• To illuminate today’s water crisis from the perspective of history, Steven Solomon traveled to the ancient aqueducts of Rome and the modern waterworks of California, down the Nile to Aswan and along the Colorado to the Hoover Dam, to the Inca terraces of the Andes and the rice paddies of Japan, as well as to the Erie Canal, Venice, Amsterdam, Jerusalem and rural Kenya. He interviewed leading world water experts.


• Solomon has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s Marketplace, and appeared as a featured guest on the late Tim Russert’s CNBC show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Bloomberg Television, and on various cable news shows. He has addressed the World Affairs Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and university forums.

Far more than oil, the control of water wealth has been pivotal to the rise and decline of great powers, notable achievements of civilization, and the quality of ordinary daily lives. In Water, Steven Solomon offers the first-ever, narrative portrait of the personalities, innovations, and power struggles over water that have transformed human history from the irrigation civilizations of antiquity, Roman Empire, medieval China, Islam’s golden age, rise of the West, Industrial Revolution, modern America, and are driving the politics, economics and environmental realities of one of the decisive challenges of 21st-century global society—fresh water scarcity.

As modern society runs short of its most indispensable resource and the planet’s renewable water ecosystems grow depleted, an explosive new fault line is dividing humanity into water Haves and Have-Nots. Genocides, epidemic diseases, failed states, and civil warfare increasingly emanate from water-starved, overpopulated parts of Africa and Asia. Water famines threaten to ignite new wars in the bone-dry Middle East. Faltering clean water supplies menace the sustainable growth and ability of China and India to feed themselves. Water scarcity is inseparably interrelated, with the global crises of energy, food, and climate change. For Western democracies, water represents no less than the new oil—demanding a major rethink of basic domestic and foreign policies, but also offering a momentous opportunity to re-launch its wealth and global power through calculated, strategic exercise of its comparative global advantage as a leading freshwater resource Have.