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The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water
Free Press
April 2011
On Sale: April 12, 2011
400 pages
ISBN: 1439102074
EAN: 9781439102077
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion
years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus
rex. Rather than only three states of water—liquid, ice, and
vapor—there is a fourth, “molecular water,” fused into rock
400 miles deep in the Earth, and that’s where most of the
planet’s water is found. Unlike most precious resources,
water cannot be used up; it can always be made clean enough
again to drink—indeed, water can be made so clean that it’s
toxic. Water is the most vital substance in our lives but
also more amazing and mysterious than we appreciate. As
Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this surprising
and mind-changing narrative, water runs our world in a host
of awe-inspiring ways, yet we take it completely for
granted. But the era of easy water is over. Bringing readers on a lively and fascinating journey— from
the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las
Vegas, where dolphins swim in the desert, and from a rice
farm in the parched Australian outback to a high-tech IBM
plant that makes an exotic breed of pure water found nowhere
in nature—Fishman vividly shows that we’ve already left
behind a century-long golden age when water was
thoughtlessly abundant, free, and safe and entered a new era
of high-stakes water. In 2008, Atlanta came within ninety
days of running entirely out of clean water. California is
in a desperate battle to hold off a water catastrophe. And
in the last five years Australia nearly ran out of water—and
had to scramble to reinvent the country’s entire water
system. But as dramatic as the challenges are, the deeper
truth Fishman reveals is that there is no good reason for us
to be overtaken by a global water crisis. We have more than
enough water. We just don’t think about it, or use it, smartly. The Big Thirst brilliantly explores our strange and complex
relationship to water. We delight in watching waves roll in
from the ocean; we take great comfort from sliding into a
hot bath; and we will pay a thousand times the price of tap
water to drink our preferred brand of the bottled version.
We love water—but at the moment, we don’t appreciate it or
respect it. Just as we’ve begun to reimagine our
relationship to food, a change that is driving the growth of
the organic and local food movements, we must also rethink
how we approach and use water. The good news is that we can.
As Fishman shows, a host of advances are under way, from the
simplicity of harvesting rainwater to the brilliant
innovations devised by companies such as IBM, GE, and Royal
Caribbean that are making impressive breakthroughs in water
productivity. Knowing what to do is not the problem.
Ultimately, the hardest part is changing our water
consciousness. As Charles Fishman writes, “Many civilizations have been
crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or
manage it. We have a huge advantage over the generations of
people who have come before us, because we can understand
water and we can use it smartly.” The Big Thirst will
forever change the way we think about water, about our
essential relationship to it, and about the creativity we
can bring to ensuring that we’ll always have plenty of it.
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