Product Description

Winner, Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction

A brilliant and disturbing look at the most crucial ecological issue of the new century – now thoroughly revised and updated


Water – where it is, who owns it, how much we’ll need, and how to make sure we’ll have it – is quickly emerging as one of the most important ecological issues of the new century.

First published in 1999, Water, Marq de Villiers’s brilliant look at the condition of water resources around the world, won a Governor General’s Award and earned glowing praise from such respected figures as Maurice Strong, now of the Earth Council (“timely, authoritative, and eminently readable”).

In compelling and lucid prose, de Villiers describes the grim situations in arid regions – in the southwestern United States, southern Africa, Mexico, Egypt, Israel, India, and Asia – and makes it clear just how serious the ramifications can be. He outlines how water is being manipulated by technology, used as a political bargaining chip, or imperilled by ignorance – and what this could mean to us in the future, how it could shape the way we live.

We must act now, says de Villiers. And although our choices are conservation, technological invention, or violence, he sees hope in the fact that we still have choices.

This new edition – completely updated – of what has become a standard book on a crucial subject makes for vitally important reading.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68973 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-26
• Released on: 2003-08-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Amazon.com
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

Books in Canada
Considering how crucial water is to life, it’s surprising how few books on water exist even today for the non-specialist. One celebrated study, Marc Reisner’s The Cadillac Desert has gone through several editions but the focus there is on the water management and depredations in the American southwest. Marq de Villiers’s Water which first came out in 1999, had a much broader perspective. It carefully reviewed some major problems the world over, both technical and political, in the seemingly simple task of making clean water reliably come out of taps. It was an impressively detailed and thought-out book and won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Inevitably its success rather begged for an update and de Villiers has obliged with a newly revised and expanded edition.
While the revision covers much the same territory as the first edition, there has been a slight darkening of tone. Although the first edition was a book full of stories of gross mismanagement and pollution, de Villiers did at least indulge himself at the start with an innocent Garden of Eden image. A South African transplanted to Canada, de Villiers can never forget his grandfather’s dry farm on the edge of a desert. At his own recreational farm in central Ontario, de Villiers has by contrast the luxury of a small spring behind his barn where the water, seemingly inexhaustible and pure, makes happy gurgling sounds. In the first edition, he even admitted that at first he loved to sit near the spring and just experience its plenitude. In the new edition he snatches this image away as if it were a bit too clever or sentimental. In virtually any other place in the world, after all, there would be farmers upstream diverting water or polluting it.
Certainly there is no shortage of unhappy stories he can relate. De Villiers provides a parade of international water disasters and there are enough recent ones. The list in the new edition is almost entirely different from that in his first book. One especially depressing prediction from the United Nations suggests that in just eleven years, 40% of the world’s population will suffer major difficulties in obtaining necessary water. Bankok is pumping so much ground water out from beneath the city that like Mexico City, it is slowly sinking in on itself. By 2050 Bangkok will be below sea level. There are plenty of nightmare pollution stories in Water as well, like the tons of mine tailings which spilled into a tributary of the Danube ruining the whole riverway both for the fish and the people living along it.
Using a chapter-by-chapter case study approach, de Villers reviews some major problems in the international arena: The destruction of the Aral Sea, attempts in various countries to pump out huge repositories of ground water, the political and technical confusions of managing the massive Tigris-Euphrates and Nile river systems, and the smaller but no less thorny questions of water supply in Israel and Palestine. The latter in particular is a microcosm of what may happen everywhere in water-scarce areas where water could become part of military strategy. Israeli determination, for instance, to hold the Golan Heights is now at least one half of a story of securing water supply.
One of the strengths of Water is de Villiers’ ability to remain rational and collected even as he outlines many frightening scenarios. He appears to expect eventual solutions to both pollution and supply problems. Political will is crucial, however, and sometimes inspired action does occur. The Rhine River reached such a crisis level after a major toxic spill that the Germans finally forced themselves to clean it up. The destroyed riverway was clean enough to sustain new fish stocks in just four years.
Throughout Water de Villiers suggests numerous ways of attacking the other vexing problem of supply-many of them obvious, if painful. If a region is furiously pumping out aquifers for irrigation water, as had been happening for decades with the enormous Ogallala aquifer of southcentral United States, then it’s obviously necessary just to halt the pumping by decommissioning land. De Villiers notes: “Texas has already decommissioned nearly a million hectares, one-third of its total irrigable land, and west Texas is almost in panic mode....”
Less easy to resolve are the predicaments of large and rapidly expanding desert cities like greater Phoenix (3 million people) and Las Vegas (1.5 million). Thousand-mile pipelines or canals won’t solve the demand problem if there is no easy supply at the other end. Even when a city virtually sits on an aquifer like Tampa, there can be nightmarish complications. When Tampa pumped out water from an aquifer close to the sea, salt water invaded the aquifer and the city had to plan massive and very expensive desalination and reservoir projects to provide fresh water for its growing population.
De Villiers twice returns to the image of his old Afrikaaner grandfather coaxing water out of the earth with a rickety windmill and then treating it as a precious-as-gold commodity to water his crops. He even hand-watered his strawberry patch. He was successful for decades but when a ranching company took the farm over after he passed away, the land was destroyed and abandoned in just two decades. There is a clear message in this concerning attitude. Care and vigilance on the individual level will translate into solutions to larger scale problems. Yet if the right values aren’t taught and encouraged at the grass roots level, the opposite prediction of catastrophe is also true.
John Ayre (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
A child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water. More than half of the world's rivers are now so polluted that they pose serious health risks. One-third of Africa's people already endure conditions of water scarcity, and water supplies are in jeopardy in China, India, Japan, Spain, southern France, Australia, the southwestern U.S. and many other parts of Asia and Europe. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction in Canada, de Villiers's important, compelling, highly readable report on the looming global water crisis sounds a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers and water-drinkers everywhere. In water matters, he finds the U.S. "both profligate and caring, rapacious and thrifty," and he cites studies that warn that the Ogallala Aquifer lying beneath six Great Plains states will run dry before 2020, imperiling U.S. agriculture as well as grain exports and posing the risk of a global food crisis. For sheer travelogue pleasure, his informal survey hops from the Sea of Galilee to Victoria Falls to a Russian boat ride down the Volga, as he delves into the science, ecology, folklore, history and politics of water. The news he brings back is ominous: rapidly growing populations, ever-increasing pollution, desertification and falling water tables endanger a fragile, finite resource. Avoiding a gloom-and-doom outlook, his spirited report remains determinedly optimistic, calling for a bold combination of solutions: conservation, technological innovation, desalination of sea water, demand-reducing devices like low-flow faucets and toilets, public policy to reduce water wastefulness and international cooperation to resolve transnational disputes over water. Rights sold in seven countries; documentary rights sold. (July)
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