Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters

Rating:
Summary: Page Turner!
Review: Glennon is a gifted writer who sucks you in from the opening pages of the introduction and makes you care about the outcomes of the stories he presents. In a witty and accessible style he tells the alarming story of the devastating effects of groundwater pumping, effects that are not limited to the desert areas of this country. This is a book for all of us! Although engaging and readable the book is packed with enough information to provide me (not a legal or environmental scholar) with the data I need to speak in an informed fashion to tell decision makers and friends that we need to do something about this before it's too late.

Rating:
Summary: A book any hydrology student should read
Review: I read this book during a summer program dealing with freshwater resources throughout the world. It not only helped my progression through the course, but also gave me a new perspective on water as a resource. In the US most of us do not give a second thought to the water we use in our everyday lives. Even in regions plagued by drought modern technology adds to the illusion that water is everywhere and limitless. However, any reader of this book will tell you differently. It takes you through different case studies through out the country where water use has had dramatic influence on the environment we live in. It explains not just the science of the situation but also the politics often behind the scenes as well. I would highly recommend this book to any student, professor, or hobbyist with an interest in hydrology.

Rating:
Summary: A book any hydrology student should read
Review: I read this book during a summer program dealing with freshwater resources throughout the world. It not only helped my progression through the course, but also gave me a new perspective on water as a resource. In the US most of us do not give a second thought to the water we use in our everyday lives. Even in regions plagued by drought modern technology adds to the illusion that water is everywhere and limitless. However, any reader of this book will tell you differently. It takes you through different case studies through out the country where water use has had dramatic influence on the environment we live in. It explains not just the science of the situation but also the politics often behind the scenes as well. I would highly recommend this book to any student, professor, or hobbyist with an interest in hydrology.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read for Environmentalists
Review: I thought I had a pretty good understanding of issues relating to fresh water and the environment. I didn't, but I do now after reading Water Follies.

This is a very important book for anyone interested in the environment. I am pretty well read on environmental topics and was surprised by how much I learned from Glennon's very readable book.

The author explains very clearly the interrelationships among ground water, lakes, rivers, and the damage we have done and are doing to the environment through mindless groundwater pumping.

Fresh water shortages and ground water pumping are going to be front page stories over the next few years. Water Follies will enable you to appreciate the issues involved and to develop a well informed opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read for Environmentalists
Review: I thought I had a pretty good understanding of issues relating to fresh water and the environment. I didn't, but I do now after reading Water Follies.

This is a very important book for anyone interested in the environment. I am pretty well read on environmental topics and was surprised by how much I learned from Glennon's very readable book.

The author explains very clearly the interrelationships among ground water, lakes, rivers, and the damage we have done and are doing to the environment through mindless groundwater pumping.

Fresh water shortages and ground water pumping are going to be front page stories over the next few years. Water Follies will enable you to appreciate the issues involved and to develop a well informed opinion.

Rating:
Summary: The same motives as Scheherazade
Review: Most recent controversy over the use and conservation of America's fresh water has concerned the water visible on the surface - river and lakes. With that as an implicit focus, we frequently argue over where dams ought to be built, what fields ought to be irrigated and at whose cost, whether homes in flood plains ought to be insured at public expense, and so forth.

Robert Glennon, a professor of law at the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law, wants to draw our attention to invisible water, and to the question how we might best avoid either polluting or running out of it.

Early on, he tells the story of Ubar, a city of ancient Arabia, an oasis for the camel caravans of its time, and a place of fabulous wealth. Scheherazade spoke of Ubar in one of her thousand-and-one tales, as did countless bedouins around countless campfires. It became an Arabian Sodom, reputedly destroyed at the peak of its splendor by an angry God. What Glennon adds is that Ubar (in what we now call Oman) was a very real place.

In the 1980s, an amateur archeologist, Nicholas Clapp, led an expedition that successfully located and unearthed the fortress that had once guarded the precious spring-fed well that had made the city a port of call for those desert-crossing voyagers. It now appears that sometime between 300 and 500 AD, Ubar simply fell. It collapsed of its own weight, into a huge underground limestone cavern - the cavern that its wells had progressively emptied of water. The groundwater had held the city up, physically as well as fiscally. So Ubar, having exended its capital, sank out of sight, and entered legend as the "Atlantis of the desert" (T.E. Lawrence's phrase.)

Glennon tells this story for the same three reasons that Scheherazade did: to charm, to instruct, to survive.

Rating:
Summary: Should be Required Reading
Review: Water Follies is fascinating--and frightening--and should be required reading for all Americans. Don't be put off by the pedantic subtitle: It's easy reading. Scholarly but accessible. Enlightening but not preachy. Glennon will pull you into the groundwater but his wry sense of humor will keep you from drowning.

Rating:
Summary: A clarion warning
Review: Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping And The Fate Of America's Fresh Waters by Robert Glennon (Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Arizona) is a timely and much needed wake-up call concerning the all-too-frequent pollution and misuse of the groundwater tables that America relies upon for fresh drinking water. Consisting of a selection of anecdotes about how the Santa Cruz River in Tucson went dry, the rampant greed in Tampa Bay, watershed initiatives concerning Massachusetts' Ipswitch River Basin, and a great deal more, Water Follies is a clarion warning and very strongly recommended contribution for Environmental Studies reference collections.