CNX 297: Landscapes People Water

The book presents an interdisciplinary systematic evaluation of increasing water stress and scarcity over the globe and specifically South Africa. South Africa is used as the prime example as the country is experiencing similar water challenges in terms of availability and quality as most regions across the globe.

From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries. Water has been so integral to China's culture, economy, and growth and development that it provides a window on the whole sweep of Chinese history.

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War. As the first holistic environmental history of the region over the last half millennium, it shows the intimate connections betweenpeoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways.

Water is our planet's most precious resource. It is required by every living thing, yet a huge proportion of the world's population struggles to access clean water daily. Agriculture, aquaculture, industry, and energy all depend on it - yet its provision and safety engender widespread conflict; battles likely to intensify as threats to freshwater abundance and quality, such as climate change, urbanization, new forms of pollution, and the privatization of control, continue to grow.

The Great Lakes are the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth, and more than 40 million Americans and Canadians live in their basin. Will we divert water from the Great Lakes, causing them to end up like Central Asia's Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area and 75 percent of its volume since 1960? Or will we come to see that unregulated water withdrawals are ultimately catastrophic?

Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world, much to quench what's now our largest crop--the lawn. Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to our taps, irrigates our food, and produces our electricity. And most don't realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble.

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out.

A vivid account of America’s first environmental cause c#65533;l#65533;bre, which illuminates our attitudes toward fundamental questions of growth, development, and our place in nature. The building of the O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the middle of Yosemite National Park–despite the availability of less expensive, less technically challenging, and less politically complicated possibilities–set off a defining controversy in American environmentalism.

While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match--or even surpass--the oil wars of the twentieth.

Notes from the Water Underground combines environmental victories in the sustainable use movement with hands-on, participatory options for country and city dwellers. Not just a "how to" but a "why to," the book begins with the story of dams in the American West--a story in which millions of acres of perfect farmland were flooded in order to irrigate the marginal land that--due to the same natural process that destroyed several ancient Native American civilizations--would turn the area into the Dust Bowl.