The topic of water and its associated problems has traditionally occupied a niche within the literature of environmental history and the history of technology. But in recent times this trickle of scholarly and popular attention has turned into a flood. Major books and reports are now appearing at a rate of several per year, dealing with drought, flood, quality, ownership, and much else, and covering almost every corner of the globe. This level of concern maps to several broader trends. Some of these are hopeful— enhanced political activism, for example, and a growing dissatisfaction with traditional supply-side engineering solutions. And others are distressing—in particular, the increasingly dire conditions of scarcity, access, and quality decline facing the world’s rich and poor alike. As with oil, it is being argued that many parts of the world have entered the twilight years of “peak water.” But unlike oil, there is no substitute. If climate change is emerging as the environmental poster child of the early twenty-first century, water is where its effects will be most immediately and painfully experienced.

Under such conditions, the volumes reviewed here—a recent subset of the emerging literature—constitute welcome, if highly varied, contributions. Peter Annin’s The Great Lakes Water Wars (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006, pp. 320, $29.95) follows directly in a tradition of popular journalistic books about water, starting in the United States with Marc Reisner’s now canonical Cadillac Desert (1986) and leading up through more recent books like Diane Ward’s Water Wars (2002), Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke’s Blue Gold (2003), and Robert Glennon’s Water Follies (2004).1 At the heart of Annin’s story lies the as-yet-unrealized specter of large-scale, out-of-basin transfers from the Great Lakes basin to the high plains, the American Southwest, or beyond. The book does a particularly nice job at tracing this fear over time, as well as the various steps taken to prevent it from actually happening. Annin is arguably strongest at tracing the obscure and tortuous path of political negotiation—through a variety of agreements, compacts, and less formal arrangements among regional policymakers—to maintain the integrity of the basin line and to construct political and legal defenses against would-be diverters. This work resulted most recently in the Great Lakes Compact, signed by regional leaders in 2005 and now slowly working its way through the various provincial and state legislatures. Annin’s book also gives a nice account of basin diversions to date, ranging from the famous (e.g., the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900) to the obscure (e.g., the almost untold Long Lac/Ogoki story, which involved turning the vast bulk of the Ogoki River back into the basin and away from its natural flow to James Bay).

Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly for a book of its kind, the human story of Great Lakes water (apart from boardroom intrigues in the various state legislatures) mostly drops out of Annin’s account. We see surprisingly little of the people who actually live and work on the lakes, and who presumably stand to lose the most. While the book is deeply sympathetic to their concerns, the advocacy community itself and the broader social movements surrounding the issue of water supply don’t show up in any kind of detail. The net result is a competent, timely, and certainly important book, but one which lacks the dramatic punch of a book like Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (admittedly, a high bar). This may in part be a feature of the topic under study; fights over small and extremely local transfers to places like Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, and Lowell, Indiana, while no doubt significant for legal precedent, can hardly command the drama of a Hoover Dam, an Imperial Valley, or an Owens Valley water grab by the city of Los Angeles. But one also wonders whether, in centering the Great Lakes story on questions of diversion (a notably western framing), Annin doesn’t miss the chance to tell a different and richer story that lies beyond supply controversies and is reflective of the somewhat different character of the lakes themselves vis-à-vis western rivers or a place like the Ogallala Aquifer. While it is enjoyable and competently executed, the first popular book-length foray into Great Lakes water politics might have done better.

A different set of strengths and weaknesses can be found in journalist Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, pp. xi+324, $26.95). Pearce’s canvas is, literally, the world, with a total of thirty-four chapters devoted to case studies from almost every corner of the globe. This coverage is truly impressive, both geographically and topically, addressing the full panoply of water issues, from shortages and mass diversion schemes to quality problems, water-based geopolitical conflict, and even civilizational decline. Pearce’s stories can be subtle, poignant, and, in the case of famous water disasters like the Aral Sea and China’s Yellow River, rendered in a notably fresh way. There also are stories that have not received much press to date—about Afghanistan’s Hamoun wetlands, for example, and an almost anthropologically rendered account of changes on the Mekong River system, including the consequences of the recent failure of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake to reverse itself during periods of Mekong peak flow (this is the natural phenomenon most responsible for Cambodia’s ancient civilization at Angkor Wat).

