The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

More than 1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water.  Australia has suffered a decade-long, continent-wide drought.  Even seemingly water rich places, like Atlanta, Georgia, can’t get enough water.  Many are talking of a global water crisis.  Except, as Charles Fishman aptly states it in The Big Thirst, “There is no global water crisis, there are a thousand water crises, each distinct.”

I think the story of Atlanta and Lake Lanier, as told recounted by Fishman, is especially instructive.  Lake Lanier on the Chatahoochee River is the source of 75 percent of the water used by Atlanta, 5 million gallons a day.  A drought in 2007-2008 brought the level of the lake dangerously low, prompting downstream states to sue over the amount of water Atlanta was taking.  The federal court declared that Atlanta had been illegally receiving water from the lake and had to find another source.  Atlanta has a lot of resources, barely tapped conservation efforts, reuse, and alternative supplies, but with a lack of political will, leadership, and vision, it leaders threw up their hands in impotent defiance of the court and whined they must have Lake Lanier water.  When the lake was built, Atlanta passed on paying for a piece of it thinking it would never be needed, and now they think they can’t live without it.

Part of the point Fishman makes it that water crises are more often than not political crises.  There is a lack of political will and sense of necessity, even though the problems can be plain and the solutions within reach.  The Big Thirst includes examples from around the world (the United States, India, and especially Australia) where people are facing water problems.  Happily, many of them have taken a more realistic and reasonable approach than Atlanta.

Fishman is going for something deeper, though.  Our political and economic stumbling in the area of water management stems for our cultural relationship with water.  It is obviously necessary for life.  We also consider it beautiful, it is part of our landscape, and in some places it has important religious significance.  Even so, we have difficulty understanding the value of water, comparing one use to another, assigning responsibility for its distribution and quality, acknowledging the infrastructure needed to have water when and where it is needed.  It the West, where for the last century we have enjoyed incredible access to abundant water, we hardly ever think about water unless we have some professional connection to it.

We can’t continue to be mindless of water.  The systems of water abundance we built in the last century aren’t sustainable without major ongoing investment.  In light of climate change, they may be altogether unsustainable.  Even without climate change, much of our water policy dates to a time of unusual water abundance.

Fishman encourages water mindfulness.  We need to reconnect to water.  In part, this reconnecting means understanding what it means to have water in our homes and in our streams.  It is also connecting to how critical water is to food, energy, commerce, health, and almost every aspect of life.  Our decisions about water need to be rooted in reality.

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

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I’ve also written about Atlanta and Lake Lanier at Infrastructure Watch:

Courts Could Affect Uses of Lake Lanier

Georgia Appeals Lake Lanier Decision

Georgia Loses Lake Lanier Battle

Judge Winnows Down Central Question in Lake Lanier Case

Fishman, Charles.  The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.  New York: Free Press, 2011.

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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.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The prevailing myth of invention is that it is the product of a solitary genius. Steven Johnson takes on this myth in How We Got to Now.

Johnson’s book is a history of invention with a focus on six particular innovations. He demonstrates that simultaneous invention is common, suggesting that societal knowledge, norms and expectations play a part in invention—at least in providing an environment in which certain types of inventions can be created and flourish.

Thomas Edison and the light bulb is the classic myth challenged by simultaneous invention. Humphrey Davy demonstrated an incandescent electric light in 1802 and Frederick de Moleyns received the first patent for a light bulb in 1841. By the time Edison got involve, people had been working on light bulbs for 30 years, and the potential for electric light had been now for 70 years. Edison and his team of collaborators deserve a lot of credit for creating a commercially successful electric lighting system, inventing solutions to many problems along the way, but is a story of systematic hard work.

Edison’s electric lighting system depended on a lot of prior technology, which relates to another of Johnson’s points: clusters of inventions. An invention can illuminate a previously unnoticed problem (or create a new one). For instance, the availability of affordable books that follow Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press revealed that many people were farsighted. This sparked a demand for reading glasses. The tinkering with lenses led to the invention of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo took up the telescope and made discoveries in astronomy that reshaped how people saw the world. Robert Hooke used the microscope to explore a seemingly alien world of the very tiny thing all around us, though the revolution he inspired took longer to bloom.

