A radical new approach to tackling the growing threat of water scarcity Water is essential to life, yet humankind’s relationship with water is complex. For millennia, we have perceived it as abundant and easily accessible. But water shortages are fast becoming a persistent reality for all nations, rich and poor. With demand outstripping supply, a global water crisis is imminent. In this trenchant critique of current water policies and practices, Edward Barbier argues that our water crisis is as much a failure of water management as it is a result of scarcity. Outdated governance structures and institutions, combined with continual underpricing, have perpetuated the overuse and undervaluation of water and disincentivized much-needed technological innovation. As a result “water grabbing” is on the rise, and cooperation to resolve these disputes is increasingly fraught. Barbier draws on evidence from countries across the globe to show the scale of the problem, and outlines the policy and management solutions needed to avert this crisis.

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out. Robert Glennon captures the irony—and tragedy—of America’s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical. From manufactured snow for tourists in Atlanta to trillions of gallons of water flushed down the toilet each year, Unquenchable reveals the heady extravagances and everyday inefficiencies that are sucking the nation dry. The looming catastrophe remains hidden as government diverts supplies from one area to another to keep water flowing from the tap. But sooner rather than later, the shell game has to end. And when it does, shortages will threaten not only the environment, but every aspect of American life: we face shuttered power plants and jobless workers, decimated fi sheries and contaminated drinking water. We can’t engineer our way out of the problem, either with traditional fixes or zany schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska. In fact, new demands for water, particularly the enormous supply needed for ethanol and energy production, will only worsen the crisis. America must make hard choices—and Glennon’s answers are fittingly provocative. He proposes market-based solutions that value water as both a commodity and a fundamental human right. One truth runs throughout Unquenchable: only when we recognize water’s worth will we begin to conserve it.

New York Times–bestselling Author: “Powerful . . . a compelling case for the game-changing role of innovation in some of the world’s most desperate economies.” —Eric Schmidt, former Executive Chairman, Google and Alphabet Clayton M. Christensen, author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and How Will You Measure Your Life, and co-authors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic development fail to generate sustainable prosperity, and offer a groundbreaking solution for true and lasting change. Global poverty is one of the world’s most vexing problems. For decades, we’ve assumed smart, well-intentioned people will eventually be able to change the economic trajectory of poor countries. From education to healthcare, building infrastructure to eradicating corruption, too many solutions rely on trial and error. Essentially, the plan is often to identify areas that need help, flood them with resources, and hope to see change over time. But hope is not an effective strategy. At least twenty countries that have received billions of dollars’ worth of aid are poorer now. Applying the rigorous and theory-driven analysis he is known for, Christensen suggests a better way. The right kind of innovation not only builds companies—but also builds countries. The Prosperity Paradox identifies the limits of common economic development models, which tend to be top-down efforts, and offers a new framework for economic growth based on entrepreneurship and market-creating innovation. Christensen, Ojomo, and Dillon use successful examples from America’s own economic development, including Ford, Eastman Kodak, and Singer Sewing Machines, and shows how similar models have worked in other regions such as Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, Rwanda, India, Argentina, and Mexico. The ideas in this book will help companies desperate for real, long-term growth see actual, sustainable progress where they’ve failed before. But The Prosperity Paradox is more than a business book—it is a call to action for anyone who wants a fresh take for making the world a better and more prosperous place.

This book is for young adults and their parents striving to navigate the turbulent waters of this transformational epoch. We are partway through a period of change that probably began when a young Albert Einstein penned on a scrappy piece of paper e=mc2. In time this will most likely be characterized as among the most significant in history, perhaps even more impactful than the Renaissance. One feature of this reformation is sure to be the development of a deep appreciation for the place of abundance in both nature and our lives. Today most people, organizations and communities describe their existence as a struggle to survive. Rarely does anyone report on how much they are thriving. That is strange because never before has humanity as a whole been so wealthy, so bathed in abundance. One reason is that most of contemporary life is governed by economic systems predicated on scarcity. Because it is not possible to make money unless there are natural or artificially-induced shortages, we are prone to reason about tradeoffs using a scarcity logic. As with every reformation, this era is both exciting and taxing. Once this transformation has taken root we will come to recognize that all of life is predicated on abundance. And with that realization we will begin to make major shifts in our thinking and our prioritizing. Of special import will be the addressing of an ancient folly that still haunts us. In his famous economic text Adam Smith signaled this dilemma by rhetorically asking why we assign zero monetary value to water, which is essential for all lives, but pay a small fortune for diamonds whose utility is purely symbolic? Economists have mostly ignored this issue, although the British fiscal maestro, Maynard Keynes did gratituously dub it the water-diamond paradox. Given the current socio-political complexities, the global world cannot possibly be sustained by an economic system based solely on scarcity. It needs to be augmented by a new financial infrastructure centered on abundance. As a precursor to this anticipated economic shift we face a large task, to develop a coherent and collective sense of abundance. This will take time. Since we already know a great deal about scarcity it seems wise to prepare for this evolutionary inevitability by learning to describe every-day events using the principles of abundance. Abundance is a way of seeing, a method of thinking, a form of emoting and a manner of intuiting. So is scarcity. Diamandis and Kotler, in their book Abundance, present a compelling and optimistic case that the future is better than we think. In the past people have treated shortages as evidence of scarcity and have spoken about abundance in terms of excesses. Such notions are now being re-conceptualized. Abundance involves balancing consumption and replenishment, decay and regeneration, expired pasts and future dreams. It also depends on the restrictions and regulatory actions of Yin-Yang-like rheostats. As with a pregnancy approaching full-term, when the confining function of scarcity subsides, the landscape of what-is-to-be emerges. In an artful way this book shows how everyday events can be experienced as either awash with abundance or burdened by scarcity. If we so chose, we can all be guided by a self-created and communally-sustained sense of abundance. Learning how to see the best and the worst of times with an abundance rather than a scarcity lens is the special gift of this book.

The little-known story of the systems that bring us our drinking water, how they were developed, the problems they are facing, and how they will be reinvented in the near future

Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? “Luminous essays” on nature and environmental stewardship (Booklist). Named one of the Top Ten Northwest Books of the Year by the Oregonian In this book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore, a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast, reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate. Moore’s essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter’s arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane. Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family. “Stands with the best tradition of nature writing.” —The Oregonian

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.