Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

M&S, 2003. Soft cover. Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾ in. - 9¾ in.Tall. 453 pages. Considering how crucial water is to life, it's surprising how few books on water exist even today for the non-specialist. One celebrated study, Marc Reisner's The Cadillac Desert has gone through several editions but the focus there is on the water management and depredations in the American southwest. Marq de Villiers's Water which first came out in 1999, had a much broader perspective. It carefully reviewed some major problems the world over, both technical and political, in the seemingly simple task of making clean water reliably come out of taps. It was an impressively detailed and thought-out book and won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Inevitably its success rather begged for an update and de Villiers has obliged with a newly revised and expanded edition. While the revision covers much the same territory as the first edition, there has been a slight darkening of tone. Although the first edition was a book full of stories of gross mismanagement and pollution, de Villiers did at least indulge himself at the start with an innocent Garden of Eden image. A South African transplanted to Canada, de Villiers can never forget his grandfather's dry farm on the edge of a desert. At his own recreational farm in central Ontario, de Villiers has by contrast the luxury of a small spring behind his barn where the water, seemingly inexhaustible and pure, makes happy gurgling sounds. In the first edition, he even admitted that at first he loved to sit near the spring and just experience its plenitude. In the new edition he snatches this image away as if it were a bit too clever or sentimental. In virtually any other place in the world, after all, there would be farmers upstream diverting water or polluting it.