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When the Rivers Run Dry
- Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century
- Narrated by: Tony Craine
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
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Publisher's summary
Throughout history, rivers have been our foremost source of fresh water both for agriculture and for individual consumption, but now economists say that by 2025 water scarcity will cut global food production by more than the current U.S. grain harvest.
In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce focuses on the dire state of the world's rivers to provide our most complete portrait yet of the growing world water crisis and its ramifications for us all.
Pearce traveled to more than 30 countries examining the current state of crucial water sources like the Indus River in Pakistan, the Colorado River in the U.S., and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China. Pearce deftly weaves together the complicated scientific, economic, and historic dimensions of the water crisis, showing us its complex origins - from waste to wrong-headed engineering projects to high-yield crop varieties that have saved developing countries from starvation but are now emptying their water reserves. He reveals the most daunting water issues we face today, among them the threat of flooding in China's Yellow River, where rising silt levels will prevent dikes from containing floodwaters; the impoverishment of Pakistan's Sindh, a once-fertile farming valley now destroyed by the 15 million tons of salt that the much-depleted Indus deposits annually on the land but cannot remove; the disappearing Colorado River, whose reservoirs were once the lifeblood of seven states but which could easily dry as overuse continues; and the poisoned springs of Palestine and the Jordan River, where Israeli control of the water supply has only fed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The situation is dire, but not without remedy. Pearce argues that the solution to the growing worldwide water shortage is not more and bigger dams, but a greater efficiency and a new water ethic based on managing the water cycle for maximum social benefit rather than narrow self-interest.
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Countdown
- Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
- By: Alan Weisman
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Weisman visits an extraordinary range of the world's cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems to learn what in their beliefs, histories, liturgies, or current circumstances might suggest that sometimes it's in their own best interest to limit their growth.
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Boring
- By NorthFLADiver on 01-14-14
By: Alan Weisman
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1493
- Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
- By: Charles C. Mann
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.
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Fascinating Mindbending History.
- By Betsy Powel on 12-19-11
By: Charles C. Mann
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Let There Be Water
- Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World
- By: Seth M. Siegel
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also has an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors - the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan - every day.
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More water politics story than water technology
- By normal person on 04-12-21
By: Seth M. Siegel
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Farmageddon
- The True Cost of Cheap Meat
- By: Philip Lymbery, Isabel Oakeshott
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.
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Excellent insight of industrial farming
- By Grazyna on 04-19-14
By: Philip Lymbery, and others
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The Swamp
- The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
- By: Michael Grunwald
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.
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This is not Jiminy Cricket's river
- By Robert R. on 09-02-18
By: Michael Grunwald
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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
- Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland
- By: Miriam Horn
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.
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great stories
- By GMMT on 05-15-18
By: Miriam Horn
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Rain
- A Natural and Cultural History
- By: Cynthia Barnett
- Narrated by: Christina Traister
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.
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Mostly a cultural history
- By serine on 02-10-16
By: Cynthia Barnett
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The Soil Will Save Us
- How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming
- By: Kristin Ohlson
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.
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Rambling, mile wide, inch deep treatment of a subject
- By Charles Phillips on 10-17-18
By: Kristin Ohlson
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Water in Plain Sight
- Hope for a Thirsty World
- By: Judith D. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
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Crucial solutions
- By Shane Emanuelle on 07-25-19
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The Ocean of Life
- The Fate of Man and the Sea
- By: Callum Roberts
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts - one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists - leads listeners on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on Earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.
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Immediate fan of Mr Roberts
- By Anna on 06-25-24
By: Callum Roberts
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Enough
- Why the World's Poorest Starve in An Age of Plenty
- By: Roger Thurow, Scott Kilman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.
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It's Time For Us To Be More Compassionate
- By James on 07-18-10
By: Roger Thurow, and others
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Late Victorian Holocausts
- El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
- By: Mike Davis
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.
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Mike Davis on Audible!
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-02-17
By: Mike Davis
What listeners say about When the Rivers Run Dry
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- IF
- 03-08-21
An well told story of a live well lived
One man's personal account of his love affair with surfing and the people and places it's carried him through.
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- David
- 03-24-15
Water woes worldwide
This is another one of those depressing books that catalogs in grim detail just how badly humans are destroying the environment, on a cataclysmic scale, how greed, desperation, and short-sightedness have destroyed entire ecosystems, devastated nations, and displaced millions, and how even though we have the scientific and technological know-how to do better, we're not going to, because short-term thinking always wins.
