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Battling Drought: The Science of Water Management
The extreme drought in the US Southwest has brought the issues of water use and management to the forefront of media attention. Historically, arguments over water rights have plagued this area since the days of John Wesley Powell, and disputes mark the relations between states, city-dwellers, farmers, and environmentalists to this day. Add to that the challenges of climate change, which is altering rainfall patterns the world over, and the imperative to rethink water management policies becomes acute.
Battling Drought takes a long look at the situation in the American Southwest from the early engineering projects, such as building the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, which were designed to tame the rivers, to the recycling and restoration efforts of today. Projects like the recycling of wastewater in Santa Rosa, CA, and the restoration of the Aral Sea in Central Asia offer both optimism and lessons for change. However, the story of the Himba in Africa--who have, so far, successfully blocked building a dam on a nearby river--illustrates that changing attitudes is often like trying to change the flow of a river. It's an upstream battle. While successful projects like these move us toward that goal, new technologies, methods, and crops are still needed to combat diminishing water supplies. A common saying is that someone "spends money like water." Over the last century, we've learned that water might be the more precious of the two.
Battling Drought takes a long look at the situation in the American Southwest from the early engineering projects, such as building the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, which were designed to tame the rivers, to the recycling and restoration efforts of today. Projects like the recycling of wastewater in Santa Rosa, CA, and the restoration of the Aral Sea in Central Asia offer both optimism and lessons for change. However, the story of the Himba in Africa--who have, so far, successfully blocked building a dam on a nearby river--illustrates that changing attitudes is often like trying to change the flow of a river. It's an upstream battle. While successful projects like these move us toward that goal, new technologies, methods, and crops are still needed to combat diminishing water supplies. A common saying is that someone "spends money like water." Over the last century, we've learned that water might be the more precious of the two.
- GenresScience
290 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 22, 2012
4 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Scientific American
895 books91 followers
Scientific American
, as an institutional author, is a popular science magazine founded by Rufus M. Porter and controlled by Nature Publishing Group since autumn, 2008. Mariette DiChristina has been editor-in-chief since December, 2009.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 10, 2023
This is a collection of articles from Scientific American, some of them dating back to the 1930's such as one about the construction of Hover Dam and what they were hoping to accomplish. What surprised me about the articles was that damns are being decommissioned. Despite the value that damns can offer they also present some problems. Those problems can be addressed, but that makes the damns more expensive and thus cost prohibitive.
One of the problems is silting. It eventually settles next to the damn. Also the silt doesn't go downstream to build up beaches so you have erosion of the beaches downstream. Fishing and fish breeding are greatly reduced and while there are ways to mitigate these problems, as I said before, the solutions are expensive.
FYI, there are a lot of numbers in this audiobook, so my eyes sort of glazed over in those sections. Overall I liked this audiobook and I might listen to it again.
One of the problems is silting. It eventually settles next to the damn. Also the silt doesn't go downstream to build up beaches so you have erosion of the beaches downstream. Fishing and fish breeding are greatly reduced and while there are ways to mitigate these problems, as I said before, the solutions are expensive.
FYI, there are a lot of numbers in this audiobook, so my eyes sort of glazed over in those sections. Overall I liked this audiobook and I might listen to it again.
Displaying 1 of 1 review