Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind
Fagan, Brian (Author)
Jun 2011. 416 p. Bloomsbury, hardcover, $28.00. (9781608190034). 553.7.
Fagan, author of a suite of titles on climate history (The Little Ice Age, 2001), here surveys water management, alighting on every continent and chronologically spanning from the advent of irrigated agriculture to the water works of modern cities like Phoenix, Arizona. He critiques the common impression that centralized control of water, such as that which conjured Phoenix into existence or, in ancient times, Roman aqueducts and Chinese canals, is the main theme in the story of humanity’s capture and distribution of water. He favors a bottom-up view, suggesting that local solutions to water problems were consolidated by civilizations, not invented by them. He describes village-scale technologies to support that viewpoint, going into archaeological analysis to underscore how communities such as Bali, the Maya, and Angkor Wat invested their water sources with sacredness. Well might they have ritualized water, for Fagan recounts how science indicts drought as the agent of various civilizations’ downfalls and a forewarning of our own. Supplying intriguing historical background, Fagan well informs those pondering freshwater’s role in contemporary environmental problems.
— Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal pre-pub
Fagan, Brian. Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind. Bloomsbury, dist, by Macmillan. Jun. 2011. 400p. ISBN 9781608190034. $28.
Water is one of the most precious substances on Earth, and we’re about to run out of it. Here, acclaimed anthropologist Fagan shows just how important it is by tracing three ages of water: the millennia when cultures were necessarily built around it; the time of the Industrial Revolution, when humans figured out how to make it flow more easily and hence carelessly exploited it; and today, when we’re dealing with the consequences of that mistake. Important and, from a New York Times best-selling author, accessible to all.
^
|
