"Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization:" Water as the new oil

"Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization"

by Steven Solomon

HarperCollins, 608 pp., $27.99

There's a slick catchphrase in the air these days — "Water is the new oil" — that author Steven Solomon and others use when referencing water's newfound significance on today's geopolitical stage.

But if Solomon's outstanding survey, "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization," reveals anything, it is that oil, for maybe a century or so, was actually the new water, and now water has simply returned to the primacy it has always held throughout history.

In detailed but highly readable fashion, economics journalist Solomon ("Confidence Game," 1995) works through each major civilization — the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the early Romans, China, India, Islam, northern Europe, the New World — and shows the profound water challenges each faced and overcame in advancing human aspirations.

Roman success came both in mastering ship building to control the Mediterranean's western sea lanes, and in devising a series of massive aqueducts and water systems for its urban populations.

For the Chinese, it was the construction of the 1,115-mile-long Grand Canal, which linked the great Yangtze and Yellow rivers and provided a vital transport line between the country's north and south.

For European countries like Portugal, Spain, then Holland and England, it was the ability of these relatively low-population countries to master the seas and extend empires throughout the world.

And for America, it was, early on, the natural moat provided by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and, later, the completion in 1825 of the Erie Canal, which turned the American axis from north-south to east-west. This was followed by the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, which dramatically opened up global trade opportunities for the United States.

Solomon points to a different water-related development that changed history and hastened the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine, which among many other things facilitated the production of high-quality, inexpensive cast iron.

From his historical account, Solomon moves to the state of water management today. The most alarming perhaps is the fact that one in five people worldwide lack access to at least one gallon of safe water to drink per day. And two in five do not have access to the mere 13 gallons needed for rudimentary sanitation and hygiene.

"Yet it is unachieved for two-fifths of mankind for one overriding, simple reason — the deficit of existing infrastructure and competent, institutional governance," Solomon writes.

From such desperation, Solomon predicts serious struggles between and among the water haves and have-nots. And he points to disastrously polluted or disappearing freshwater sources, expanding populations, and climate change as just some of the pressures on the world's supply of clean water.

If Solomon's book has a weakness, it is that the author might be a little too optimistic about our country's freshwater future.

"In an age of scarcity in which freshwater is becoming the new oil, the industrial democracies enjoy an enormous comparative resource advantage that they have yet to fully recognize or exploit," he writes.

Yet, from the American West's fragile water supply to pollution of the Great Lakes to interstate fights over water to our embarrassingly wasteful water consumption, America has serious water challenges of its own.

Still, Solomon's book is a seminal study from which readers should be able to grasp the larger issues of water in the 21st century.

Alan Moores is a Seattle-based writer and editor.