The Three Ages Of Water

‘The Three Ages Of Water’ by Peter Gleick is a warning on climate change with an emphasis on water.

The author begins with statistics—e.g., 97% of the world’s water is salt water, and 80% of the fresh water is used to grow food—and then devotes nearly half of the text to a history of the world. The author’s first “age” of water runs from the Big Bang to the end of the Middle Ages, and the second is “our age,” when scientific and industrial revolutions led to the “replumbing of the entire planet with hard infrastructure that dammed, channelized, collected, treated and redistributed almost every major freshwater source on Earth.”

Though we possess the ability to feed Earth’s 8 billion people, deliver safe drinking water, and take away wastewater, it’s not happening because these advances came with “the unintended consequences of pollution, ecological disruption, water poverty, social and political conflict, and global climate change.”

The third age of water will lead to a dystopian future unless we fix matters, and the author devotes the remainder of the book to that prospect. The most gripping chapters recount our disastrous abuse of freshwater ecosystems, which cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface and continue to shrink.

Freshwater fish have the world’s highest rate of extinction among vertebrates. When fossil fuels are exhausted, alternatives exist, but this is not the case with fossil water.

The author delivers a realistic solution in which economists do cost-benefit analyses that include the loss of free-flowing rivers, dislocated communities, floods, the costs of human ill health from pollution, pandemics, loss of wilderness and nature, and the “use-value” of natural ecosystems.

However, this requires governments to spend money, nations to work together, and communities to “do what needs to be done.” Ultimately, writes the author, “the chronic problem is a lack of will and commitment.”