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Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world, much to quench what’s now our largest crop—the lawn. Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to our taps, irrigates our food, and produces our electricity. And most don’t realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble.
Blue Revolution exposes the truth about the water crisis—driven not as much by lawn sprinklers as by a tradition that has encouraged everyone, from homeowners to farmers to utilities, to tap more and more. But the book also offers much reason for hope. Award-winning journalist Cynthia Barnett argues that the best solution is also the simplest and least expensive: a water ethic for America. Just as the green movement helped build awareness about energy and sustainability, so a blue movement will reconnect Americans to their water, helping us value and conserve our most life-giving resource. Avoiding past mistakes, living within our water means, and turning to “local water” as we do local foods are all part of this new, blue revolution.
Reporting from across the country and around the globe, Barnett shows how people, businesses, and governments have come together to dramatically reduce water use and reverse the water crisis. Entire metro areas, such as San Antonio, Texas, have halved per capita water use. Singapore’s “closed water loop” recycles every drop. New technologies can slash agricultural irrigation in half: businesses can save a lot of water—and a lot of money—with designs as simple as recycling air-conditioning condensate.
The first book to call for a national water ethic, Blue Revolution is also a powerful meditation on water and community in America.
- Sales Rank: #439151 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-04
- Released on: 2012-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .77" w x 6.04" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 296 pages
Review
Named one of the 10 best science books of 2011 by The Boston Globe.
“Journalist Barnett explores a simple solution to the growing water crisis in the US, where we use more water than any other culture in the world. That solution: a water ethic. She notes that the green movement has helped raise awareness of the importance of energy and sustainability, and that a blue movement would do much the same: help Americans rediscover their relationship with water, and learn to conserve/recycle and manage it more effectively. And, she adds, it is entirely possible to reverse the damage done by the indiscriminate use of water through those measures and new technologies that can cut agricultural irrigation in half.”—Book News Inc.
“It's a call to action. Barnett takes us back to the origins of our water in much the same way, with much the same vividness and compassion as Michael Pollan led us from our kitchens to potato fields and feed lots of modern agribusiness.”—Los Angeles Times
“Barnett does not come off as a Cassandra, shrieking about looming cataclysm and dumping figures over her readers’ heads. In Blue Revolution she is part journalist, part mom, part historian, and part optimist, and as a result her text comes off as anything but a polemic.”—The Boston Globe
“Our future depends on the Blue Revolution that Cynthia Barnett advocates, for, as the ancients knew long before modern science did, 'Water is life.'”—New York Journal of Books
“Thorough and packed with data.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Barnett’s clarion call to her fellow citizens imagines an America where it’s ethically wrong to waste water. Using compelling stories from around the globe, she shows that America’s future depends upon our coming to value water – not only in the price we pay, but with profound appreciation for each drop.”—Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It
“The roots of a new water ethic are found in the practices of millions of individuals, businesses, and other organizations around the world. Barnett shows how good water use practices can go viral, with massive benefits for society and nature. Blue Revolution offers affordable, practical, down-to-earth solutions for America’s water crisis.”—Stephen R. Carpenter, Director of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Winner of the 2011 Stockholm Water Prize
“The book provides an eye-opening overview of the complexity of our water-use problems and offers optimistic but practical solutions.”—Publishers Weekly
“As Aldo Leopold is to the land ethic, Cynthia Barnett is to the water ethic. Her important and hopeful new book is rich with stories about innovative water projects around the world, demonstrating that we can choose thrift over waste, water gardens over cement ditches, local projects over mega-industries, smart over incredibly, stubbornly, self-destructively stupid. She calls us to a respectful water use that restores our spirits, even as it creates thriving biocultural communities. If you use water, you should read Blue Revolution.”—Kathleen Dean Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril
“Aldo Leopold helped found twentieth-century American environmental thinking with his call for a land ethic. Barnett has done a great service by calling for a twenty-first-century water ethic. She tackles America’s illusion of water abundance in the way past thinkers attacked our old ideas about an endless western frontier. Of the new crop of books on water, this one may be the most important.”—Fred Pearce, author of When the Rivers Run Dry
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Cynthia Barnett is a long-time journalist whose awards include a national Sigma Delta Chi prize for investigative magazine reporting and eight Green Eyeshades, which recognize outstanding journalism in the Southeast. Her first book, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., won the gold medal for best nonfiction in the Florida Book Awards and was a “One Region/One Book” selection in thirty Florida counties. Barnett earned a master’s degree in environmental history and was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she spent a year studying water. She lives with her family in Gainesville, Florida.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter 1
The Illusion of Water Abundance
During America’s retreat to the suburbs in the 1950s, large home lots, disposable incomes, and a nifty concrete spray called gunite gave families a new marker of success: the backyard swimming pool. For the rest of the twentieth century, residential pools symbolized upward mobility and offered a sense of seclusion not possible at city pools or even private clubs.
