Writing
Author: Kit Reed
Thoughts: “You’re going to have to write a lot of crap in your life before you write anything good, so you might as well get started” (quote from the book).

Books I Want to Write
Goal Setting that Works
A hardboiled, science fiction crime story
The Prodigal
Phin

Other parts of What I Read:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5,
Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10,
Part 11, Part 12

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about infrastructure and the environment.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Mankind’s attempts to harness rivers have had unintended consequences. Schemes to make land more productive have created deserts. Crops on drained land have produced less food and value than the swamps they displaced. Rivers hemmed in to prevent flooding have flooded more frequently and worse than before.

Pearce isn’t against technology. He sometimes expresses admiration for the dams, canals and other engineering feats about which he writes. However, he’s not impressed when this technology deprives people of the water and wealth it was intended to provide.

Water and wealth is a connection Pearce often makes. For all the lip service paid to the social benefits of grand water schemes, the water tends to go where the money is.

Overall, the world has become more water poor. The poorest have generally lost the most.

In spite of the history, Peace sees hope in the potential of technology that works with the water cycle instead of against it. It is already happening on a small scale where ancient where people are reviving ancient methods of capturing rainwater. Indian farmers are adapting dessert containers for use as a cheap, and more efficient, drip irrigation pipe. On the large scale, river engineers are cutting levees, restoring wetlands and allow river to return to curvy courses. In agriculture, the biggest user and waster of water in much of the world, there is a move to crops that are more appropriate to the locally available rainfall and less dependent on irrigation. Even in Los Angeles, a city known for the lengths it has gone to in order to quench its great thirst in a dry land, activist are seeking to create a more porous city that captures and uses the water that falls there naturally.

To illustrate his points, Pearce travels the world to see the disastrous results of bad water management, the extreme example being the disappearing Aral Sea. He also points out what works, like a restored qanat in Iraq.

You can order this book here.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in Water by Marq de Villiers.

Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

The Big Necessity by Rose George

George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. New York: Metropolitan, 2008.

Rose George wants people to talk about something they don’t usually talk about: shit. Human excreta is a huge problem in much of the world. Even in the West where flush toilets are nearly ubiquitous, safe disposal of the waste is a daunting problem. There is probably nothing that could do more to improve human health, productivity and prosperity worldwide than to improve the disposal of human excreta, i.e. to really deal with our shit.

George deals with both the highs and the lows of disposing human waste. The pinnacle is found in Japan, the land of high functioning toilets. Japanese butts are pampered with heated seats and built-in warm-water bidets just for starters. On the other extreme, some people have nothing better to resort to than open defecation in the bushes or even the street.

There is no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to sanitation. One reason is water. The waterborne sewage systems of the relatively water-rich, flushing West would not even begin to work in the dryer parts of the world. Even where great and affordable technology exists, sanitation can be thwarted by misunderstandings of culture and society.

George’s look at how culture effects sanitation make a lot of sense, but it is easy to overlook. Many sanitation programs have failed because well meaning planners have imposed solutions from the top. The successful solutions seem to be coming from the bottom, where people find solutions that fit the local customs or where local awareness is awakened before solutions are proposed.

Another interesting thing about the book is that George has talked to many people who are trying different ways to solve the sanitation problem in different parts of the world. There a lot to be learned from their successes and failures. Maybe by openly discussing the shit, and seeing what works and doesn’t from both a social and engineering standpoint, we can come up with better policies and programs—or simple human interactions—that will lead to better living for everyone through sanitation.

Order this book here.

The Last Taboo by Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett

I haven’t read this book yet, but I was intrigued by the review on the Water and Wastewater Blog and thought I’d mention it. It discusses the problem of sanitation and drinking water in poorer nations. If you’re interested in this topic, you may also want to check out The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. Order The Last Taboo here.