Johnson explores other aspects of invention and society. I think it is fair to say that his view of how invention works is a lot messier than the myth. Inventors are at the right place at the right time, with open minds that are prepared (likely by accident) to make a connection and a willingness to do the work of thinking, testing and making something new. They probe the boundaries of their fields, tinker and throw themselves into hobbies that bring them, often with companions, to crossroads that challenge their notions of where they can go and how they can get there.

On the whole, Johnson presents a vision of hope in our history. We are not dependent on genius or serendipity; human creativity is both a social and an individual process in which the collision of ideas leads to new ideas. We live in an era where the collision of ideas may be more possible than ever.

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

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Circles by James Burke

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steven Johnson also wrote

The Ghost Map

The Invention of Air

Johnson, Steven. How We Got To Now: Six Innovations that Make the Modern World. New York: Riverhead, 2014.

New & Interesting Stuff Jan. 24, 2013

A man skilled in his work..will serve before kings

Book Review: The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Government & Infrastructure News

Let the words of my mouth be acceptable to you, O Lord

New & Interesting Stuff Jan. 22, 2013

The plans of the diligent lead surely to plenty

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Quick Hits

Second Kings

World wastes half its food, study finds

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold had a long career working with and studying nature as a government forester, university professor, founder of the discipline of wildlife management. He is remembered as author and popular proponent of wilderness based on his book A Sand County Almanac.

A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays in three parts. The first part is a tour of his Wisconsin farm covering each month of the year. Actually, it is not a farm in the sense of being a business that produces food and fiber. It was abandoned as a farm and hiding place for illegal stills when Leopold bought it as a semi-wild getaway. To be fair, though, it was abandoned as a farm because of practices that destroyed much of its productive capacity, and Leopold’s theme is land management. He approaches that theme gently in the first part. A reader can have the sense of strolling around the place with Leopold as he points out the plants and animals that live there, full-time or seasonally, and shares his enthusiasm for them.

In the second part, Leopold expands the scope to cover many places in the central and western United States, and even a few places in Mexico and Canada. These essays also recount his personal experiences relating to wild lands. In some of these essays he begins to touch more firmly on points of land management and policy.

In the final part, Leopold’s essays are more direct. The point of the book is that, if Americans, or people generally, want to have a rich landscape, wildlife, and land that is productive for generations, we need to value land in a new way and take new approaches to managing it.

The culmination of this discussion is the land ethic. Ethics are essentially about community, and the appropriate and acceptable relationships between the members of the community and each member and the community as a whole. A land ethic treats the land as a part of the community. In land, Leopold includes “soils, waters, plants, and animals.” Land is a part of our community that produces things of both economic and ineffable value. The land ethic implies that we have obligations to each other and to the land to conserve it. Conservation isn’t simply a matter or protecting specific areas, plants or animals. There is a place for policy, but the ethic is also individual, and a successful conservation efforts will mean landowners will need to treat the land and something inherently valuable. We would conserve ethically out of a sense of humility, realizing that the land is much more complex that we understand, and that our progress can outpace our understanding with possibly irreversible undesirable results.

Reconnecting to the land, and learning to value it, is encouraged by Leopold. Arguably, the first two parts of the book are intended to give the reader a sense of connection to the land. On the policy front, he suggests that many of the things we do to connect people to wilderness is destroying the wilderness. A land ethic could be a curative for this because aware people could connect to the land (especially wild plants and animals) close to home, even in cities, and be able to appreciate even wilder places from a distance. He goes so far as to suggest that amateur wildlife research could become a new type of sportsmanship, and cites cases were amateurs managing their own small plots have contributed to our understanding of wildlife.

It should be noted that, in addition to being a collection of thoughtful essays on nature, A Sand County Almanac is beautifully written. He can be poetical and political in the same sentence, such as “Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.” He expresses himself with a gentle, homey cynicism as when he wrote, “Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”

*

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

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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300 Books Reviewed on Keenan’s Book Reviews

I’ve posted reviews of 300 books on this blog. It’s hard to believe.  Here are links to the 50 most recent posts. Further down are links to more reviews.

