"The Big Thirst: The Secret Life And Turbulent Future of Water" by Charles Fishman;
Free Press, New York, New York; 2011; 370 pages; $26.99.

It's a pretty safe bet that if you said the phrase "an essential energy resource," most Americans would say that you're talking about oil, gas, or coal. According to author Charles Fishman, we're not even aware of one the largest uses of fresh water: the generation of electricity. To help draw our attention to his premise that we rarely have the foggiest idea of where most of our water goes, Fishman puts forward a surprising point:

"The largest single consumer of water in the United State, in fact, is virtually invisible. Every day the nation's power plants use 201 billion gallons of water in the course of generating electricity. That isn't water used by hydroelectric plants-it's the water used by goal, gas, and nuclear power plants for cooling and to make steam. U.S. electric utilities require seven times more water than all U.S. homes. They use 1.5 times the amount of water used by all the farms in the country."

Fishman sees us as viewing water as we did a century ago. He calls it the "early era" of water, when America had an abundance of it available nearby or pumped in from many miles away. Most of us still think we live in that early era when water was truly clean, inexpensive, and easily available. Fishman sees the situation differently. He notes:

"We are entering a new era of water scarcity-not just in traditionally dry or hard-pressed places like the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, but in places we think of as water-wealthy, like Atlanta and Melbourne. The three things that we have taken to be the natural state of our water supply-abundant, cheap, and safe-will not be present together in the decades ahead. We may have water that is abundant and cheap, but it will be 'reuse water,' for things like lawn watering or car washing,, not for drinking; we will certainly have drinking water that is safe, and it may be abundant, but it will not be thoughtlessly inexpensive.... We are on the verge of a second modern water revolution-and it is likely to change our attitudes at least as much as the one a hundred years ago."

Much of Fishman's book is an analysis of the projected lack of water in both the developed and developing portions of the world. The outlook according to most government and university based studies isn't good. At our current rate of use there will less and less water for more and more people, and the result can easily become more ugly with every passing year. The author believes that the ugliness is just beginning:

"What the century-long golden age of water has done...is create an incredibly sophisticated system for gathering water and distributing it-an engineering system. But the engineering system assumes one thing: plenty of water. What we don't have-in Australia, in the United States, in most of the world-is an equally sophisticated system for figuring out how to allocate the water, particularly when there isn't enough."

Fishman goes on to state:

"That's where economics comes in. Economics is a way of managing scarcity, and market economics-pricing-is a way of letting the people who want something that's scarce participate in deciding who gets it."

The author concludes by saying, "Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it.... Everything about water is about to change... It is our fate that hangs on how we approach water-the quality of our lives, the variety and resilience of our society, the character of our humanity."

It's likely that a resource like water (or lack of it) will change how we view economics, how we do business, how we govern ourselves, and how we choose to survive. "The Big Thirst" forces us to take another look at all four of these and make our decisions in an orderly, well thought way.
- Henry Holtzman

©2011 Bay Tact Corporation