Water A Biography

Spanning millennia and continents, a revealing history that “tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity” (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host). 

"Far more than a biography of its nominal subject ... The book stands as a compelling history of civilization itself." —The Wall Street Journal Book Review
 
Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc­caletti—honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford—shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.
 
We see with clarity how irrigation’s structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.
 
Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to—and fundamental reliance on—the most elemental substance on earth.

Giulio Boccaletti is a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. He is the Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He has been a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a Partner of McKinsey & Company, where he founded the firm's Global Water Resource initiative, and was one of the leaders of its Sustainability and Resource Productivity Practice. He frequently writes on environmental issues for news media, including Project Syndicate and The Guardian, and is an expert contributor to the World Economic Forum. His work on water has been featured in the PBS documentary series "H2O: the Molecule that Made Us." He lives in London.

Prologue ix
 
PART I ORIGINS
1 Standing Still in a World of Moving Water 3
2 The Rise of the Hydraulic State 16
3 Bronze Age Globalization 29
4 An Article of Faith 41
5 The Politics of Water 53
6 Res Publica 66
 
PART II A THOUSAND YEARS OF CONVERGENCE
7 Fragments of the Past 83
8 The Republic Returns 96
9 Water Sovereignty 110
10 American River Republic 123
1 1 Global Water Empire 136
12 The Great Utopian Synthesis 151

PART III THE HYDRAULIC CENTURY
13 Setting the Stage for Revolution 167
14 Crisis and Its Discontent 181
15 Industrializing Modernity 195
16 FDR’s Modernization Project 210
17 Cold War 224
18 The Great Acceleration 238
19 The End of an Era 251
 
PART IV FINALE
20 A World of Scarcity 267
2 1 A Planetary Experiment 281
Coda 293

Acknowledgments 299
Notes 301
Bibliography 331
Index 359