The following decades redefined our relationship with water itself—from essence of life to emblem of luxury. By the time of the twenty-first-century housing run-up, even the plain blue pool had lost its luster. Adornments were needed. Aquatic affluence meant floating fire pits, glass portholes, and vanishing edges, which create the illusion of never-ending water.
The amenity to envy was no longer the diving board. The musthave, now, was the waterfall.
No community glorified the trend like Granite Bay, California.
Granite Bay is nestled on the north shores of Folsom Lake, commuting distance east of Sacramento. The upscale suburb is named for the Cretaceous age rock that underlies this region in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. But during the housing boom, Granite Bay’s developers were determined to upstage the area’s natural geologic outcroppings.
In Granite Bay’s best backyards, rocky waterfalls cascade artfully into boulder-lined swimming pools, set off with grottoes, swim-up bars, and built-in hot tubs. Thick bushes and trees bearing flowers and fruit adorn the watery wonders, making a place naturally dominated by needlegrass and sedge look more like Fiji. Precisely groomed lawns, a quarter acre and larger, complete the sublimely unnatural tableau.
On Waterford Drive, a beige ranch home with a trim green carpet out front only hints at the tropical excess out back: a pair of waterfalls flow into a clear-blue lagoon, with large rocks positioned for sunning and for diving. This is one of the more subdued motifs. Sacramento landscape architect Ronald Allison tells of a two-and-a-half-acre residential design in Granite Bay with a waterfall, a grotto, a cave, six fountains, a pool with a bridge and an island, and a ninety-foot water slide: “It’s fun for the grandkids.”
Such fun has helped push average water use in Granite Bay to among the highest on Earth. Its residents use nearly five hundred gallons of water a person every day—more than three times the national average. Even when drought conditions cut federal water deliveries to California farmers and closed the state’s salmon fisheries, Granite Bay residents continued to consume water as if it were as plentiful as air. After three consecutive years of California drought, Folsom Lake—actually a reservoir created by a dam on the American River—was so dry, it looked like a moonscape. As water levels plummeted in summer 2009, officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the lake, ordered all boats removed from the Folsom Marina. Yet the San Juan Water District, which supplies Granite Bay from the reservoir, informed its customers that summer they would have to endure no mandatory water restrictions.
Spectacular squander in the middle of a water crisis is not much of a shock in the United States, where we use about half our daily household water bounty outdoors. The dryer the conditions, the more we tend to pour. What is surprising, however, is to find some of the world’s worst waste in the Sacramento metropolitan area. That’s because Greater Sacramento has become a national leader in finding solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges—and in working to solve other problems brought about by suburban growth. Sacramento glitters with all things green. But when it comes to water, the city represents a national blind spot.
Somehow, America’s green craze has missed the blue.
*****
California’s capital likes to call itself “Sustainable Sacramento.” The progressive municipal government is spending heavily on light rail and constructing only green city buildings. The utility generates solar, wind, biomass, and hydro power for customers willing to pay more for renewable energy. Sacramento’s citizens choose to do so at some of the highest rates in the nation.
The city is so green, it provides organic food to public school children, bike racks to businesses, and free trees to residents who want to cool their homes with natural shade.
But with water, Sacramento isn’t so enlightened. The metropolitan area, which lands regularly on lists of top green cities, smart cities, and livable cities, also has earned this startling ranking: it squanders more water than anywhere else in California. That distinction makes it one of the most water-wasting places in the United States. And that makes it one of the most water-wasting places on the planet.
Residents of the metro region use nearly 300 gallons of water per person every day—double the national average. By comparison, the equally affluent residents of Perth, Australia, use about 75 gallons per day. Londoners tap about 42 gallons per day. The water-rich Dutch use about 33 gallons daily.
Grottoed communities such as Granite Bay aren’t solely to blame. Some of the same politicians who forged the new path for energy in Sacramento fought for the city’s right to keep to the old road for water. The city is one of the last major metro areas in the nation to hold on to flat rates that charge residents the same no matter how much water they use. In 1920, Sacramento had amended its charter to declare that “no water meters shall ever be attached to residential water service pipes.” Only an act of the state assembly, which requires the measuring of water use statewide by 2025, has the city installing meters these days.
