Still, an informed discourse about the vital historical relationship between humans and water, and an overview of a possible...
A warning about the worldwide struggle to manage water resources in an era of growing demand and climactic instability.
Droughts in Texas, irrigation problems in Wyoming, concerns about rising sea levels in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh and the Netherlands, deteriorating drinking-water safety: these are among the many fronts in the world’s ongoing “water wars.” Getting water to go where we want it to, when we want it to, is a large part of the battle, although the real question is whether people can manage to develop new attitudes that will lead to solutions. Can the industrial world, with its increasing population that crowds and pollutes waterbodies, and its gaseous emissions that affect sea levels and cause glacier-melt, rise to the challenge of safeguarding so precious a resource? The author pursues a far-reaching itinerary in order to evoke the global nature of the crisis. She reviews the history of America’s bold experiment with regional improvement through water management, the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority; discusses power needs in areas of rapid population growth; and evaluates decades of successful dike management in the Netherlands (where increased population in below-sea-level areas has heightened fears of a future catastrophic flood). Ward writes of the water politics of the American Southwest, with special focus on the unchecked expansion of Las Vegas, a boomtown whose growth has sucked up so much of the region’s scarce water supply that area springs and wetlands have dried up, dooming wildlife and straining aquifers. Ward’s key arguments: that in earth’s natural climactic workings, there is a finite amount of water; that efforts to control it have historically been hit-or-miss; and that growing population and environmental pressures mandate concerted action. She fails, however, to propose many specific remedies. Ward focuses almost exclusively on the availability of water, power needs, irrigation, and flooding; unfortunately, she sidesteps concerns about the decline of drinking-water safety in industrial nations.
Still, an informed discourse about the vital historical relationship between humans and water, and an overview of a possible global dilemma.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-229-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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