Dry, Life Without Water - book review

For my shower this morning I probably used more water than many of the people described in Dry, Life Without Water use for a whole month. Water is so scarce for them that a bath might indeed be a once in a lifetime event. It's not, of course, that I am particularly wasteful with water or that the world has a particular scarcity of water but that it is so unevenly distributed. And I think the thing that struck me most about this book is that the writing talent is so unevenly distributed as well.

As explained in the introduction of the book, it is the result of a grant by GEF (the Global Environment Facility) to an organization primarily funded by Italy and administered by UNESCO. The project's goal was to showcase best practices in conservation and best practices in arid and semi-arid environments around the world. Several conferences were held and many papers were written, some of which appear in edited form in this book. So, by it's nature, one would expect the writing to be diverse. I would not, however, expect it to be as bad as it is at times nor would the diversity excuse the rather sloppy editing and typographical errors. The pictures, mostly National Geographic quality, are not always captioned and not always relevant to the story they accompany.

Some articles are pure political fodder (income redistribution thinly disguised as "conservation") and one is blatant wishful thinking about the role that the author feels women in that country should have regarding agriculture. The women, one gets the feeling, stand at the kitchen door and direct the men what to plant and where to plant, harvest and process it. Other stories leave more questions than one would expect in a book of this sort. For example, one author whines about a species being domesticated without giving any reason why that should be a bad thing for the environment or the species in question. What were the editors thinking? I would expect more from a Harvard University Press product. The book reads more like a collection of Harvard freshman social sciences essays.

On the positive side, the description of fog catchers wringing useful amounts of water from moisture-laden coastal fog is absolutely fascinating; the comeback of the Incan vicuna in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile heartening; and the building of microdams in Pakistan inspirational. For the most part there are no ground breaking scientific discoveries illustrated in this book. They are indeed just "best practices" that require people to reconsider their longstanding traditions and adopt something that will allow them to live a little better on the land they have chosen to live on.