It is zero hour for a new US water policy! At a time when many countries are adopting new national approaches to water management, the United States still has no cohesive federal policy, and water-related authorities are dispersed across more than 30 agencies. Here, at last, is a vision for what we as a nation need to do to manage our most vital resource. In this book, leading thinkers at world-class water research institution the Pacific Institute present clear and readable analysis and recommendations for a new federal water policy to confront our national and global challenges at a critical time. What exactly is at stake? In the 21st century, pressures on water resources in the United States are growing and conflicts among water users are worsening. Communities continue to struggle to meet water quality standards and to ensure that safe drinking water is available for all. And new challenges are arising as climate change and extreme events worsen, new water quality threats materialize, and financial constraints grow. Yet the United States has not stepped up with adequate leadership to address these problems. The inability of national policymakers to safeguard our water makes the United States increasingly vulnerable to serious disruptions of something most of us take for granted: affordable, reliable, and safe water. This book provides an independent assessment of water issues and water management in the United States, addressing emerging and persistent water challenges from the perspectives of science, public policy, environmental justice, economics, and law. With fascinating case studies and first-person accounts of what helps and hinders good water management, this is a clear-eyed look at what we need for a 21st century U.S. water policy.

The objective of this book is to broadly illustrate the key aspects of water governance, mapping the spectrum of decision-making from techno-centric and eco-centric approaches, to hybrid concepts and people-centric approaches. Topics covered include the challenges for water-governance models, the polycentric model, the integration challenge, water in the decision-making hierarchy, and the rise of water-sensitive design, while also taking into account interdependencies between stakeholders, as well as the issue of scale. The book’s content is presented in an integrated and comprehensive format, building on detailed case studies from around the world and the authors’ working experiences in the water sector. Combining essential insights with accessible, non-technical language, it offers a valuable resource for academics, technicians and policy-makers alike.

Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century represents criminology’s first book-length contribution to the study of water and water-related crimes, harms and security. The chapters cover topics such as: water pollution, access to fresh water in the Global North and Global South, water and climate change, the commodification of water and privatization, water security and pacification, and activism and resistance surrounding issues of access and pollution. With examples ranging from Rio de Janeiro to Flint, Michigan to the Thames River, this original study offers a comprehensive criminological overview of the contemporary and historical relationship between water and crime. Coinciding with the International Decade for Action, “Water for Sustainable Development,” 2018–2028, this timely volume will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of green criminology, as well as those interested in critical geography, environmental anthropology, environmental sociology, political ecology, and the study of corporate crime and state crime.

Water in the 21st-Century West offers a timely look at the central issue facing the American West—the region’s diminishing water supply. It collects the best reporting on the subject, drawn from the pages of High Country News, the newspaper that sets the standard for coverage of environmental issues in the West. This book provides compelling perspectives on the water issues and controversies that roil the region, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains, from the interior mountains to the southwestern deserts. The book’s contributors—among them activists, scholars, scientists, and many of the nation’s finest environmental journalists—offer hardhitting analyses of regional dilemmas, including the unpredictable impact of climate change; intense debates over decommissioning dams; emerging Native American water power; toxic threats to groundwater quality; and the escalating urban demands for water in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Salt Lake City, and the Bay Area. Water in the 21st-Century West captures the range and nature of the arguments that have defined water politics in the region over the past decade. The collection probes the issues and explores creative attempts to find solutions, bringing a focus and clarity to the most contentious environmental issue the West faces. Water in the 21st-Century West will be an essential primer in assessing and mapping the West’s water future.

Public Waters shows how, as popular hopes and dreams meet tough terrain, a central idea that has historically structured water management can guide water policy for Western states today.

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.

A lively primer on the region's most precious and scarce resource, drawn from the pages of the newspaper that sets the standard for coverage of environmental issues in the West.