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Summary
Summary
Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
Water does not perish, nor require millions of years to form as do fossil fuels. However, water is always on the move. In this timely, important book, Judith D. Schwartz presents a refreshing perspective on water that transcends zero-sum thinking. By allying with the water cycle, we can revive lush, productive landscapes. Like the river in rural Zimbabwe that, thanks to restorative grazing, now flows miles further than in living memory. Or the food forest of oranges, pomegranates, and native fruit-bearing plants in Tucson, grown through harvesting urban wastewater. Or the mini-oasis in West Texas nourished by dew.
Animated by stories from around the globe, Water In Plain Sight is an inspiring reminder that fixing the future of our drying planet involves understanding what makes natural systems thrive.
Author Notes
Judith Schwartz is a longtime freelance writer with wide-ranging experience with books, magazines, newspapers, and a variety of writing and editing clients. She has written articles for women¿s magazines, co- and ghost-written books with therapists and doctors as well as a couple of her own. Her work then went in a different direction when she wrote an article on the Transition movement. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, she started asking questions like, What is money? Each inquiry led to more reporting, which took her on a whirlwind journalistic tour of New Economics, which sees the purpose of the economy as serving people and the environment. This lead her to environmental economics - which lead to soil. From all of this research came her book entitled Cows Save The Planet. In her book she shares insights on how we treat the soil can tilt us toward environmental and economic resilience.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this earnest but uneven volume, environmental writer Schwartz (Cows Save the Planet) places water in a wide human and ecological context, focusing on "innovators from around the world who are finding new routes to water security." She looks, for example, at the work of Allan Savory, who calls for a holistic approach to land stewardship and restoration. Schwartz describes how improperly managed water and soil lead to "poverty, crop failure, social breakdown, unrest, and repression," and she travels to Zimbabwe "to see holistic planned grazing in action." In California, Schwartz addresses the ongoing drought. She notes that large percentages of the state's water supply go to agriculture and wonders whether it is smart to grow "thirsty crops like rice, cotton, and alfalfa in a mostly dry, often hot landscape." When farmers in the Imperial Valley ship alfalfa to China to feed cows there, they are essentially "exporting water-which the region can ill afford to spare." Other chapters cover the relationship between water and Rio de Janeiro's Tijuca Forest as well as the water crises in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Kimberley, Australia. Some sections prove less engaging than others, but Schwartz does well to highlight this timely, important topic. Agent: Laura Gross, Laura Gross Literary. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The bad news is that the world's water, carbon, and energy cycles are out of whack; the good news is that solutions to these problems are within reach.Journalist Schwartz, who challenged much of the conventional thinking about global warming in Cows Save the Planet (2013), goes beyond that brief on holistic livestock management to look more broadly at how nature manages water and thus regulates heat. The author has traveled the worldAfrica, Australia, North and South Americaand spent significant time with farmers, ranchers, engineers, and scientists to understand the dynamics of plants, soil, and water and to see how these are related to climate change. Readers who stick with her will become familiar with transpiration, infiltration, and condensation (yes, dew is a major player here) as she discusses water problems and solutions. Interwoven into her occasionally challenging essays on plant biology and soil chemistry are profiles of the hardworking men and women she met and observed dealing with water problems and finding solutions that could be copied or adapted elsewhere. Schwartz demonstrates how mistreatment of the land disrupts the water cycle and leads to floods and droughts. If there is one take-home message, it is that the amount of rain that falls is not as important as what happens to the rain, how fast it moves, and where it goes. The author argues that intensive agriculture, improper grazing, urbanization, engineered water infrastructures, and forest burning lead to desertification, the loss of moisture that makes the soil bare and lifeless. Happily, she includes success stories from Slovakia, India, Africa, and Mexico that show "tremendous hopeand suggest there are multiple ways to fill the water bucket." Some demanding passages require perseverance on the part of general readers, but the stories that surround them are important and rewarding. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her optimistic Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth (2013), which won the Nautilus Book Award for Sustainability, environmental writer Schwartz mapped out a path to climate-change recovery through improved soil-management practices. In this equally inspiring follow-up, she demonstrates how paying closer attention to nature's own methods for delivering moisture where it's most needed will help forestall a looming, worldwide water crisis. Traveling the globe in search of real-world solutions to water conservation, Schwartz spent time with farmers, engineers, and scientists in countries as far afield as Mexico and Slovakia. In Zimbabwe, she visited the home territory of septuagenarian Allan Savory, whose Africa Centre for Holistic Management has reversed kilometers of soil erosion using sustainable animal-grazing techniques. In west Texas, she discovered a rancher couple gathering large amounts of dew using an innovative catchment system. Other chapters describe novel irrigation systems and urban waste-water-recycling methods. Schwartz's overview provides much needed hope for everyone concerned about the future of one of Earth's most precious resources.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
One in 10 people lack access to clean water, dramatically increasing their likelihood of experiencing disease, poverty, gender inequality and war. Schwartz promises to illuminate potential solutions to this drastic inequity but instead delivers an infomercial for a land-stewardship system in which livestock "return carbon to the soil," increasing the soil's water-retention properties and reversing climate change - or so the system's founder, the Zimbabwean farmer Allan Savory, contends. What about the significant, documented contributions of livestock production to global warming and degraded land and water quality? Visiting Savory at his ranch, Schwartz calls it "a mini miracle in land and water restoration." But she fails to mention that respected researchers have denounced his theories and seems to share his overt contempt for the scientific method. The rest of the book describes her tours of ranches and farms around the world that employ Savory's practices. At each stop, her credulity is astonishing. When her rancher host in Mexico says that his Mennonite neighbors have poisoned their own wells with fertilizer such that "almost every family has someone dying of cancer," Schwartz, unbelievably, declines to fact-check his claim or, apparently, speak to a single Mennonite. Schwartz may have legitimate insights into water management, but such failures of reporting - prevalent throughout - make her impossible to trust.
Library Journal Review
With a refreshing, optimistic tone, journalist Schwartz (Cows Save the Planet) looks into how diverse groups of people across the globe are working to align the land with the water cycle again in an era when water scarcity is already a reality for many societies, and threatens even more. Schwartz identifies how organizations such as the Permaculture Research Institute and Holistic Management International, small farmers, and creative innovators are reviving the health of the soil, encouraging the renewal of ecosystems, and, ultimately, generating more water in arid places. Discussing everything from collecting dew in the desert to reinventing agriculture, Schwartz introduces an array of individuals committed to restoring order to ecological systems around the world, using methods to make rainfall "more effective" and relying on other sources of water often ignored or not thought about before. Reviewing basic biological concepts including infiltration, transpiration, and condensation, Schwartz succeeds in revealing the important role water plays in biodiversity and the environment. VERDICT For readers interested in world water -scarcity issues.-Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Water in Plain Sight | p. 1 |
| 1 The Elephant Pools; Making Rainfall Effective | p. 5 |
| 2 Pipes, Pumps and Beaver Ponds: Moving Water across the Landscape | p. 33 |
| 3 The Birds of Chihuahua: Water and Biodiversity | p. 61 |
| 4 Missing the Water for the Trees: How Plants Make Water | p. 91 |
| 5 Farming for Water: Industrial Agriculture's Water-Guzzling Secrets | p. 121 |
| 6 Dew and the Desert: What Goes Up Must Come Down | p. 149 |
| 7 Storm Waters Dreaming: Dousing the Flames in Australia | p. 175 |
| 8 Good Riddance to the Infernal Ants: Helping the Water Poor and Avoiding Water Wars | p. 201 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 225 |
| Notes | p. 227 |
| Index | p. 241 |