Water

August 1, 2021

Climate scientist Boccaletti (Sch. of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford Univ.) weaves a detailed tapestry describing the social, economic, and political history of water, primarily in the form of rivers. He argues that fresh water helped to create and direct the progress of humanity by providing for agriculture and irrigation, transportation, trade, and eventually power generation. Environmental water is a relatively fixed geographic feature that provides stability for the development of cultures and economies, Boccaletti explains, but it's also a variable and fluid resource that imposes its own risks, like unpredictable flooding and climate changes. He identifies river systems that defined and sustained early civilizations (the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze) and convincingly argues that ancient and contemporary political and economic systems were developed, in part, to address the ownership and control of water and govern the fair and effective use of water as a public good. Different contexts and variables (periodic flooding, rivers that define or cross borders of nation-states, the topography of arable land) mean that multiple interests and solutions remain in competition today. VERDICT A fascinating analysis that will bridge the interests of environmentalists and historians, political scientists, or economists.--Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

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September 15, 2021
As with all other life forms, humanity is inextricably linked to water. With a favorable balance, we progress; absent that balance, we struggle. We understand this truth on a fundamental level, but Boccaletti's wonderfully detailed account of humankind's relationship with water truly brings this fact to life. A trained atmospheric scientist and an honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, Boccaletti is eminently qualified to lead readers through the fascinating details of the stories of civilizations and the water systems that sustained or failed them. This biography of Earth's crucial resource covers an expansive time line, from antiquity to the present day. Along the way, Water chronicles the precarious balance between human ingenuity (controlling water via dams, irrigation, and other systems) and human fragility (our utter reliance on water and weather patterns and vulnerability to climate change). Water, readers learn, is central to empire-building and collapse, war, politics, food security, and global finance and infrastructure. During this time of accelerated population growth, climate change, and political instability, Water is essential reading.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
A tour de force world history focused on water and how we use it. Climate scientist Boccaletti, chief strategy office of the Nature Conservancy, begins with an emphatic denial that "water is an inert backdrop on the stage of human events." To prove his thesis, he delivers an expert water-centered history of human progress from the time we became sedentary 10,000 years ago. "The story of water," writes the author, "is not technological, but political." Agriculture produces far more food than hunting and gathering but requires massive amounts of water. Depending on rain is unreliable, so centuries ago, farmers began to harness the power of wells, local rivers, canals, and irrigation projects, which preoccupied early governments as much as warfare. Ambitious cultures paid attention to transportation by water, which is 10 times more efficient than by land. In Boccaletti's view, an essential feature of the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century was increased security of property, which produced an explosion of investment in water infrastructure. By the end of the 19th century, he writes, the "great American rivers...would become the basis for the rise of the American republic as the dominant economy of the twentieth," the "hydraulic century." Hydropower, not hydrocarbons, powered the electrification of America. Opening with the spectacular Panama Canal in 1904, the U.S. spent much of the 20th-century attempting to repeat the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover Dam around the world, with spotty success. These efforts peaked during the 1970s, after which water-led development seemed to fall out of fashion--until, out of the blue, China appeared on the scene, built the Three Gorges Dam ("the largest single piece of infrastructure in the world"), and took the lead in spreading its technology around the world. "It may still be that if the twentieth was the American Century," writes Boccaletti in this astute global study, "the twenty-first will be the Chinese one." An ingenious lesson in geopolitics.

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