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When the Rivers Run Dry

Water -- The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

By Fred Pearce

BEACON PRESS; 324 PAGES; $26.95

The world's water crisis shouldn't be hard to miss. It's almost everywhere we look.

In the American West, water disputes are getting more heated and more frequent. The Rio Grande barely makes it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico anymore. Worldwide, more than a billion people don't have access to clean water.

And yet, when most people think of a natural-resource crisis for the coming century, it's usually oil that comes to mind. To help shift the focus, Fred Pearce, a correspondent for Britain's New Scientist, has written a much-needed book that explains what the problem is, and what can be done to fix it.

As the title of "When the Rivers Run Dry" suggests, the problem starts with rivers and works its way out. The massive demands of the agricultural "green revolution" that has dramatically boosted world food production over the past three decades -- along with thirsty industries such as textiles -- have taken their toll on rivers. One third of Pakistan's Indus River is diverted to cotton fields, drying out large swaths of the Sindh province and leading to the overcrowding of Karachi. China's Yellow River often struggles to reach the sea, and in 1997 it stopped short of its delta for more than seven months, much of that time trickling into the sand 485 miles inland.

Pearce does a masterful job of describing the raft of problems that drying rivers cause. Farmers are forced to either scale back on crop production, give up farming and head to a city, or find water from somewhere else. The same goes for people in need of drinking water and water for sanitation. In many parts of the world, this has led people to drill deep into aquifers that have been storing water over thousands of years. Each year, for example, California pumps out 15 percent more water from the ground than the rains replenish, and Arizona 100 percent more. A quarter of India's crops are irrigated with water pumped out of aquifers at an alarming rate, portending a major crisis in the coming years. This can't last for much longer.

Pearce's anecdotes and examples are meticulously catalogued. He files dispatches from the far corners of the world -- Bangladesh, Mexico, Cambodia and Nigeria, to name a few -- each carefully reported and personalized. The wealth of examples and data is a great strength. Unfortunately, it's also a major weakness. The level of detail too often detracts from the overall thrust of the book. Instead of delving right into the problems facing Pakistan, for instance, Pearce offers more than three pages of its hydraulic history. The reporting is solid, but Pearce could have weaved several of his anecdotes together rather than segmenting them so heavily, each in a chapter of its own. Still, this problem is preferable to the more common one: When an author pontificates without providing enough real-life relevance to an overarching message. Ultimately, even at the end of a disjointed set of chapters, the reader gets Pearce's point.

Solutions to water problems are necessarily local (which in part explains his anecdotal approach). This is why Pearce doesn't lay out a "big fix." He chronicles the success of harvesting rainwater in western India and the Palestinian territories. He explains the costs and benefits of desalination in areas hugging seas. He sensibly weighs in on the controversy over large dam projects, arguing that the costs have been understated and the benefits overstated, but because he does not oppose all large dam projects per se, he is not conventionally anti-dam.

To understand the extent of the water problem, consider Pearce's analysis of an average breakfast. It takes 207 gallons of water to produce a two-egg omelet, two pieces of toast and a cup of coffee. That's nothing compared to the 3,000 gallons of water needed to grow the feed for the portion of a cow that goes into a Quarter-Pounder, or the 500 to 1,000 gallons of water behind every quart of milk the cow produces. A pound of sugar takes 400 gallons, and a pound of rice can require up to 650 gallons. These are examples of "virtual water" -- the water required in the growing and manufacture of products. Remember this term, because it will soon find its way into the media mainstream.

Pearce's chief recommendation is to restore sanity to irrigation, so as to bring down the amount of water needed to produce each morsel of food. The world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it takes three times more water from rivers and underground aquifers to do it.

"We need to fit the crops grown to the availability" rather than the other way around, Pearce writes. This would eliminate the madness of growing wheat in Saudi Arabia, oranges in Israel, alfalfa in northern Mexico and cotton in the Indus valley of Pakistan. It also would require new methods and practices, such as drip irrigation and rain harvesting.

"When the Rivers Run Dry" is a timely book on an underreported issue. In an ideal world it would have a large audience here and abroad. Yet it's hard not to feel as though Pearce has missed an opportunity to reach more readers by relying so heavily on case studies.

Still, those who patiently take Pearce's tour through the global water crisis will be treated to an enriching and farsighted work.