There are some wonderful concluding chapters charting the persistence and partial resuscitation of water management techniques officially forgotten or sidelined during the high modernism of the dam engineers: Chinese water cellars, English dew ponds, Chilean fog harvesters, Indian water tankas, and Persian qanats (the latter an ancient and recently rediscovered system for running rainfall from mountains to valleys). These chapters alone make When the Rivers Run Dry worth the read. But its range is at once the book’s greatest strength and a source of weakness. Pearce occasionally stretches too far, sacrificing depth for breadth. There is, for example, his account of Colonel Qaddafi and the Halliburton Company’s “Great Man-made River,” which tapped fossil water in the Nubian Desert in an attempt to drive the modernization of Libya. This potentially fascinating story receives a mere four pages, and in such cases Pearce’s decision to cast his net wide makes it hard to get inside the complex issues he surveys with any sense of historical or social depth. But this is a minor quibble. In both range and quality, Pearce’s is arguably the best and certainly the most thorough to date among popular books addressing water issues in international context.

With Steven P. Erie’s Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. xvii+364, $55) we move into a different genre entirely, that of the academic historian (think here of classics like Norris Hundley’s The Great Thirst [1992], Richard White’s The Organic Machine [1995], and Donald Worster’s more critically flavored Rivers of Empire [1985]). But as an urban historian and political scientist, Erie brings an interest and skill in fine-grained institutional analysis sometimes lacking in the canonical water histories. In Beyond Chinatown, that skill is well on display, as Erie takes on one of the legendary giants of the American water world: the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “The MWD” generally shows up in both academic and popular accounts of water as a monolithic and somewhat shadowy figure: the formidable central purchasing agency through which much of Southern California’s seemingly insatiable demands get satisfied; a dominant player in the massive projects to bring water from the Colorado River and Northern California to the lawns and swimming pools of the arid South; the unnamed conspiracy that provides the backdrop to Roman Polanski’s film noir classic Chinatown.

As suggested by the book’s title, Erie sets out to both update and complicate this picture, distilling new and usable lessons for regional resource management. In the process, a slightly different MWD emerges: a growth machine indeed, but neither a private nor entirely secret government, and one long riven by intraregional rivalries and increasingly on the defensive vis-à-vis critics and rival claimants both external and internal to the region.

The book is particularly strong on contemporary history, with its middle chapters tracing central tensions in the MWD through the 1990s and early 2000s, including a growing split between its traditional power base in Los Angeles County and its increasingly restive San Diego subscribers; the waning security of key imports from the Colorado River and Northern California owing to shortage and environmental damage on the Colorado and in the crucial Bay Delta region; and challenges to the MWD’s traditional command-and-control strategies coming from the introduction of new market mechanisms.

In his concluding section, Erie tackles a series of looming challenges (population growth, climate change, water quality, “environmental water,” and so forth) and the MWD’s emerging responses to these, including its move toward an innovative integrated regional planning model (which Erie touts as a partial model for other regional resource management agencies) and shifts in the agency’s basic governance structure and business model. The sum is an insightful, balanced, and deeply instructive account of a fascinating and arguably unique public agency. While Beyond Chinatown won’t satisfy the most bloodthirsty of critics of the Metropolitan Water District—it lacks the intrigue and stark moral outlines of Chinatown in the original—it may in fact provide a more usable model for academic water scholarship going forward.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Erie’s fine-grained analysis, and relative newcomers to the water crisis genre, stand a pair of recent reports: the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme’s Water: A Shared Responsibility (New York: UNESCO and Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 600, $65) and the Pacific Institute’s The World’s Water, 2006–2007: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006, pp. 392, $35). Within the genre of Large World Reports (think here of the World Bank’s World Development Report, or the UN’s Human Development Report), Water: A Shared Responsibility is an unusually readable and well-crafted example. It is truly impressive in its coverage of topics ranging from ecological assessment (coastal and freshwater ecosystems, ground- and surface water supply assessments) to institutional arrangements (water valuation and governance) to a series of water-plus analyses (water and agriculture, water and industry, water and urbanization). Unlike many Large World Reports, it also exhibits a refreshing degree of statistical good sense—for example in its decision not to overwrite complex global scenarios with dubious meta-indicators and global rankings. The narrative sections are substantive, generally insightful, and richly illustrated with appropriate illustrations, charts, and statistical information.

