Reviewed by J.R. McNeill

Water looms large among the environmental issues of our young century. The availability of good-quality fresh water is shrinking, in aggregate terms, thanks to pollution, the drawdown of aquifers and the intrusion of saltwater into coastal groundwater. With global population growth above 1 percent a year,  that shrinkage is rapid in per-capita terms. John Wennersten is here to tell you that you should find it alarming, even if you live on the well watered eastern seaboard of the United States.

Wennersten is an environmental historian and frequent commentator on environmental affairs in the Chesapeake and mid-Atlantic region. Here, however, he goes global, although he frequently draws on local examples of interest to people in the D.C. area.

Throughout the book Wennersten is unabashedly bleak in his outlook. He recognizes that he is covering terrain already familiar to readers of the works of Sandra Postel or Peter Gleick, and sees it as his contribution to “add a sharper and somewhat more pessimistic angle of vision to much of the work that has already been done and offer the lay reader a comprehensive view of what our water future may look like in the very near term locally and globally.” Indeed, the book is reasonably comprehensive given its size, and he fully succeeds in providing a pessimistic angle of vision. Greater detail, but not greater pessimism, is available in Gleick’s series The World’s Water, which comes out every two years.

Wennersten takes up the human relationship with water generally, ranging from its mentions in the Bible to the proportion of our brains accounted for by water (about 85 percent). He addresses the possibility of international conflicts over water and the vulnerability of public water supplies to terrorist attack, even explaining in detail how terrorists might poison millions. He has a chapter devoted to water issues in the United States, and another on India, reminding us that water problems exist here at home, not merely in faraway places. He delves into water sanitation, the bottled-water business and the deterioration of rivers from pollution and water withdrawals for irrigation. He ends the book with a look at what climate change and other future trends might mean for water.

Wennersten is a bit more historical than most water writers, and a bit less concerned with policy recommendations. His historical reach occasionally exceeds his grasp, as when he misdates the ancient Indus cities by two millennia and asserts that salt contamination “in ancient Sumeria shows how easily a society could be destroyed by its water problems.” Salinization of ground water probably contributed to the troubles of ancient Sumerians, but Wennersten takes matters further than the experts are prepared to go with such an assertion.

He saves his policy recommendations for the end. After debunking some suggestions that he thinks will not work (such as the desalinization of sea water),Wennersten plunks for water conservation, which accurate pricing could achieve, and broader use of recycled or waste water. So-called gray water, dirty but not toxic, could be used for irrigation, for example. Wennersten is much more interested in raising the alarm than in suggesting solutions.

The world water situation certainly has its bleak aspects. Those are best understood in regional and local terms. Almost all shortages of everything are regional and local in nature. With water they are hard to address, because we need so much of it and it is so heavy that transporting it from places of abundance to places of shortage is usually uneconomic, and made more so by frequent underpricing of water. Water-short populations in the Horn of Africa or the Bolivian altiplano cannot look forward to the market solving their water problems. Indeed, in some parts of the world water supply is a severe constraint on health and well-being and will remain so for any foreseeable future.

But in most regions the situation is less bleak than that because water use is so inefficient.  The lion’s share, in global terms, goes to irrigation and half of that water never touches the plants it is intended to nourish — it is wasted. As Wennersten notes at the end of the book, pricing water more realistically would address this waste. It would make beef and cotton more expensive. No one holding office wants to be held responsible for raising the price of beef or cotton, but if that could be overcome, much of the water problem would soon disappear.

Wennersten’s book does not break new ground in the study of the world’s water, but it is a handy and up-to-date conspectus of the issue and easy to read. He splices brief travelogues into his discussions of water in India, Japan, Fiji and elsewhere, including his bike rides along the Anacostia River. He avoids subjects that require an education in chemistry or microbiology. In contrast to Gleick’s works, there are no graphs and tables and almost no quantitative data. It will not be mistaken for authoritative science by expert hydrologists, but it is more likely to be read by ordinary citizens.

J.R. McNeill is a professor of history and university professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.