Low on H20: Can We Slake the Nation's Thirst for Water?

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 102-105

102 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Low on H20:

Can We Slake the

Nation’s Thirst for Water?

By G. Tracy Mehan III

Unquenchable : America’s Water Crisis a nd What to Do About It,

by Robert Glennon. Island Pre ss. 432 pages.

From the September/ October 2009 issue of The Environmental For um.

Robert Glennon, the author of

Unquenchabl e: America’s Water Cri-

sis And What to Do About It, has the

heart of an environmentalist and the head

of an economist. He also has a very good

sense of humor—or maybe the absurd—

which is on  ne display in his survey of the

nation’s use and abuse of its vast but imper-

iled water resources.

Glennon, a professor at the Rogers Col-

lege of Law, University of Arizona, has given

us a book in the tradition of Marc Reisner’s

classic Cadillac Desert: e American West

and Its Disappearing Water (1986) and the

best of Tom Wolfe’s social and cultural writ-

ings on the American scene. He brings to

bear great knowledge and a sophisticated understanding of the ways Ameri-

cans defy nature, gravity and sound economics in t heir quest for unlim-

ited consumption of water whenever and wherever t hey so desire. He views

water comprehensively and appreciates how the many facets of managing the

resource relate to one another: quantity and qua lity, surface and groundwa-

ter, land and water, water and energy, economics and ecology.

rough monumental feats of engineering, and a kind of fecklessness as

to the depletion of both surface and groundwater sources, Americans have so

far avoided the consequences of a national crisis in the making: