Water 1st Edition

This seller is excellent, The book had some stains on it and without prompting they gave me an entire refund. I feel so bad because it was totally adequate for a $5 book. One planet books are great.

The author does a great job of providing a view into the complexities surrounding the management and future of what is one of the most important parts of our world. This book is not overly-emotional, and it does a great job of providing objectivity to a subject that will surely become heated in the near future.

Fresh water will be the next resource crisis. This book explains the issues. Bottled water is an environmental disaster. I recommend this book.

I had high hopes for this book. what he is saying. He repeats himself often. His sentences are often as long as a paragraph. He keeps referring to past chapters or future chapters, all of this keeps the reader off pace. I only read half the book because it was too hard to stay with him. He is writing about a subject that will change the way we live, but he does not give the reader a chance to get the full story. I was very disappointed. This could be a much better book. I can tell the author knows his stuff, but he has written the story in such a convoluted way that I lost interest half way through. I know the author is passionate about his study of this vital resource. The book needs a great deal of editing to make it accessible to anyone except another academic.Water is certainly the commodity that we will be fighting about in coming years instead of oil. Even though the blue planet is composed mostly of water, the amount of water available a freshwater is very limited. When I studied Economics at UCLA in 1969 the economists spoke of three kinds of goods we would study:(1)economic goods; (2) luxury goods; and (3) free goods. Economic goods are scare items such as a home or an automobile, the lower the price the more that are purchased. It is our traditional supply versus demand type of good. A luxury good is one that the higher the price the more that are sold. Two items come to mind, lipstick and yachts. Women will not purchase a lipstick at 50 cents, thinking it is defective. She would pass up the cheaper brand for the name brand. Likewise if you are in the market for yacht you are thinking of getting one larger and more expensive than your neighbor.There were only two goods in the free class of items. A free good is one that no matter how much I consume there is an infinite amount avaiable to everyone else. The two goods we spoke of in my economics classes were (1) clean air and (2) clean water. Because we treated water and air as free, we did not create a market for them. Thus we allowed the air and the water to be poisoned by our waste materials. That is what the issue of water is about. Tens of millions of people will die this year because of inability to get clean water. Water wars are on their way.

Water actually refers to Fresh Water, which accounts for less than one percent of all the water on the planet (not counting ice). Feldman lays out the issues confronting us now and in the near future as populations and economies grow.His main point is that freshwater problems "point to a global crisis" of sustainability. By sustainability he does not merely mean limiting freshwater usage to the amount that can be replenished naturally. He includes the welfare of other species and of future generations in his calculus. He points out that "sustainability also means promoting development, protecting the environment, and advancing justice."Feldman is a great believer in "transparency", open decisions openly arrived at (to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson). He emphasizes again and again the importance of including all stakeholders in any decision-making process. The number of stakeholders can be daunting, for instance when a dam is contemplated or a river is diverted. And democracy is no guarantee of a rational outcome. No one quite knows how to weigh the concerns of other species or future generations in any decision-making process.As is common with books warning us of ecological perils, Feldman is eloquent in describing the problems, their linkages and complexities; he becomes suitably wonkish in his case studies (he focuses particular attention on the Chesapeake Bay, Brazilian dams, and Israeli-Palestinian cooperation); and he is fervent in his prescriptions for humanity.The book is worthwhile for all readers because of his description of the problems. His insights provide an important contribution to our understanding of the limits of this essential resource and how some solutions have unintended harmful consequences.Serious students of environmental policy will want to ingest the case studies just to see what works and what doesn't, although how universal these lessons are is open to debate. His discussion of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation seems bizarrely optimistic, given the inequities of water usage prevailing in the region. On the other hand, Feldman is correct to point out how climate change can ruin hard-won water usage agreementsFeldman's prescriptions contain lots of "we must" and "we should" statements. These tend to be utterly obvious to anyone who would bother to read this book, but they range from the unlikely to impossible in their probabilities of being implemented. And let us not forget that any proposed solution can be rendered pointless by those things that tend to grow exponentially: population, consumption, and capital.

The book is in great shape and great condition. It is almost brand new if not brand new. I am very happy with the product.

Interesting read for a textbook. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Will have to keep this one for next semester also. Great job.