Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
by Marc Reisner
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
The definitive history of water resources in the American West, and a very illuminating lesson in the political economy of limited resources anywhere. Highly recommended!
Part One Of Two Parts
The story of the American West is the story of the relentless quest to control and allocate nature's most common, and the West's most precious, resource: water. CADILLAC DESERT recounts this dramatic saga.
The early settlers were lured by free land. But there was not enough water to sustain them, and they drifted on. Only the Mormons stayed, carefully tending a system of irrigation canals that tempered perpetual drought. Their success gave birth to federal aid programs, principally the Bureau of Reclamation. Without the bureau, without Hoover, Shasta and Grand Coulee, the West as we know it would not exist.
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands (Vol. 1): Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life And Landscape
by Brad Lancaster
from Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape is the first volume of three-volume guide on how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. This book enables you to assess your on-site resources, gives you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empowers you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional water-harvesting plan specific to your site and needs. Volume 1 helps bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow you with skills of self-reliance, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same!
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
by Maude Barlow
from New Press
A passionate call to action from one of the leading voices in the global struggle for universal access to the earth's most vital element—a sequel to the acclaimed Blue Gold.
"Life requires access to clean water; to deny the right to water is to deny the right to life."—from the introduction to Blue Covenant
In their international bestseller Blue Gold, Maude Barlow and co-author Tony Clarke exposed how a handful of corporations are gaining ownership and control of the earth's dwindling water supply, depriving millions of people around the world of access to this most basic of resources and accelerating the onset of a global water crisis.
Blue Covenant, the sequel to Blue Gold, describes a powerful response to this trend: the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to have water declared a basic human right, something that can't be bought or sold for profit.
World-renowned activist Maude Barlow is at the center of this movement, which is gaining popular and political support across the globe, encompassing protests in India against U.S. bottling giant Coca-Cola; in Bolivia against the water privatization scheme of European water conglomerate Suez; against the use of water meters in South Africa; and over groundwater mining in Barrington, New Hampshire, and dozens of other communities in North America.
With great passion and clarity, Barlow traces the history of these international battles, documents the life-and-death stakes involved in the fight for the right to water, and lays out the actions that we as global citizens must take to secure a water—just world—a "blue covenant"—for all.
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
by Vandana Shiva
from South End Press
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. In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites.
In Water Wars, Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to outline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good.
In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns.
Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000); Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997); and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
by Marq de Villiers
from Mariner Books
Water is a curious thing, observed the economist Adam Smith: although it is vital to life, it costs almost nothing, whereas diamonds, which are useless for survival, cost a fortune. In Water, Canadian journalist de Villiers says the resource is still undervalued, but it is becoming more precious. It's not that the world is running out of water, he adds, but that "it's running out in places where it's needed most."
De Villiers examines the checkered history of humankind's management of water--which, he hastens to remind us, is not a renewable resource in many parts of the world. One of them is the Nile River region, burdened by overpopulation. Another is the Sahara, where Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi is pressing an ambitious, and potentially environmentally disastrous, campaign to mine deep underground aquifers to make the desert green. Another is northern China, where the damaging effects of irrigation have destroyed once-mighty rivers, and the Aral Sea of Central Asia, which was killed within a human lifetime. And still another is the American Southwest, where crops more fitting to a jungle than a dry land are nursed. De Villiers travels to all these places, reporting on what he sees and delivering news that is rarely good.
De Villiers has a keen eye for detail and a solid command of the scientific literature on which his argument is based. He's also a fine storyteller, and his wide-ranging book makes a useful companion to Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert and other works that call our attention to a globally abused--and vital--resource. --Gregory McNamee
In his award-winning book WATER, Marq de Villiers provides an eye-opening account of how we are using, misusing, and abusing our planet's most vital resource. Encompassing ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives, de Villiers reports from hot spots as diverse as China, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, where swelling populations and unchecked development have stressed fresh water supplies nearly beyond remedy. Political struggles for control of water rage around the globe, and rampant pollution daily poses dire ecological theats. With one eye on these looming crises and the other on the history of our dependence on our planet's most precious commodity, de Villiers has crafted a powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations that will be "a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers, and water drinkers everywhere" (Publishers Weekly).
North Carolina Waterfalls: A Hiking and Photography Guide
by Kevin Adams
from John F. Blair Publisher
Since its original publication in 1994, North Carolina Waterfalls has been the most comprehensive guide available to one of the prime natural features of the Tar Heel State. This new edition includes over 600 waterfalls, with detailed directions and trail and beauty ratings for the major waterfalls on public land. For the first time, waterfalls located on private land will be listed, although directions won't be provided.
Visitors to western North Carolina are often surprised at the spectacular variety of waterfalls tucked among the Appalachians all the way from Murphy in the southwest to Stone Mountain in the northeast, and surprisingly, even in eastern locations such as Fayetteville and Rocky Mount. This guide features over 100 color and black-and-white photographs showing those waterfalls at their absolute best. Its special section about photographing waterfalls in general, as well as specific hints for photographing each individual waterfall, will help readers create memorable images of their own.
Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping And The Fate Of America's Fresh Waters
by Robert Jerome Glennon
from Island Press
"...a book as rich in detail as it is devastating in its argument." -SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
"Water Follies deserves a place alongside the late Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert." -ENVIRONMENT
"a lively account of hydrology" -NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
"if you want to scare yourself silly, read Water Follies, by Robert Jerome Glennon. In it you'll learn how America is irrigating itself to death-just like the Sumerians-while sucking its groundwater aquifers dry."-TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL
The Home Water Supply: How to Find, Filter, Store, and Conserve It
by Stu Campbell
from Storey Publishing, LLC
Knowledgeable discussion of home water systems, potential water problems, and practical, money-saving solutions.
The World's Water 2006-2007: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (World's Water)
by Peter H. Gleick
from Island Press
Produced biennially, The World's Water provides a timely examination of the key issues surrounding freshwater resources and their use. Each new volume identifies and explains the most significant current trends worldwide, and offers the best data available on a variety of water-related topics.
The 2006-2007 volume features overview chapters on:
* water and terrorism
* business risks of water
* water and ecosystems
* floods and droughts
* desalination
* environmental justice and water
This new volume contains an updated chronology of global conflicts associated with water, as well as an assessment of recent water conferences, including 4th World Water Forum. It also offers a brief review of issues surrounding the use of bottled water and the possible existence of water on Mars.
From perhaps the world's leading authority on water issues, The World's Water is the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of information and analysis on freshwater resources and the political, economic, scientific, and technological issues associated with them. It is an essential reference for water resource professionals in government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, researchers, students, and anyone concerned with water and its use.
Earth Ponds: The Country Pond Maker's Guide to Building, Maintenance and Restoration
by Tim Matson
from Countryman Press
There is nothing like a pond! What else can simultaneously increase your aesthetic pleasure, offer recreational opportunities, help the environment, and increase the value of your land? This is the recognized standard on ponds, now expanded to include a comprehensive guide to living happily with your completed pond and keeping it perpetually healthy. Here is everything you need to know about planning, digging, sculpting, and maintaining your pond.
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