| View Larger Image | Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource | Paperbackby Marq de Villiers (Author)
| List Price: | $16.00 | | Price: | $10.88 | | You Save: | $5.12 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Mariner Books | | Edition: | 1st Mariner Books Edst Edition | | Page Count: | 368 Pages | | Publication Date: | July 12, 2001 | | Sales Rank: | 31,153st |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780618127443
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In his award-winning book WATER, Marq de Villiers provides an eye-opening account of how we are using, misusing, and abusing our planet's most vital resource. Encompassing ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives, de Villiers reports from hot spots as diverse as China, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, where swelling populations and unchecked development have stressed fresh water supplies nearly beyond remedy. Political struggles for control of water rage around the globe, and rampant pollution daily poses dire ecological theats. With one eye on these looming crises and the other on the history of our dependence on our planet's most precious commodity, de Villiers has crafted a powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations that will be "a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers, and water drinkers everywhere" (Publishers Weekly). |
Amazon.com Review
Water is a curious thing, observed the economist Adam Smith: although it is vital to life, it costs almost nothing, whereas diamonds, which are useless for survival, cost a fortune. In Water, Canadian journalist de Villiers says the resource is still undervalued, but it is becoming more precious. It's not that the world is running out of water, he adds, but that "it's running out in places where it's needed most." De Villiers examines the checkered history of humankind's management of water--which, he hastens to remind us, is not a renewable resource in many parts of the world. One of them is the Nile River region, burdened by overpopulation. Another is the Sahara, where Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi is pressing an ambitious, and potentially environmentally disastrous, campaign to mine deep underground aquifers to make the desert green. Another is northern China, where the damaging effects of irrigation have destroyed once-mighty rivers, and the Aral Sea of Central Asia, which was killed within a human lifetime. And still another is the American Southwest, where crops more fitting to a jungle than a dry land are nursed. De Villiers travels to all these places, reporting on what he sees and delivering news that is rarely good. De Villiers has a keen eye for detail and a solid command of the scientific literature on which his argument is based. He's also a fine storyteller, and his wide-ranging book makes a useful companion to Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert and other works that call our attention to a globally abused--and vital--resource. --Gregory McNamee |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 12 reviews)
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Surprising by Ren_A (Missouri)  4 Stars
November 26, 2009
I had to read this for a class and I ended up buying it because I couldn't find it at the library and it was cheap enough on Amazon. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book.
This book is very informative, easy to read and kept me turning the pages...which is all I ask for in a book of this topic.
If you're interested in this type of thing, I recommend this book.
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Are We on a Course Towards Disaster? by Avid Reader (USA)  5 Stars
January 22, 2009
Marq DeVilliers takes on a topic that affects each of us every day, and he brings it into perspective in a concise, tightly woven book. Written in the late 1990s, DeVilliers gives a snapshot of the problem emerging worldwide from overuse and pollution of fresh water. Without going over the top in his phrasing, he nevertheless brings the potential for a water apocalypse into view.
This book is a great introduction for a person interested in environmental issues. I would even suggest that it's worthy of inclusion on a college reading list, even though it's written for a general audience. Of course, college students today are not great scholars, so they would need supplemental information to even understand this book.
My only reservations about the book are these.
1. It's now more than a decade old, so is it relevant? Have things become so much worse that this book doesn't really encapsulate the problem today? Or, conversely, have some of the political and technological solutions that DeVilliers discusses in the second half of the book actually started to solve the problem? Either way, this book cries out for a 2nd edition.
2. Given the dire circumstances depicted in "Water," I'm wondering why the crisis has not yet hit home. For example, I am aware that the US West and Rockies are fighting about water, in much the way that DeVilliers described in the book. But people seem to be getting by, and the West is still gaining population. Similarly, places with even greater stresses, such as Israel or China, seem to be functioning. Yet the book made it seem as if they were nearly at the breaking point. So, is the problem really as bad as his anecdotes about the Aral Sea and other parched areas make it seem?