Sacramento is by no means unique. Even as our green consciousness evolves, we often manage to ignore water not only on a global level but also in our own backyards. The Copenhagen climate accord, negotiated by the United Nations in 2010, did not mention the most immediate threat from a changing climate—the worldwide freshwater crisis. Across the United States, we give little thought to our water use even as we replace lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and SUVs with hybrids.
The conscientious consumer who plunks down $25,000 for a Prius may still wash it every weekend in the driveway. The office manager who rallies every department to recycle paper is unaware of the millions of gallons of water a year that could be recycled from the building’s air-conditioning system.
How is that?
One part of the answer is the illusion of water abundance. When we twist the tap, we’re rewarded with a gush of fresh, clean water. It’s been that way since the turn of the twentieth century, when Americans perfected municipal waterworks, indoor plumbing, and wastewater disposal as a response to diseases like cholera or typhoid fever.
Water is also our cheapest necessity. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline helped drive consumers to cars that cost them less to operate. Lower fossil fuel consumption and reduced carbon emissions are fringe benefits to protecting our pocketbooks. No equivalent economic incentive makes us think about our water waste. In fact, our water is so subsidized that many Americans pay less than a tenth of a penny a gallon for clean freshwater delivered right into our homes.
“As a society, from a water standpoint, we’re fat, dumb, and happy,” says Tom Gohring, executive director of the Sacramento Water Forum, a coalition of business, environmental, and other competing water interests that work together to find solutions to the region’s water woes. “In the history of our country, we’ve had some serious water shortages, but very, very seldom have people been told that they cannot turn on the taps but for an hour in the afternoon, or that they must boil water.
“Water is just too easy to take for granted,” Gohring says. “It’s always there.”
This is true in Sustainable Sacramento, and it’s true in the scorched Southwest. The most conspicuous water consumption in America is often found in those parts of the country where water shortages are most serious. Nationwide, we use an average of 147 gallons each day. In wet Florida, the average hits 158 gallons. In Las Vegas, it’s 227 gallons per person—in one of the most water-scarce metro areas of the United States, where water managers lose sleep at night thinking about what will happen when the level in Lake Mead drops below the intake pipes that carry water to the city.
Vegas swimming pools—with their glass walls, underwater sound systems, sushi bars, and stripper poles—make Granite Bay’s look like they came from the Kmart garden department. But in both locales, the extreme illusion of abundance makes it all but impossible for people who live and play there to notice their personal connection to the nation’s water crisis—to understand how wasteful water use in one house, in one backyard, multiplied by 310 million Americans, equals trouble for the generations to come.
Profligate water use today will imperil future generations, the same as profligate use of oil, destruction of forests, and other environmental tipping points will. But water is much more important to our future than oil. That’s because there are no alternatives to it, no new substitute for life’s essential ingredient being cooked from corn, french fry grease, or algae.
Like our other great, national illusions—say, the unending bull market, or upward-only housing prices—the illusion ...
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Blue Revolution: A Powerful Call for a Water Ethic
By Valerie I. Nelson, Water Alliance
Cynthia Barnett has written a compelling and engaging book. When Barnett called me last fall, I was impressed with her call for a new water ethic grounded in the work of Aldo Leopold. Now that I've read her new book, I can see why she's won awards as a Florida-based investigative reporter. One in-depth case study after another -- the Everglades, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Netherlands, Australia, and even the new water cluster in Milwaukee -- offer a solid political-economy diagnosis of how we've created a water crisis through big engineering projects and profligate use. Her prescriptions are resonant with our Baltimore Charter for Sustainable Water Systems ([...]) -- a strong water ethic, efficient use and recycling, local management and natural systems, and multi-stakeholder and public collaboration. Perhaps the most eye-opening chapter for me was called "The Water-Industrial Complex," where Barnett describes how water and wastewater engineering has increasingly been consolidated by global conglomerates, and she tracks how these firms influence government policy and spending to maximize their profits just like other big business in America, through campaign contributions. The problem is they think they will make the most money for large, disruptive water supply and wastewater systems. Perhaps we should take more time in "following the money trail." This book is a must read!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
You Say You Want a Revolution? Well You Know You Can't Have Green Without Blue
By Brian M. Ranzoni
Note: This review is based on a Beacon Press Uncorrected Proof, and is subject to change.
I'm a big fan of Frank Herbert's seminal novel *Dune*. A book reveling in central ironies--a desert planet that is the source of the greatest riches in the known universe, yet utterly poor in water. Such is the detail of the story that housekeepers sell droppings to beggars from wrung rags, while local water merchants have great power over the spice barons who ostensibly grow fat from the rest of the universe. The parallel, of course, is to the oil-rich and water-poor Middle East.
