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Doris S. Michaels Literary Agency, Inc. » History https://dsmagency.com Tue, 13 Jan 2015 22:06:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Drinking Water https://dsmagency.com/?p=2102 https://dsmagency.com/?p=2102#comments Mon, 07 Oct 2013 14:19:41 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=2102 Four Books Explore Humans’ Relationship With Water By  Published: October 7, 2013 Earth, “the blue planet,” has a lot of water. Most of the planet’s surface is covered with it. But less than 5 percent of that water is fresh, and much of that is locked up in ice sheets or inconveniently far underground. And it is not always most abundant where it is most needed.

As a result, we are drawing on underground aquifers faster than they can recharge. And the water we have is often polluted by sewage, industrial waste, parasites and other contaminants that can make “natural” water unsafe to drink.

In short, as James Salzman puts it in “Drinking Water,” one of four new books that dive into our species’ relationship with water, clean supplies have always been the exception, not the norm. As recently as 1900, he writes, 1 in 70 Americans died of a waterborne disease before age 70.

Though he ranges widely, Mr. Salzman, who teaches law and environmental studies at Duke, focuses on what one might call social justice. Access to water may be viscerally regarded as a “right,” but he points out that the best way to ensure a reliable supply of pure water, especially in poor regions, is often to privatize it.

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As seen on nytimes.com:

Four Books Explore Humans’ Relationship With Water

By 
Published: October 7, 2013

Earth, “the blue planet,” has a lot of water. Most of the planet’s surface is covered with it. But less than 5 percent of that water is fresh, and much of that is locked up in ice sheets or inconveniently far underground. And it is not always most abundant where it is most needed.

As a result, we are drawing on underground aquifers faster than they can recharge. And the water we have is often polluted by sewage, industrial waste, parasites and other contaminants that can make “natural” water unsafe to drink.

In short, as James Salzman puts it in “Drinking Water,” one of four new books that dive into our species’ relationship with water, clean supplies have always been the exception, not the norm. As recently as 1900, he writes, 1 in 70 Americans died of a waterborne disease before age 70.

Though he ranges widely, Mr. Salzman, who teaches law and environmental studies at Duke, focuses on what one might call social justice. Access to water may be viscerally regarded as a “right,” but he points out that the best way to ensure a reliable supply of pure water, especially in poor regions, is often to privatize it.

Water management has been critical to economic, social and cultural development for thousands of years, Steven Mithen tells us in “Thirst.” An archaeologist at the University of Reading in England, Dr. Mithen covers a vast portion of the ancient world: water storage in ancient Sumeria, the terra cotta pipes of classical Athens and the aqueducts of Rome, the “hydraulic city” of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the water-allocation policies of the Maya.

His tone is academic and at times highly technical, but he builds to a striking conclusion. Though we may think that the rise of complex social and economic networks enabled ancient cultures to manage their water, the reverse may well be true: only when a society had reliable access to water could it turn itself into an economic or cultural power.

If some ancient empires acquired their water by conquest, so, in its way, did a much later empire: New York City. In “Empire of Water,” David Soll describes how the city transformed its notoriously unsanitary water system in the early 20th century by buying up watersheds in the Catskill Mountains and building a large network of reservoirs, pipes, tanks, sampling stations and other devices that delivers a billion gallons a day of excellent water into the city’s homes and businesses.

For Dr. Soll, a historian who focuses on water issues in his work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, this past is fraught with political deal making, hubris, unintended consequences and government overreach. But in the end, “the willingness of Catskill residents and city officials to embark on the world’s most expensive and ambitious watershed management program after almost a century of bitter conflict” offers hope that the goals of sensible water management and environmental progress “are not as elusive as they may seem.” As for waste, a first step in avoiding it is to recognize how much water we use each day, counting not just water for flushing, bathing, washing and watering the lawn, but also the water use embedded in the food we eat, the products we buy and the electricity that powers our lives.

How much is that? A lot, according to Wendy J. Pabich’s “Taking On Water.”

Dr. Pabich, an environmental scientist and water activist who lives in a dry region of Idaho, says the average American uses 100 times as much water as, say, the typical Mozambican — a level of waste brought home to her when she realized she and her husband were using thousands of gallons each month to irrigate their garden.

Her book recounts their effort to cut back their water habit, by a lot. Along the way, she discovers how much water is lost to leakage in the United States — a trillion gallons a year — and how low its price is related to its value and growing scarcity.

At times Dr. Pabich’s environmental correctness can be wearying. And her suggestions for reducing water use are mostly self-evident: fix leaks, install low-flow toilets and water-miser washers, turn off the shower while you lather, and so on.

But she also supplies a chart detailing the “water footprint” of various commodities. For example, it takes 22.8 gallons of water to produce, package and ship a single egg. A pound of beef requires 183 gallons. By contrast, strawberries come in at 3.6 gallons per cup, and it takes only 1.3 gallons of water to produce a tomato.

