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The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century
Scribner
June 2011
On Sale: June 7, 2011
448 pages
ISBN: 1416535454
EAN: 9781416535454
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child
were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My
Life in France, they began to talk about the French
obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to
America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what
would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving
story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the
climate warms and world population grows, demand for water
has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or
dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day.
The Ripple Effect is Prud’homme’s vivid and engaging
inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first
century. The questions he sought to answer were
urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What
are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our
water infrastructure—both the pipes that bring us freshwater
and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water
supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we
create new sources for our water supply through scientific
innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like
oil—and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the
twenty-first century be fought over water? Like
Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for
Oil, Money & Power, Prud’homme’s The Ripple
Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic
narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story,
Prud’homme introduces readers to an array of colorful,
obsessive, brilliant—and sometimes shadowy—characters
through whom these issues come alive. Prud’homme traversed
the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the
daily dramas that will determine the future of this
essential resource—from the alleged murder of a water
scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic
confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in
Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic
of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over
fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way
we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud’homme will change
the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and
provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.
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