BLUE REVOLUTION: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis By Cynthia Barnett
Beacon, 272 pp., $26.95
DRIVING HOME: An American Journey By Jonathan Raban
Pantheon, 512 pp., $29.95
“Water is life,’’ runs the biology teachers’ precept, but water is wealth too. Gold and diamonds are nice, but clean, crisp, controlled water has long been the preeminent hallmark of the rich.
First-century Rome, for example, with its aqueducts and public baths, was full of hydro-fanatics, perhaps none more rabid than Emperor Nero, whose 300-room party palace featured canals, pools, fountains, perfumed mists that could rain from the ceilings onto guests, and an artificial lake. Louis XIV constructed over 1,000 fountains, ponds, and waterfalls at Versailles. There wasn’t enough water to run them all at once, so his engineers would switch on whichever one the king was closest to as the royal retinue wobbled past.
In the 1890s, tobacco baron James Duke built himself a water wonderland in New Jersey featuring nine man-made lakes, pergolas, well houses, and 35 fountains described by American Homes and Gardens in 1914 as among “the most beautiful in the world.’’
Céline Dion churns through 500,000 gallons of water a month at her Florida home. In a single month in 2007, Donald Trump poured 2 million gallons of water through the lawns, pool, and 22 bathrooms of his Palm Beach residence.
Indeed, what suburban symbol of abundance and good fortune has endured longer than that of the backyard swimming pool? Use Google Earth to troll over fancy neighborhoods and try to count how many aquamarine shapes gleam up at the sky.
And yet: Our supply of fresh water is anything but inexhaustible. Groundwater supplies all over the nation are dropping, even in the relatively wet Southeast. Wetlands have become as rare as sea-run salmon, and Lake Mead, which supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water, could be dry by as soon as 2021.
“Like our other great, national illusions say, the unending bull market, or upward-only housing prices,’’ writes journalist Cynthia Barnett, in her new and eminently sensible book “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis,’’ “the illusion of water abundance is a beautiful bubble doomed to pop.’’
Each American, on average, uses 147 gallons of freshwater every day, four times what we used in 1950. Las Vegas residents use 227 gallons per person. Sacramento residents use nearly 300 gallons per day.
Add the water our power plants guzzle, plus the water our farmers use, and the average meat-eating American uses about 1,000 gallons every day.
That’s unsustainable.