Unquenchable

America's Water Crisis and What to do About it

By: Robert Glennon

Narrated by: J. Paul Guimont

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out.Robert Glennon captures the irony - and tragedy - of America’s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical. From manufactured snow for tourists in Atlanta to trillions of gallons of water flushed down the toilet each year, Unquenchable reveals the heady extravagances and everyday inefficiencies that are sucking the nation dry.The looming catastrophe remains hidden as government diverts supplies from one area to another to keep water flowing from the tap. But sooner rather than later, the shell game has to end. And when it does, shortages will threaten not only the environment, but every aspect of American life: we face shuttered power plants and jobless workers, decimated fi sheries and contaminated drinking water.We can’t engineer our way out of the problem, either with traditional fixes or zany schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska. In fact, new demands for water, particularly the enormous supply needed for ethanol and energy production, will only worsen the crisis. America must make hard choices - and Glennon’s answers are fittingly provocative. He proposes market-based solutions that value water as both a commodity and a fundamental human right.

One truth runs throughout Unquenchable: only when we recognize water’s worth will we begin to conserve it.

©2009 Glennon, Robert (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

A must read, second only to Cadillac Desert

A must read for anyone who wants to understand how water is used in the U.S., what's wrong with how it's used, and what to do about it.

Good Information

Decent information but too biased towards a left leaning perspective. In a more perfect world we could all just trust the government to regulate fairly and never favor the influential and wealthy over the common man but that's just not how it works. We already live in a highly regulated world and yet look at the condition of our water, food, etc.

The so called free-market isn't the answer either of course, but some kind of balance has to be found where the answer is not simply focusing on private wells, and whether or not the neighbors water their lawn. It's the developers and politicians that gave us lawns in the desert to begin with, let's not allow the focus to be shifted away from them, those that first profited from putting those lawns there.

The author's basic solution is more of the same of what we already have and I just can't see where that's the right answer.