Here in the West, journalist Cynthia Barnett perceives that we don't have a water ethic to go with our energy ethic. Much ink has been spilled and tax dollars spent over alternatives and enhancements to hydrocarbons. Yet hydrology is getting a short shrift, even as we try to power our yard fountains and swimming pools through deep summer droughts. While Frank Herbert planted a seed of an ethic, it lay dormant until I took a chance on another book.
Barnett's *Blue Revolution* is an accessible, jam-packed and somewhat disorganized look at an underrated companion to Green thinking. It isn't a hard science book of water engineering, but an investigative journalism of dozens of problems around the world. It emphasizes a change in American attitudes as the gateway to the solutions in our own country.
At the industrial heart of the book, water and energy problems are linked. Electricity requires water circulation requires electricity--all of it in large doses. Energy of any kind must also compete with agriculture for the biggest pieces of the aqua pie. Power plants return much of their water at elevated temperatures. Agriculture hardly returns water at all.
The news for water reform isn't all good either. Barnett presents examples from around the globe of seeming victories with failures lurking beneath. The Netherlands system of dikes, prior to the 1950s, actually left them more vulnerable to certain types of flooding and economic chaos; manifested most in the lethal North Sea flood of 1953. Afterward, new systems attempted to integrate more with nature while building some of the most elaborate works yet... and yet they still have surprising problems pop up. Singapore had another problem, being a small island with little fresh water. They ultimately "closed the loop" with a highly advanced waterworks, demonstrating both the power and the extreme of the Blue Ethic. However, Barnett also compares Singapore to a songbird in a lacquered cage--illustrating that the United States can have an ethic without being oppressive.
Nor does Barnett come across as some stereotypical socialist hippie, or any of the other unflattering mash-ups used to dismiss conservation and to promote consumerism . Mindful of multiple sides to the story, her writing targets the water price of alternative energies such as concentrated solar power and corn-based ethanol. In other places, the problem is too much water flooding over instead of not enough reaching the pumps and sluices. Rather than condemn farmers and engineers, she recognizes the economic realities behind the abuse of our rivers. Another reality is the lack of a one-size-fits all solution. Many of the case studies are different: divided by distance, environment and finance.
Because the case studies are isolated from each other, because there are so many of them, and because the author applied the same formula to most chapters, the book kept starting over instead of streaming through middle to end. There is little chronological, geographical, or categorical order. Barnett does attempt to link chapters together with transitional paragraphs. This is bumpy surf when it should be a smooth slide: these transitions are too obvious, the chapters do not have topical connections in the first place, and most begin with a flurry of names and numbers. Coming from a journalist, it all reads like a collection of articles. Ironic for a water ethic to not have stronger flow.
Reorganization and expansion is the solution. For example, the first chapter is a collection of about a dozen different vignettes to establish the basic premise that water abundance is an illusion. Each example could take up an entire chapter to tell their story. Yet many are not revisited in the rest of the book. The cases you use to introduce the premise should be summarized in that intro, then examined in depth as the book goes on--the narrative builds itself. This could increase the page count of the book to its benefit, being a natural unfolding of the idea.
Also, the author can take some of the potential devices, seeded throughout the book, and bring them to full bloom. Chapter Two compare and contrasts the problems of a California delta with the Florida Everglades. There's almost a whole book just in this idea. Bound by a third thread regarding Aldo and Luna Leopold, two generations of scientists who worked the delta and the Glades. Instead of cramming this into one chapter, bookend with the Delta in the first chapter and the Glades in the last. The Leopolds could be part of the central cast of historical characters running through the middle, giving a personality drive to the whole book. Going from west coast to east coast--left to right--from father to son, and from the past to the present, all create an attractive order.
Blue Revolution does what investigative journalism is supposed to do--raise awareness through an introductory tome. To that end its author packs the pages with information while attempting to find different angles of the same basic problem. Blue Revolution's own flaw is a central theme unattached to a central narrative. Correctable by streamlining the number of case studies while simultaneously looking into the remainder more deeply and smoothly.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
It is no Cadillac Desert.
By Abacus
In summary, this book is well researched and informative. However, Cynthia Barnett excludes from her investigation the national positive trend in water conservation. And, her recommendations are too vague. It is also boring, especially in comparison with Marc Reisner Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition that is twice as long.
Cynthia Barnett indicates that the largest user of water is electric utilities. Within our information world, technology = rising electricity consumption = water constraints. Thus, our civilization relying on information bits ultimately runs on water.
