Water Wars: Drought, Flood, and the Politics of Thirst
“Right now a gallon of drinking water in my city costs more than a gallon of gas.”
“Our whole society was built on the notion that we could and must control nature, that we must master our circumstances, technologically,” environmentalist Roland Clement said to me not long ago. “But natural systems are the consequence of a long evolution, and ecology is teaching us that we must first understand these systems to see how far we may modify them for our benefit without disastrous consequences. This is a new point of view that arose with ecological science, that world systems have a functional reality of their own and that if we push them too far, the systems will either break down or backfire.”
Using case studies of water issues in the Fertile Crescent to the coasts of the Netherlands to Bangladesh and various other flashpoints across the world, Ward helps readers understand the forces that have brought us to the brink of a global water supply crisis and what solutions have been and are being carried out presently (both successful and non-) to prevent future water wars.