The results of her experiment are both gratifying and alarming. She and her husband did cut their water use in half, but that took them only to the level that residents of places like Japan or Poland routinely achieve.

Perhaps, she and others write, people would think more about water if it were priced differently. Cheap water may reflect a widespread view that access to clean water is a natural right that everyone, rich or poor, should enjoy.

Is that the approach most likely to bring clean water to the most people? Maybe not. “Clean water is no longer a free gift of nature,” Dr. Soll writes. It is “a shared resource that can be preserved only through judicious investments and active engagement.”

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Reviews for Drinking Water by James Salzman https://dsmagency.com/?p=1368 https://dsmagency.com/?p=1368#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:56:47 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=1368 Just add H2O to shape humanity’s past, present and future DrinkingWater3
03 January 2013

Drinking Water: a history

by James Salzman In 2010 the United Nations passed a resolution declaiming that “safe and clean drinking water” was a universal human right. A noble sentiment but words that gurgle straight down the plughole since the UN also estimates that half the world’s population will live in “water scarce areas” by 2030. The point the well-hydrated delegates were trying to get across is that the liquid we have seen more than enough of recently is in fact scarce and getting scarcer. James Salzman’s book is a look at this everyday commodity most of us take for granted and which proves, on further examination, to be far from unremarkable after all. Salzman is American so the majority of his examples come from that side of the Atlantic; nevertheless, there is more than enough floating about in this book to satisfy a thirst for detail.]]>
As seen on standard.co.uk:

Just add H2O to shape humanity’s past, present and future

DrinkingWater3

03 January 2013

Drinking Water: a history

by James Salzman

In 2010 the United Nations passed a resolution declaiming that “safe and clean drinking water” was a universal human right. A noble sentiment but words that gurgle straight down the plughole since the UN also estimates that half the world’s population will live in “water scarce areas” by 2030. The point the well-hydrated delegates were trying to get across is that the liquid we have seen more than enough of recently is in fact scarce and getting scarcer.

James Salzman’s book is a look at this everyday commodity most of us take for granted and which proves, on further examination, to be far from unremarkable after all. Salzman is American so the majority of his examples come from that side of the Atlantic; nevertheless, there is more than enough floating about in this book to satisfy a thirst for detail.

What Salzman lays out is water’s role in shaping human history — as a cultural, social, political and economic resource. Springs and wells feature in all the world’s great religions; access to fresh water has always been equated with power; water provision is a political issue — a thirsty populace means a shaky regime; and water is big business, with Americans alone quaffing more than nine billion gallons of bottled water in 2011, some 312 bottles per person.

The author dips his toe into all these areas. The idea of paying for water, for example, was established in ancient Rome; it supplied its citizens with free water via its 11 aqueducts but charged a tax, the vectigal, for those who ran off pipes for private houses. The bottled water industry goes back to pilgrims who wanted to take away samples from holy sites such as St Maelrubha’s well on Loch Maree, famed for curing insanity, or those on North Uist that alleviate toothache. The reductio ad absurdum of bottled water supposedly being better for you than tap water means that in America, 1,500 bottles of water are now opened every second and there is even a mineral water for dogs — Woof Water.

The safety of water has been a perennial concern. The struggles against waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera may seem less urgent today but unsafe water remains the world’s greatest killer and even now 19 million Americans fall sick every year through drinking impure water; indeed it accounts for nine deaths in every 100 there. Post 9/11, there has been an increased awareness in the West of the vulnerability of water supplies to terrorist attack although, as Salzman points out, while poisoning a single glass is relatively easy, poisoning an entire reservoir would require tankers full of pollutants.

Meanwhile the search to source clean water ranges from desalination plants that turn salt water into fresh to “toilet to tap” schemes for recycling waste water. The astronauts on the International Space Station used one such filtration method to drink their own urine (“the taste is great” was the cheery message they beamed back to Earth). The problem of this solution and its “sewage sipper” adherents is largely one of perception. It is, nevertheless, one answer as is the greater use of non-potable or “grey” water for such domestic tasks as toilet flushing and clothes washing that currently account for nearly 50 per cent of our domestic consumption.

While Salzman’s book often has the tone of a lecture, it is brimful of these sorts of fascinating if not always useful facts. One of the most pertinent, regarding the fad for bottled water, being that Evian backwards spells “naive”.

