Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst

The author, Diane Raines Ward, is obviously passionate about this subject–she has traveled the world and seen with her own eyes the good and the bad of water ‘management.’ She does not make assumptions, she does not make sweeping generalizations–she examines each dam, river, levee and irrigation system individually, thereby proving how complicated the water wars are. Her passion for the subject also makes the book quite readable; it is written more like a novel than a scientific treatise. My only complaint is the complete lack of maps and diagrams, but that does not stop me from giving the book 5 stars.

 

Ward takes a comprehensive and world-wide view of the problem of managing water, and I learned a considerable amount from her book. She writes with an easy style. (Another reviewer calls it "the best book on water that I’ve read"; that’s true for me, too, but in my case it’s faint praise since I’ve only read this book!) Clearly, water management is becoming more important as the world’s population grows, and given the public policy decisions facing most nations, it is a subject that the average citizen will need to learn more about. Unfortunately, the book has a couple of flaws. First, it is shallow technically, even for a popular non-fiction book; Ward could benefit by providing additional depth on both the technology of watershed management and the dominant legal structures behind it. Second, I found the footnotes to be very poorly written; frequently direct quotes appear without footnotes, and on many occasions the information in a footnote is almost a non-sequitur when compared to the footnoted text.