Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

AS ALEX PRUD'HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France , they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud'homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud'homme's vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century.

The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure--both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil--and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water?

Like Daniel Yergin's classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power , Prud'homme's The Ripple Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story, Prud'homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant--and sometimes shadowy--characters through whom these issues come alive. Prud'homme traversed the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource--from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud'homme will change the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

CHAPTER 1 The Defining Resource Thousands have lived without love--not one without water. --W. H. Auden It is scarcity and plenty that makes the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water. --Galileo Galilei, 1632 THE PARADOX OF WATER The received wisdom is that America has some of the best water in the world--meaning that we have the cleanest and most plentiful supply of H2O anywhere, available in an endless stream, at whatever temperature or volume we wish, whenever we want it, at hardly any cost. In America, clean water seems limitless. This assumption is so ingrained that most of us never stop to think about it when we brush our teeth, power up our computers, irrigate our crops, build a new house, or gulp down a clean, clear drink on a hot summer day. It's easy to see why. For most of its history, the United States has shown a remarkable ability to find, treat, and deliver potable water to citizens in widely different circumstances across the country. Since the seventies, America has relied on the Environmental Protection Agency and robust laws--most notably the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, which have been further enhanced by state and local regulations--to protect water supplies. Even our sewer systems are among the best in the world, reliably limiting the spread of disease and ensuring a healthy environment. At least, that is what the water industry says. To put the state of American water in perspective, consider that by 2000 some 1.2 billion people around the world lacked safe drinking water, and that by 2025 as many as 3.4 billion people will face water scarcity, according to the UN. What's more, as the global population rises from 6.8 billion in 2010 to nearly 9 billion by 2050, and climate change disrupts familiar weather patterns, reliable supplies of freshwater will become increasingly threatened. In Australia and Spain, record droughts have led to critical water shortages; in China rampant pollution has led to health problems and environmental degradation; in Africa tensions over water supplies have led to conflict; and in Central America the privatization of water has led to suffering and violence. At a glance, then, America seems to be hydrologically blessed. But if you look a little closer, you will discover that the apparent success of our water management and consumption masks a broad spectrum of underlying problems--from new kinds of water pollution to aging infrastructure, intensifying disputes over water rights, obsolete regulations, and shifting weather patterns, among many other things. These problems are expensive to fix, difficult to adapt to, and politically unpopular. Not surprisingly, people have tended to ignore them, pretending they don't exist in the secret hope that they will cure themselves. Instead, America's water problems have steadily grown worse. In recent years, the quality and quantity of American water has undergone staggering changes, largely out of the public eye. Between 2004 and 2009, the Clean Water Act (CWA) was violated at least 506,000 times by more than twenty-three thousand companies and other facilities, according to EPA data assessed by the New York Times. The EPA's comprehensive data covers only that five-year span, but it shows that the number of facilities violating the CWA increased more than 16 percent from 2004 to 2007. (Some polluters illegally withheld information about their discharges, so the actual contamination was worse.) The culprits ranged from small gas stations and dry-cleaning stores, to new housing developments, farms, mines, factories, and vast city sewer systems. During that time, less than 3 percent of polluters were punished or fined by EPA regulators, who were politically and financially hamstrung. During the same period, the quality of tap water deteriorated, as the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was violated in every state. Between 2004 and 2009, a study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit watchdog organization, found, tap water in forty-five states and the District of Columbia was contaminated by 316 different pollutants. More than half of those chemicals--including the gasoline additive MTBE, the rocket-fuel component perchlorate, and industrial plasticizers called phthalates--were unregulated by the EPA and thus not subject to environmental safety standards. Federal agencies have set limits for ninety-one chemicals in water supplies; the EWG study found forty-nine of these pollutants in water at excessive levels. Translated, this means that the drinking water of 53.6 million Americans was contaminated. Many people have turned to bottled water as a convenient, supposedly healthier alternative to tap, but a 2008 test by EWG found that bottled water (purchased from stores in nine states and the District of Columbia) contained traces of thirty-eight pollutants, including fertilizers, bacteria, industrial chemicals, Tylenol, and excessive levels of potential carcinogens. The International Bottled Water Association, a trade group, dismissed the EWG report as exaggerated and unrepresentative of the industry, demanding that EWG "cease and desist." EWG stuck to its conclusions and objected to the industry's "intimidation tactics." The health consequences of water pollution are difficult to gauge and likely won't be known for years. But medical researchers have noticed a rise in the incidence of certain diseases, especially breast and prostate cancer, since the 1970s, and doctors surmise that contaminated drinking water could be one explanation. Similarly, the effect of long-term multifaceted pollution on the ecosystem is not well understood. What, for instance, is the cumulative effect of a "cocktail" of old and new contaminants--sewage, plastics, ibuprofen, Chanel No. 5, estrogen, cocaine, and Viagra, say--on aquatic grasses, water bugs, bass, ducks, beavers, and on us? Hydrologists are only just beginning to study this question. In the meantime, human thirst began to outstrip the ecosystem's ability to supply clean water in a sustainable way. By 2008, the world's consumption of water was doubling every twenty years, which is more than twice the rate of population growth. By 2000, people had used or altered virtually every accessible supply of freshwater. Some of the world's mightiest rivers--including the Rio Grande and the Colorado--had grown so depleted that they reached the sea only in exceptionally wet years. Springs have been pumped dry. Half the world's wetlands (the "kidneys" of the environment, which absorb rainfall, filter pollutants, and dampen the effects of storm surges) were drained or damaged, which harmed ecosystems and allowed salt water to pollute freshwater aquifers. In arid, rapidly growing Western states, such as Colorado, Texas, and California, droughts were causing havoc. A report by the US General Accounting Office predicts that thirty-six states will face water shortages by 2013, while McKinsey & Co. forecasts that global demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent in 2030. The experts--hydrologists, engineers, environmentalists, diplomats--have been watching these trends with concern, noting that the growing human population and warming climate will only intensify the pressure on water supplies. Some call freshwater "the defining resource of the twenty-first century," and the UN has warned of "a looming water crisis." "We used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues. Now we think water will be the critical issue," Mostafa Tolba, former head of the UN Environment Programme, has declared. Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank's leading environmental expert, put it even more bluntly: "The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water." © 2011 Alex Prud'homme Excerpted from The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'homme All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

