The Ages Of Water: Three
Peter Gleick’s book, “The Three Ages of Water,” is a warning about climate change with a focus on water.
Nearly half of the material is then devoted to a history of the planet. For example, 97% of the world’s water is salt water, while 80% of its fresh water is utilised to create food. The second “age” of water is “our age,” when the 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.” The author’s first “age” of water spans from the Big Bang to the end of the Middle Ages.
The reason this isn’t happening is that although we have the technology to feed the eight billion people on Earth, provide them with clean water to drink, and remove their waste, these advancements also came with “the unintended consequences of pollution, ecological disruption, water poverty, social and political conflict, and global climate change.”
The remainder of the book is devoted to the idea that if we don’t make changes, the third era of water would result in a nightmarish future. The most compelling chapters describe how we mistreat freshwater ecosystems, which make up less than 1% of the planet’s surface and are rapidly disappearing.
The highest rate of extinction among vertebrates is found in freshwater fish. Alternatives exist when fossil fuels run out, but not in the case of fossil water.
The author offers a practical approach in which economists do cost-benefit calculations that take into account the destruction of free-flowing rivers, the displacement of populations, floods, the costs of human illness caused by pollution and pandemics, the loss of wildness and nature, and the “use-value” of natural ecosystems.
However, this necessitates that governments