First Time Reviews

1939 by David Gelernter

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances & Joseph Gies

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Dog Days by Dave Ihlenfeld

Double Your Brain Power by Jean Marie Stine

Epistles

First Chronicles

First John

First Kings

First Peter

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hebrews

Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

I Declare by Joel Osteen

James

Jude

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Mojo by Marshall Goldsmith

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

The Most Effective Organization in the U.S. by Robert A. Watson & Ben Brown

No Excuses by Brian Tracy

Pauline Letters

Philemon

Quiet by Susan Cain

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Revelation

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Second John

Second Kings

Second Peter

Second Samuel

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Third John

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Additional and Expanded Reviews

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

1939 by David Gelernter

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Quiet by Susan Cain

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Continuation of list of 250 books reviewed

First 25 Reviews

Reviews 26-50

Reviews 51-75

Reviews 76-100

Reviews 101-150

Reviews 151-200

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Water is a chemical essential to human life and culture, and it is possibly the oddest common substance. Physicist and science writer Philip Ball describes the nature of water, both scientific and cultural, in Life’s Matrix (originally published in the United Kingdom as H2O: A Biography of Water).

Ball begins at the very beginning—the big bang. Hydrogen, the simplest atom and most abundant element in the universe, appeared early in the universe. Oxygen is forged in stars and has become the third most abundant element. There is water in space. Ice seems to be common in the far reaches of the solar system. It has been found on the moon and stars and a few molecules appear in the cooler spots on the sun.

We have found no worlds yet that have as much liquid water as ours. The water cycle has shaped Earth. Our weather comes largely from the interplay of water and energy. Even the water locked up in the ice of our poles and glaciers shape the land, influence the weather, and affect the movement of heat, water and salt in ocean currents.

Ball tackles all phases of water, including a few exotic forms that only occur in extreme conditions created in laboratories. That water exists as vapor, liquid, and solid within the fairly narrow range of temperatures that are common on Earth make it unique. This is just one of its unusual properties. The structure of the water molecule is described in the book along with the physics that explain its behavior, to the degree that such things are even known.

Our understanding of water as a compound of hydrogen and oxygen is a relatively recent thing. For a long time, water was thought of as an irreducible element. This makes sense on some level. Water is essential to life as we know it. It is irreplaceable. From the perspective of living creatures, and in almost every culture, water is a fundamental material.

In the final chapter, Ball moves away from the hard sciences to culture, economics and policy. Water of the quality needed for drinking, and even the lesser quality needed for other things, is scarce and unevenly distributed on the planet. To take a serious look at water is to be drawn to issues of health and wealth. Growing population and changing climate will put increased demands on the available fresh water, and we need to consider how we are going to manage it. Ball takes a look at some of the hot spots.

The book is intended for a broad audience. I think it is probably more accessible to someone with some education in the sciences, especially chemistry or physics, but someone had a high-school level class in these subjects they should be able to follow along.

In addition, the book is 16 years old, so necessarily out of date in some respects. I suspect that much of the physics, chemistry and biology described is still sound. Similarly, there is unlikely to be discoveries in history that would seriously outdate the book, even in the interesting section on dead ends and “pathology” in water science.

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

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

New & Interesting Stuff Jan. 22, 2013

All things are possible to him that believes

All things work together for good to those who love God

Around the Nation

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Ribbon Commission Reports on Missouri Transportation Funding

Epistles

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

If you have faith even as small as a mustard seed...nothing would be impossible

Infrastructure & Environment Bills Introduced in Missouri General Assembly

Infrastructure in the United States

New & Interesting Stuff Jan. 8, 2012

The Nexus of It All

Oil & Gas Industry Toots its Own Horn

Revisit: Fiscal Cliff, More Trouble for Colo. R., EPA Leadership

Space Cartoons to Space Psychedelia: How Sci-Fi Book Covers Evolved

Tributes to Ada Louise Huxtable: 1921-2013

World Water Scarcity

You’d think that a creature made in God’s image would be pretty sure of himself