Water: A Biography

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.