Regardless, this book is a very strong effort. It covers an important work with great breadth and useful depth. It's very readable. It makes passionate arguments, but it does so by using reason and data. For anyone who wants to get on the path of becoming a knowledgeable citizen of the world, this book is an important mile marker.
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Realistic, balanced assessment of world water issues by A. S. Johnson (Anchorage, AK) 4 Stars
December 29, 2008
This book covers freshwater issues around the world and is a great companion to Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. The author starts with a discussion of world freshwater sources, their accessibility, and how they are currently being used. He gives a really good overview of what constitutes water scarcity and the number of people currently fall into that category. He then covers some key concerns in the way humans affect the water supply including:
- Climate change and weather; he provides an assessment of how humans most likely are figuring into climate change and how climate change seems to be affecting our long-term water supply.
- Rerouting water (e.g. Aral Sea); he discusses how this sort of thing has changed local climates, killed off species, and ruined existing economic bases.
- Dams; he covers some of the biggest issues with dams and whether or not they are as useful as we once thought.
There is a fascinating section on the politics of water with a focus on the water-challenged Middle East that helped me understand some of the long-term conflicts in that area a little better.
The one problem I had with the book is that he often discusses his personal life in a manner that I found distracted from the overall focus of the book. That is why I only gave it 4 stars.
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Outstanding Discussion Group Text by B. Case (Redondo Beach, CA) 5 Stars
August 20, 2008
Every four months, I participate in one or more university-sponsored, Osher Lifelong Learning In Retirement (OLLI) discussion groups. Each deals with an important contemporary world issue. For the coming Fall 2008 trimester, I've signed up for the course "Water and the Politics of Water," and our textbook is "Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource," by Marq de Villiers. We are supposed to read and discuss the book slowly over the course of eight two-hour-long discussions. That was the plan...but as soon as the book arrived, I started reading it and couldn't put it down! The course won't begin for another two weeks, but I've already devoured the entire book. I don't know when I have ever come across such a compelling and captivating work of popular nonfiction! For the purpose of our discussion group, I cannot think of a better starting-off point.
The book provides an outstanding introduction to a critical contemporary concern. Each chapter focuses on a set of related issues. Taken by themselves, each of these could serve as the basis for thousands of detailed academic articles and books. It is a testament to the author's enormous skill that he was able to condense each set of issues down to a manageable summary, and give these topics just the right balance of fact and human-interest stories to make a page-turning work of can't-put-it-down nonfiction.
Since I was reading the book for a future discussion group, I read it pen-in-hand, liberally highlighting the text and writing notes to myself in the margins. The most frequent note I wrote was: "Needs update!" Typically, before each discussion, participants research the issues in order to bring new and updated material to the forefront. This book is an excellent catalyst for sparking interest for further research. The book was first published in 1999 and republished in a revised and updated version in 2003. Even with the revised version, most of the issues still require significant updating some five years later. Accomplishing this research on the Internet is easy; of course, there is also an overwhelming amount of popular, academic, and technical information available on these issues in public and academic libraries.
Don't get the impression that this book is out-of-date. The emerging water crisis is one of those "slow emergencies" that's happening just outside our range of day-to-day human perception. The vast majority of the damage has been accomplished in the past 100 years--an infinitesimally tiny length of time for any geological process, yet on our human perception scale, still profoundly slow...so slow that many people still do not know that a problem even exists.
The book is a real eye-opener, and a first-rate springboard for discussion groups. I recommend it highly.
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Good, but fails about Brazil by Dalton C. Rocha (Fortaleza, CE, Brazil.) 4 Stars
June 21, 2006
I'm an agronomist and I live in Brazil.I read this book, translated to the portuguese, here in Brazil.This book really has many usefull informations, about water suplly in the world.
China, Israel, Africa, USA, Mexico, India are some of the nations who are with water's problems and are focused in this book.
About Brazil this book is a failure.Brazil export far less paper and wood than Canada or USA, but we have far more forests than Canada or USA.And our forests grow far more fast than an american or canadian forest.And this book talks about ecomyths about Brazil.
In fact, this book sometimes reproduces, the ridiculous lies from "green eugenicists" or ecologists.
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