The report is particularly strong in its treatments of the connections between water, poverty, and governance (though other sections, for example those dealing with the impacts of climate change and urban settlement, are equally strong). Structurally, it is enriched and given depth by a set of national and subregional case studies, included in summary form as appendixes with full versions available for download via linked sections on the report’s accompanying website. This decision to relocate the most extensive case materials outside the body of the report proper—a clear concession to space in an already dense 600-page document—detracts somewhat from their potential impact. But it also leaves the individual cases unconstrained by page count, enabling a depth of coverage otherwise difficult to achieve short of multivolume publication. The effect is also lessened when reading the report in its free online version, which seems likely to be the dominant mode of readership given the hefty price of its glossy print version. Somewhat unusually for a multiagency-authored report (different chapters have been prepared by different UN bodies), this one hangs together rather well, showing a nice consistency of style and purpose throughout.

The same cannot be said of the venerable The World’s Water, now in its fifth biennial edition. Prior to the publication of the World Water Assessment Programme’s first report in 2003, The World’s Water was the only game in town. Produced out of the California-based Pacific Institute and lead-authored by its director Peter Gleick, the biennial series has long functioned as an essential resource within the water community. From its inception, The World’s Water series has sought to juggle a number of hard-to-reconcile roles: an introduction to water issues for the uninitiated; a semiregular update on new approaches, research, and thinking in the field; a documentary record of hot spots and emerging issues; and, until the inauguration of the WWAP, the preeminent global statistical compendium of the field. Past editions have given us the “soft path” to water development, a fresh and well-balanced approach to questions of water management emphasizing a range of options and priorities almost entirely forgotten by the twentieth century’s “hard path” purveyors of dams, reservoirs, and megaprojects.

Partly because of this range, The World’s Water reports have always been somewhat uneven in style and quality, and the 2006–2007 edition is no exception. As statistical compendium and global report, it can no longer compete with the reach, resources, and professionalism of the WWAP; seekers of world water numbers and the broad state of the field will be better served by turning, at least initially, to Water: A Shared Responsibility. The World’s Water is also undeniably quirky, in ways both good and bad. In places it has a distinctly homespun quality—as witnessed, for example, in its inclusion of an odd series of “briefs” in the report’s conclusion, including one on water on Mars, and the endearing but not necessarily great poem, “The Soft Path in Verse.” Touches like these, combined with lower production values and notably uneven writing, make The World’s Water seem, in comparison with the WWAP report, somewhat of an in-house operation. At the same time, it needs repeating that this uneven quality is frequently endearing and/or innovative. An example is the report’s unusual opening chapter on “Water and Terrorism,” complete with a chronology of water-based terrorist activities stretching back to the 1700s (this chapter builds on and extends the Water Conflict Chronology, a regular feature of The World’s Water series since its inception). If The World’s Water is unlikely to compete over time with the WWAP report as a global state-of-the-field document, it seems likely to continue to play an important role in introducing new and heterodox ideas into the global water debate.

The volumes reviewed here represent several strategies, each with distinctive strengths and weaknesses, for writing about the global water crisis. For reasons they themselves document, the recent flood of attention shows few signs of abating. Water-related issues and challenges can only multiply in the years and decades ahead. As this review goes to press in May 2008, the world is learning of yet another catastrophe: cyclones and flooding in Burma/Myanmar with early death tolls reported in the tens of thousands and certain to rise. The Burmese events provide a fitting if sober conclusion to this essay. Again we are reminded of water’s deep and here tragic confluence with many other only apparently unconnected issues: poverty, governance, conflict, power, and control. The books reviewed here can help us to think through these connections. It remains to be seen if they will lead to new modes of action that will help make future Burmese floods and similar events less likely.

1. For an essay review of these volumes, see Ted Steinberg, “Big Is Ugly: Corporate Enclosure and the Global Water Supply,” Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 618–23.

Steven Jackson is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and a steering member of the university’s Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) programs.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 49 No. 3 (July 2008)