Oh, the author ends with an optimistic chapter, as all these books do, detailing bold and forward-thinking news plans from economists and water engineers and politicians and scientists around the world — all the ways in which we could save the water tables, grow crops more efficiently with more "crop per drop," irrigate more cheaply, supply urban populations more sustainably, etc.
But that's after chapter after chapter detailing such disasters as the Aral Sea, which the Soviets basically destroyed and which the current government is continuing to destroy, and the Salton Sea in California, created by a mistake and now allowed to become a festering, drying blister in the Sonora desert, and the Dead Sea, which is receding visibly every year. Worse, though, are the water tables. These are the underground reservoirs of water which, unlike rivers, are non-renewable. Much like oil, once you tap them dry, they're gone (and they also destabilize the surrounding earth, leading to erosion and possibly even earthquakes), and farmers and cities around the world, from the American west to India, are tapping them at an alarming rate. Everyone knows that wells used to hit water at 200 feet and now have to go 1500 feet or more, but this doesn't stop everyone from trying to get the last drop.
It is the Tragedy of the Commons on a regional scale. As many of the farmers Fred Pierce interviews point out: "If everyone stopped using the water, that would be great, but if only we do, it won't make a difference, except that our family will starve."
When the Rivers Run Dry is a bit of travel journalism that covers nearly every continent. India and China and their respective mistreatment of the Ganges, the Indus, the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers are all covered, as is the madness that is Los Angeles and Las Vegas, currently draining the Colorado River dry and casting thirsty eyes thousands of miles north to the Great Lakes.
While America's water woes are certainly serious (at least in the west), the most tragic regions of the world are, predictably, the places where government policy is completely disconnected from local resource management, or where politics and war mix violently with water rights. China and the former Soviet Union have literally killed millions in man-made floods. The author's visit to the region around the Aral Sea was particularly depressing, as he describes a stunted, poisoned land where the people have no jobs, no hope, and no future. Then there is the Middle East, where Palestinians go thirsty in sight of Israeli swimming pools.
While there are some compelling stories in here, and enough facts and history to make you think, When the Rivers Run Dry was... well, a bit dry. Fred Pierce has been to many places and talked to many people, and what he's produced is a global atlas of water mismanagement, wrapped up in the end with a few cheery programs that might solve a few of them, and some suggestions that no one is really going to heed. He questions the wisdom of dam-building, says that cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas need to be more conservation-minded, and that farmers worldwide need to use more water-efficient irrigation methods.
Yup, good luck with that.
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2 people found this helpful
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 07-26-14
WATER CRISES
“When the Rivers Run Dry” was published in 2007. The author is an environmental journalist based in London. He has written several global environment and development books—the first as long ago as 1989 and the latest as recent as 2012. Pearce has written for US publications like “Audubon”, “Foreign Policy”, Popular Science”, “Seed”, and “Time”.
Pearce writes a rambling and semi-optimistic history of fresh water resource in the world.
Pearce’s story rambles because of the wide territory covered from seas to rivers to underground aquifers. Pearce exposes both short-sighted and visionary ideas about water. Though he skewers the lack of foresight and negative consequence of industrial pollution, he suggests that some old and new ideas about fresh water conservation may preserve human existence.
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3 people found this helpful
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- James
- 09-30-16
Interesting but performance grated on m
The subject matter was interesting but the narrator needs pronunciation lessons. Not light reading.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-19-20
Very thorough book on water issues
Written very well. It keeps your curiosity high to read the book.
The book covers water issues around the globe and in quite detail.
It ends with hope.
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- Sandy O.
- 11-08-16
Review of "When the Rivers Run Dry."
Excellent info on the state of water usage globally. The author gives several examples of how water shortages may be mitigated. I recommend this book.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-11-19
Amazing book
It open your eye on the water shortage in whole world , it just need update as it was written 10 years ago or so but indeed amazing book
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- Eric
- 11-11-11
Very comprehensive
A book that all humans should read, especially those that are not concerned about the future of 'water.'
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joel
- 04-30-19
International book
this book covers the water security and culture of the world. if you are looking for a book which teaches you about where the world is with concern to water, where is was, and where it could be give this book a listen.
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- Margaret Weidemann
- 05-25-15
Important book
This is one of the most informative and interesting books I have listened to in the past few years. It is beautifully narrated, well produced and appears to have been almost unbelievably thoroughly (and globally) researched. Even though it was originally published in 2006, the issues it discusses are still extremely pertinent.
Thank you, Audible, for carrying it. Please, please consider "audifying" some of Fred Pearce's other works. It would be a service to all who are concerned about environmental issues.
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