Barnett, just like Reisner did 25 years ago, confirms agriculture is the most wasteful sector with the greatest potential for water conservation. American irrigation benefits from wasteful $4.4 billion subsidies. A good deal of those are applied to rice; half of which is exported. Wasting water on exporting rice is incoherent. California is the largest agricultural state. Yet, agriculture accounts for only 4% of the State GDP and even far less of its employment.
Barnett indicates the Green Revolution is not Blue. Many alternative energies are huge water guzzlers. It takes 10 times as much water to generate power for a plug-in electric vehicle as to produce gasoline for a regular car. Ethanol consumes 20 times as much water for every mile traveled than regular gasoline. Large scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plants are very water intensive. If you want to study this issue further I recommend Robert Bryce books: Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence" and Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future that demonstrate the wasteful water and land resource footprint associated with alternative energy.
Barnett uncovers that within the US, it is in the driest cities most stressed for water that residents use the most. In Las Vegas they use 227 gallons per person per day or over 50% more than the national average of 147 gallons. This is because in Las Vegas given the hotter temperatures residents use more water to maintain lawns. Lawn is the number one crop in America. We irrigate our lawns twice as much as needed. Barnett advances that consuming so much fresh water to maintain lawn does not make sense. Similarly, the growing trend of water parks and golf courses everywhere makes little sense from a water resource standpoint. Throughout the dry Southwest and even the Great Plains we are depleting our water aquifers. This could have dire consequences for our agriculture.
Barnett travels the world to study water issues starting with the Netherlands that developed a world class dike and dams to protect the country from sea generated flooding. By comparison the U.S. is more than half a century behind. The Netherlands infrastructure would have fully prevented Katrina's destruction. She also travels to Singapore that is probably the most water efficient society. They consume 40 gallons of water per person per day or 73% less than the U.S. They treat enough wastewater to meet 30% of their freshwater need. Two thirds of the area was turned into water-storage making for a giant water cistern. Later, she goes to Perth, Australia. Perth was the equivalent of Las Vegas, as another water wasteful city with a dry climate. But, due to necessity within a decade they moved from being Las Vegas-like to becoming Singapore- like.
Barnett indicates that even some American cities and counties have followed in the water conserving footsteps of Perth and Singapore. San Antonio, TX, is another city in a dry climate that originally was very wasteful. But, due to pressing water constraints it managed to reduce its water consumption by half from 225 gallons per person per day (gpd) in the 1980s to around 115 gpd currently. Over the same period Boston has reduced its water consumption per person per day by 43%. Sarasota in Florida pretty much did the same. Monterey in California became one of the champions of water conservation with one of the lowest US consumption per capita (70 gpd). The local private water utility did it through innovative means including tiered water rates that rendered lawn very expensive. Another growing trend is the promotion of rainwater-harvesting systems in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, North Carolina.
Barnett speaks of the water-industrial complex just as Eisenhower mentioned the military-industrial complex over 50 years ago. Barnett indicates that regarding water policies it is the most expensive solution (water dams, reservoirs, pipelines) that wins. Water efficiency costs between $450 to $1,600 for every million gallons it saves. That is far less than any other alternative. For instance, desalination costs $15,000 per million gallons of water. Yet, during the most recent $790 billion stimulus package $billions went to expensive water management projects. Virtually no money was disbursed for water efficiency.
However, the book has mentioned weaknesses. Barnett does not flesh out the national contemporary improvement in water conservation. Between 1975 and 2005, US population has increased by 36% to 300 million. Yet according to the USGS, US water consumption has remained flat thanks to an overall 27% water conservation rate. During the same period, U.S. electricity generation has doubled. This entails a 50% water conservation rate in water per KWH generated. Agriculture has also become more water efficient. Barnett briefly recognizes that rice (the main water wasting culprit in "Cadillac Desert") is now grown with 40% less water than in the 60s. But, she does not adequately cover all the mentioned positive national water conservation trends that jump at you when studying the USGS data.
Barnett cassandra tone is still warranted. Mounting pressure on water scarcity will be tremendous. The U.S. population is expected to rise by 45% to 450 million by 2050. To keep water consumption flat this entails another 31% reduction in water consumption per capita on top of the 27% reduction we achieved between 1975 and 2005.
Barnett also remains vague on her Blue Revolution recommendations. Her main ones are to stop depleting the aquifers and stop large water projects. Based on her research, she could have been far more incisive and should have recommended: 1) eliminating agricultural water subsidies; 2) curbing rice exports; 3) abandoning ethanol; 4) discouraging electric cars; and 5) mandating higher water rates to irrigate lawns. Those suggestions entail that water be repriced upward for all sectors so to take water out of the tragedy of the commons.
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