What does water mean to individuals, to daily life, to a society? We frequently take its availability for granted. This complacency is what provoked Prud'homme (The Cell Game) to write this book. With his acute journalist's instincts, he investigates numerous issues surrounding water, including its quality, availability, ownership, and infrastructure in both the United States and the rest of the world. In this high-stakes story, bolstered by extensive research and in-depth interviews with experts, Prud'homme guides readers on an "intellectual adventure" to better understand why water is "the most valuable resource on earth," and, more important, he demonstrates why water is "the resource that will define this century." VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of nature and political science books.-Norah Xiao, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Prud'homme, a journalist and the coauthor with Julia Child of My Life in France, examines crucial issues concerning the world's finite supply of fresh water-pollution, water quantity (drought and flood), waste, and governance. Focusing on the U.S., he explores how water scarcity, population growth, and environmental degradation are forcing the country to a moment of reckoning on a scale not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. And he notes how woefully obsolete laws designed to protect drinking supplies in the 1970s are becoming, when hundreds of untested new chemicals enter U.S. waterways every year, and the majority of water pollution now comes from unregulated storm-water runoff, where insecticides, fertilizers, paint, and motor oil are washed into the water supply. Prud'homme offers ample and eloquent warnings of a looming water crisis: intersex fish in Chesapeake Bay, the poisoning of water wells in Wisconsin from agricultural runoff, Lake Mead's record-low waterline in Nevada, decaying dams and levees. Prud'homme's eloquence and local focus will help this book rise to the top of the recent flood of water-themed books including Elixir by Brian Fagan and The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Freshwater in the 21st century looks polluted and overdrawn. It is going to be a very dry future. Not that water is a dry topic, especially when this book begins with an account of a dead body found at a water treatment plant. Writer/journalist Prud'homme presents case after case involving both corporate and individual abuse in the midst of government mismanagement, and discusses each case in the context of global warming. The brightest spots on the horizon are the new technologies being developed to address some of the pollution issues presented, for example the use of microorganisms in remediation efforts. The author explains complex topics very well. However, the book is not particularly scholarly; most citations are from Web sites or news sources, and sensationalism is too often the tone invoked. For example, living in Phoenix will be like "... a dress rehearsal of life on Mars...." This is reminiscent of what S. Lichter and S. Rothman wrote about in Environmental Cancer (1999). Also, suggesting that wealthy societies pollute more ignores Kuznets curve and the role of free trade in the fight against climate change, according to the WTO at the UN. Nonetheless, a timely book on an important topic. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and academic students, all levels. T. Johnson Prescott Valley Public Library

Booklist Review

As development spreads and water resources are stretched to the limit, one essential resource, water, is becoming increasingly commodified and the subject of corporate interest and investment as well as lawsuits when consumers weigh in with their concerns. How did we get to such a place, and what does the future hold for water quality and supply in the U.S. and around the world? Prud'homme examines the everyday products whose use affects the quality and the supply of water, including fertilizers, antibacterial soap, and prescription drugs containing chemicals that later find their ways into water and sewage treatment systems to the detriment of the ecosystem. Prud'homme takes as a starting point the mysterious death in 2005 of a hydrochemist killed while taking water samples in Passaic, New Jersey, a hotbed for controversies over water. Proceeding from it, he offers historical and current perspectives on incidents ranging from th. black mayonnais. of sludge found in New York neighborhoods to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico BP oil rig blowout. An important book on a fundamental resource.--Bush, Vaness. Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Freelance journalist Prud'homme (The Cell Game: Sam Waksal's Fast Money and False Promisesand the Fate of ImClone's Cancer Drug, 2004, etc.) offers acomprehensive, even encyclopedic, survey ofthe dangers, debates, frustrations, failures, technology, greed, apathy and rage that whirlpool around the phenomenally complex issue of freshwater.The author conducted interviews with principals on all sides of the issueconsumers, entrepreneurs, politicians, business executives, bureaucrats, the rich and the thirstyand visited key sites, and he provides a generally balanced view of the looming freshwater crisis. He educates us about the depletion of aquifers, the role of big business in the race for water (billions of dollars at stake), the demands that power generation (coal, nuclear) place on water resources, the effects of agricultural runoff on rivers, oceans and marine life, the process of wastewater treatment, global warming, the difference between "gray water" and "black water," the fragility of cities (due to water demand) as geographically distant as New York City and Los Angeles, the mining industry's passion for some prime Alaska real estate, droughts and floods, dams and salmon, desalination, shrinking reservoirs and our human determination to keep doing what we're doing until it's too late to save ourselves. Prud'homme lauds the Dutch for looking ahead and protecting their land (at enormous expense), and the Singaporeans for their stewardship; praises Intel for recycling much of the water used in computer-chip fabrication; blasts the bottled-water industry, reminding us that about half of the products available are mere tap waterand they generate all those throwaway bottles that most people don't bother to recycle. And what would a story about liquid gold be without a walk-on by T. Boone Pickens? Hopefully, the author's commonsensical solutions will be heeded.As essential work about a topic too-often ignored.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.