Water by David Lewis Feldman (review)

How can you resist a book with a one word title? Water. It is both simple and elegant. Despite its little title, this book tackles a big concept—water sustainability, one of the most compelling global challenges of our time. At its heart, this is a book about water governance—and in this way, it is a book about people; how people successfully and unsuccessfully manage water. At 200 pages, it is a compact and fascinating read. It reads more like literature or a best seller and less than an academic treatise on water.

The aim of the book is to convey the magnitude of threats to freshwater sustainability and to point to ways they might be prevented. The author does so by weaving together stories and case studies from across the globe. Some are more well-told stories to students of water policy including unrest over water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and regional collaboration in the case of the Rhine and Danube Rivers. Many are less well-known stories about restoration of the Los Angeles River, or management and restoration efforts associated with Brazil’s Itaipu Dam.

To more successfully address the threats to freshwater sustainability, David Lewis Feldman argues the need to first confront some myths around water. He outlines these myths in Chapter 2, but they are a recurring theme throughout the book. The first myth is about whom controls water. Here Feldman argues that all forms of power over water are reciprocal and must be accepted as legitimate by others. In cases where power is not widely seen as authoritative, debates over equity and fairness of how freshwater is managed will arise. The second myth is that transnational water conflicts are impossible to resolve or amicably manage. This is not to say that trans-national cooperation and dispute resolution is not easy, but cooperation and clear mechanism for enforcement are possible. The third myth is that public participation alone does not necessarily lead to sustainable outcomes. It may lead to a balance of power but it might also “invite decisional gridlock”.

Readers might be interested in Feldman’s exploration of three cases of freshwater restoration efforts. In Chapter 3, he explores efforts in the Chesapeake Bay, the Parana River on the border of Brazil and Paraguay, and cooperation between Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he concludes that successful restoration efforts do three things: (1) achieve clear consensus among parties over responsibilities for fixing problems along with dedicated flow of fiscal and administrative resources to help solve problems; (2) draw on a set of collaborate tools that span political jurisdictions that are engaged in watershed management; and (3) embrace a basic principle of adaptive management and emphasize economic and community development benefits of restoration along with environmental ones.

Feldman explores what he calls the “bottled water fetish,” or the transformation of freshwater into a consumer item in Chapter 4. Bottled water sales have grown substantially in recent years in part because many people perceive bottled water to be healthier and safer than tap water. Although bottled water is a healthful alternative to unsafe public water supplies in many parts of the world, in many developed countries—where tap water is stringently regulated and inexpensive—it is not a healthful alternative. Here Feldman catalogs the sins associated with bottled water. Bottled water is largely unregulated in terms of quality. Producing, distributing, and transporting bottled water generates a huge carbon footprint. Contaminants have been commonly found in bottled water. But Feldman is more concerned with the inequities and injustices associated with bottled water. While there has been a cultural shift among more educated and wealthy in North America and Europe away from bottled water, minority populations still prefer bottled water. In some cases, corporations are exploiting fears about public water to directly advertise and falsely entice minorities in the U.S.

Finally, in Chapter 5, Water Ethics and Environmental Justice, Feldman returns to his earlier work around ethics and the need for ethics in water management...