Other reviews can be viewed at the links below:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2264029/Mineral-water-dogs-We-barking-mad–DRINKING-WATER-A-HISTORY-BY-JAMES-SALZMAN.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9793270/Fat-Chance-by-Robert-Lustig-and-Drinking-Water-by-James-Salzman-review.html

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/salzman-examines-paucity-of-safe-drinking-water-in-the-world

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Cultural, Historical, and Political Implications of Water https://dsmagency.com/?p=1109 https://dsmagency.com/?p=1109#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:06:46 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=1109 Drinking Water Thursday, November 29 2012 by Frank Stasio and Nicole Campbell When your body’s feeling crummy, someone will likely tell you to remedy it by drinking more water. Whether it’s for clearer skin or lower anxiety, people have a lot of faith in the healing power of this liquid. But water isn’t a plentiful cure-all everywhere. For many people living in places bordered by water masses, it’s hard to gain access to this necessity. In his latest book, “Drinking Water: A History” (The Overlook Press/2012), James Salzman explores the cultural, historical and political implications of water around the world. James Salzman is a professor in environmental policy at Duke University’s School of Law, and he joins host Frank Stasio today in the studio.
To listen to the audio, click here.
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As seen on WUNC.org:

Drinking Water

Thursday, November 29 2012 by Frank Stasio and Nicole Campbell

When your body’s feeling crummy, someone will likely tell you to remedy it by drinking more water. Whether it’s for clearer skin or lower anxiety, people have a lot of faith in the healing power of this liquid. But water isn’t a plentiful cure-all everywhere. For many people living in places bordered by water masses, it’s hard to gain access to this necessity. In his latest book, “Drinking Water: A History” (The Overlook Press/2012), James Salzman explores the cultural, historical and political implications of water around the world. James Salzman is a professor in environmental policy at Duke University’s School of Law, and he joins host Frank Stasio today in the studio.

To listen to the audio, click here.

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New York’s Water System https://dsmagency.com/?p=1066 https://dsmagency.com/?p=1066#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:13:18 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=1066 Our water system withstood Hurricane Sandy, but the threats aren’t over By James Salzman, Published: November 9 James Salzman, an environmental law professor at Duke University, is the author of “Drinking Water: A History.” As the fury of Hurricane Sandy crashed into the Northeast last month, online postings along the storm’s path recounted the collapse of one service after another — no lights, no heat, no phones, no subway and, ultimately, no Internet. But amid the darkened buildings and flooded subways of Lower Manhattan, one service remained largely intact and, as a result, largely ignored: the water supply. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg confidently tweeted, “NYC Tap Water is absolutely safe to drink.”]]> As seen on TheWashingtonPost.com:

Our water system withstood Hurricane Sandy, but the threats aren’t over

By James Salzman, Published: November 9

James Salzman, an environmental law professor at Duke University, is the author of “Drinking Water: A History.”

As the fury of Hurricane Sandy crashed into the Northeast last month, online postings along the storm’s path recounted the collapse of one service after another — no lights, no heat, no phones, no subway and, ultimately, no Internet. But amid the darkened buildings and flooded subways of Lower Manhattan, one service remained largely intact and, as a result, largely ignored: the water supply. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg confidently tweeted, “NYC Tap Water is absolutely safe to drink.”

The media hardly noticed. We take easy access to reliable, clean drinking water for granted. But it hasn’t always been that way: Lack of safe drinking water has plagued American cities for most of their history. In fact, what’s truly remarkable is that the one problem New York did not face after Sandy was contaminated water.

The first Europeans to live in Manhattan, the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, got most of their water from a spring-fed pond later known as the Collect. As New York’s population increased, poor sanitation and effluent from tanneries and slaughterhouses fouled the local water sources. By 1748, Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist visiting the city, observed that the well water was so terrible, horses from out of town refused to drink it.

Building commenced on an ambitious plan for a steam-engine-powered waterworks to pump water through aqueducts, but this came to an abrupt end when British troops destroyed the new construction during the Revolutionary War.

Two decades later, in 1799, New York Assemblyman Aaron Burr — with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton, whom he would kill in a duel five years later — founded the Manhattan Company, which raised $2 million promising to “furnish and continue a supply of pure and wholesome water” to the city. But most of the money was lent to local businesses, and the institution eventually became the Chase Manhattan Bank. The company laid only 23 miles of pipe in three decades. In the early 19th century, the city was still drawing most of its water from the polluted Collect and suffered from cholera outbreaks.

Chastened by the Manhattan Company debacle, New York in the 1830s established a Board of Water Commissioners, which raised money to build a series of reservoirs far north of the city. It began piping water into the five boroughs in 1842. An expanded version of that system exists today, with more than 1 billion gallons daily coming from protected Delaware, Croton and Catskills watersheds. It was these gravity feeds and the reservoirs’ distance from the coast that saved New York’s water supply from Sandy’s wrath. Some New Jersey systems were not so protected, and residents had to boil water to be sure it was safe.

The resilience of the New York system sounds like a fitting epilogue to a triumphant story. But the drinking water in New York and other American cities remains under serious threat from sources both less obvious and less direct than natural disasters.

