Water, water everywhere. Or not.
“Somehow, America’s green craze has missed the blue,” writes environmental journalist Barnett (Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., 2007). A good citizen of Sacramento wouldn’t dream of throwing a plastic bottle in the trash, and yet, California’s capital, which calls itself “Sustainable Sacramento,” uses 300 gallons of water per person per day, 8.5 times the consumption of watery Holland, and about four times the consumption of similarly dry Perth, Australia. Small wonder that reservoirs such as Lake Mead, on which Las Vegas depends, are rapidly being drawn down to the sand—though, admittedly, drought and climate change have as much to do with it as careless drinkers. The problem is endemic, writes the author. It’s not just the arid West that is suffering, since even moist places such as Florida are rapidly using up their groundwater supplies. As with so much else, it all comes down to human actions: Conserving water and changing how we manage it would do a great deal to relieve the ever-accelerating crisis. Yet “using water ethically” in this way, as she puts it, faces formidable challenges, among them the “water-industrial complex” and its powerful lobby, aimed at preserving the huge profits that come with the control of one of the few things that humans actually need to live. Other enemies of progress, writes Barnett, are the squabbles over water fought by “lawyers billing by the hour rather than by communities drawn together in a shared ethic”; agricultural subsidies seemingly designed to encourage major users of water to be profligate; and politicians who resist the notion that Americans should have to curb their appetites at all. The subject is ripe for moralizing, but Barnett generally keeps the conversation at a practical level, noting, helpfully, that no American set out deliberately to exhaust the nation’s water supply any more than the Soviets “set out to create the disaster of the Aral Sea.” Thorough and packed with data but a touch dry. General readers will find much of the same information in Brian Fagan’s more engaging book Elixir (2011).
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0317-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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