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Environmental and Engineering Geoscience

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When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

¹ Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Kentucky, 101 Slone Building, Lexington, KY 40506-0053

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Since the publication of Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert in 1986, multiple books, documentaries, and popular magazine articles have warned of current and impending water problems in the United States and around the world. In the past year alone (since October 2007, as this review is being written), there have been cover stories or major articles on this topic in the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Vanity Fair. As anyone who has paid attention will know, high-profile issues include access to potable water and sanitation in developing countries, overpumping of aquifers, effects of land use and river engineering on aquatic ecosystems, and impacts of climate change on water resources. One of the most recent book-length overviews is When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, the environment and development consultant for the British magazine New Scientist. Pearce offers an engaging, wide-ranging collection of cautionary tales about the uses and limits . . . [Full Text of this Article]