When The Rivers Run Dry: Journeys into the heart of the world's water crisis

"When we think of rivers we think of these enormous forces that seem impervious to change by humans. They have always run their course and we might have extracted from them and we might have slightly polluted them but essentially they are these geographic forces that we can’t really change. What Pearce does here is to say no, that’s not true, we are in danger of losing something that is fundamental to human society. We have very limited freshwater, and almost all of it comes from rivers in some way. We’re either using groundwater or glacial water, and that’s normally carried in rivers, or water from lakes and reservoirs, and again these are normally fed by rivers. So rivers are essential to humanity. Pearce is talking about how we are killing our rivers, how we’re killing our water sources and what that means for people. He again is someone who goes to the source—no pun intended!—of the stories that he talks about. He does proper on-the-ground reportage. He talks to people affected, for example in a small Indian village where people are extracting water much faster than it can be replenished, using new electric pumps for irrigation. They’re on a knife-edge, a catastrophe is about to happen, because the aquifers are running incredibly low and people’s need for water is growing. There’s huge uncertainty in this book about what on earth is going to happen in the future. “We are in danger of losing something that is fundamental to human society” He also looks at issues of damming. A lot of rivers are being tapped for hydropower but what does that mean for the people downriver, or the people upstream, who depend on the water? The conflict at the heart of this story is about unequal power and unequal rights to the water. Where communities develop and grow up around a water source, they depend on it for everything – for drinking water, agriculture, their animals and so on. If the land rights adjacent to the river or the river rights are taken and given to, say, a corporation that wants to plant a very thirsty crop like cotton, or to a hydropower facility, then it affects millions of people. And these people often have no say at all. Agricultural collapse, human migration. They are quite profound. There are some examples of where water sharing has really worked, when all the players come to the table and a more equitable decision is taken. That happens rarely but where it does happen he’s there to report it."