For starters, the system’s infrastructure is decaying. Nationwide, more than 10 percent of public water is lost through leaks. On average, a major water pipe bursts somewhere in the country every two minutes. In the District of Columbia, a pipe bursts every day.

This should not be surprising. Most of our water systems were built decades ago. Some date to the Civil War. The EPA estimates that $335 billion will be needed simply to maintain the current water infrastructure over the next few decades. Upgrades would cost even more.

So what are we doing about it? To date, very little. We are starving our water system of funds and have been doing so for years. Part of the reason is the system’s invisibility; the average citizen doesn’t give buried water pipes a thought until they burst and faucets run dry. Another part is a lack of public understanding of how antiquated our infrastructure has become. Finally, there is a stubborn refusal to pay for the system’s actual cost; we seem to think it has always been cheap and should remain so, come hell or high water.

And because of climate change, both hell and high water may be in store for us. In addition to making water more scarce in some regions of the country — pitting cities’ consumption against agricultural demands — climate change will give rise to storms of greater intensity, according to most models. Sandy’s uncommon power could become the new reality, placing public services under regular threat of deluge. We may have no choice but to harden our infrastructure as “hundred-year” storms become commonplace.

A further challenge, even more difficult to assess, comes from emerging contaminants. We are introducing compounds into our environment that did not exist only a few decades ago. To take one example, millions of people ingest pharmaceutical products every day, treating a range of conditions from arthritis to depression. Our bodies excrete residue from the drugs into the sewage system, and unused medications are often flushed down the toilet. As a result,they turn up in our tap water. One study found evidence of 56 pharmaceuticals or their byproducts in treated drinking water, including in metropolitan systems that together serve more than 40 million people.

These drugs are designed to change human body chemistry, and the risks they pose in the water supply may be real, but they are hard to quantify. The concentrations are extremely low, sometimes in parts per billion or even parts per trillion — far, far below the level of a prescribed medical dose. Nor are there any documented cases of pharmaceutical traces in drinking water leading to harm, but with such small doses it is difficult to assess effects that may be subtle or distant in time. As EPA scientist Christian Daughton has described, such contaminants are “at the outer envelope of toxicology.”

Other emerging contaminants, such as methane from fracking and endocrine disruptors from pesticide runoff, raise similar concerns.

Despite these challenges, it’s important to recognize the scale of achievement in a clear glass of tap water. We can go to any city in the United States and sip from a fountain without a moment’s concern for our health. This is remarkable, and it certainly was not inevitable. For most of human history, and in many parts of the world today, clean drinking water has not been readily available or expected.

Recognizing its critical importance, New York made major water investments over the past 180 years that have stood the test of time — and the test of Hurricane Sandy. It took some false starts, but the commitment, ingenuity and large-scale investments that safeguarded drinking water supplies in the 19th and 20th centuries will prove just as necessary to safeguard our cities and coasts. The history of New York’s water system should be an inspiration for the protection of our communities into the future.

James Salzman, an environmental law professor at Duke University, is the author of “Drinking Water: A History.” 

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Scientific American Review https://dsmagency.com/?p=1019 https://dsmagency.com/?p=1019#comments Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:50:26 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=1019 Recommended: Drinking Water

By Marissa Fessenden

Drinking Water: A History  by James Salzman Overlook Press, 2012 Salzman's account of drinking water makes the liquid seem as mythic as the fountain of youth. He explores the engineering, politics and health implications surrounding humans' quest for water, as well as the toxins and changing climate that threaten our supply. The history includes how physician John Snow methodically traced an 1854 cholera outbreak to a single water pump in London, New York City's evolution from a disease-ridden metropolis to one that boasts about its tap water, and the innovative technologies that may avert global water poverty. Learn more about Drinking Water at http://drinkingwaterhistory.com/]]>
Recommended: Drinking Water

By Marissa Fessenden

Drinking Water: A History 
by James Salzman

Overlook Press, 2012

Salzman’s account of drinking water makes the liquid seem as mythic as the fountain of youth. He explores the engineering, politics and health implications surrounding humans’ quest for water, as well as the toxins and changing climate that threaten our supply. The history includes how physician John Snow methodically traced an 1854 cholera outbreak to a single water pump in London, New York City’s evolution from a disease-ridden metropolis to one that boasts about its tap water, and the innovative technologies that may avert global water poverty.

Learn more about Drinking Water at http://drinkingwaterhistory.com/

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Tap Water vs Bottled Water https://dsmagency.com/?p=919 https://dsmagency.com/?p=919#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:09:40 +0000 http://dsmagency.com/?p=919 OverlookPress.com: Learn more about Drinking Water by Duke professor James Salzman here.]]> As seen on OverlookPress.com:

Learn more about Drinking Water by Duke professor James Salzman here.

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