The specter of scarcity.

• Author: Schade, Abigail E.
• Position: When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century - Book review

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

Fred Pearce

(Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 324 pages.

British journalist Fred Pearce approaches the issue of global water scarcity from the point of view of a layman, with no formal training in the scientific, political or economic aspects of the world's water problems. This approach is both a strength and a weakness for readers who are seeking a global snapshot of the ways water-which might at first glance seem like a matter for local quality control or regional engineering projects--is important on a wider scale than the nearest watering hole. Pearce argues that the world should pay attention to problems of water scarcity and water quality on a global scale--and quickly.

Pearce makes a compelling case for the need to consider water problems on a broad geographic scale, and he also explores some small, tentative steps toward best practices for international water resources management. Pearce is particularly hopeful about the revival and adaptation of indigenous technologies for small-scale irrigation systems. He recounts the practices of desert-dwelling Bedouin, Nabataean, Persian and Chinese peoples, who used a form of local knowledge to observe and sustain water extraction in arid environments. These ancient techniques are generating enthusiasm among proponents of sustainable development in arid regions of the world, for example, among agricultural development experts and innovative farmers in Israel and India. Pearce hopes to see a reversal of some of the most unsustainable irrigation practices that contribute to global water scarcity by updating these traditional, small-scale technologies and through the use of cheap plastic tubing for less wasteful drip irrigation techniques.

However promising these singular and traditional techniques might be, Pearce's narrative emphasizes some intractable problems, namely, the entrenched practices of an interconnected agricultural economy and a historically unprecedented 6 billion mouths to feed. The problem lies with the agricultural source from which these numerous mouths can expect their next meal. The constraints on agricultural production are not merely land and labor; irrigation for agriculture worldwide is the single greatest application of freshwater resources. While the so-called "green revolution" of high-yield crop varieties in the 1960s and 1970s made it possible to feed more people than ever before, world population levels increased dramatically at the same time. Although the economic and social divide between the well-fed and the hungry persists, the green revolution became an agricultural and economic modality, highly...