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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

THE THREE AGES OF WATER

Peter Gleick

Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future

The human story is inextricably linked to water. Without air, we cannot exist. But how we exist, how we sustain ourselves, where we build our societies, how we support our industry, and ultimately what we poison and spoil is the story of people and water.

In The Three Ages of Water, expert on water resources and climate change Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our most valuable resource. Spread over a ten-thousand-year human history, it begins with the fundamental evolutionary role water had in shaping early civilizations and empires, crests to the scientific and social revolutions that created modern society, and spills into the global water crisis of depleted groundwater reserves and ubiquitous pollution. Agriculture thrived only after irrigation; cities were possible only with clean water supplied from aqueducts and wastewater safely removed; the industrial revolution was initially dependent on steam. Many of the world's great cities - London, Rio, Buenos Aires, New York, Rome, Athens, Venice - are water cities, where ships made possible seafaring, explorations, commerce and exchange. Even the most landlocked cities of the world owe their existence to water in the form of lakes and rivers. Fresh water is never more valuable than when it is missing: wildfires in California, British Columbia and Siberia thrived because of desiccation. Flint, MI, was slowly poisoned by a decayed source of safe drinking water. The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1968, the Meiyu River, China, in 2014, the Bellandur Lake, India, in 2015; they all looked apocalyptic. We now face a fight to preserve clean water globally, a fight we cannot afford to lose. THE THREE AGES OF WATER is a revelatory account of how water has shaped the course of human life and history, and a positive vision of what the future can hold - if we act now. Peter Gleick is perhaps the world's most widely known and widely cited water expert. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he went on to co-found the Pacific Institute, the leading independent research group devoted to finding solutions to the world's most pressing water problems. He is a scientist by training, winner of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award, and an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. He lives in Oakland, California.

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Book Published 2023-06-13 by Public Affairs

Comments

Gleick has delivered a book that provides a rich story of humanity's interaction with water through a lens that helps us understand where we are today as we strive to balance all the demands we place on the planet's water resources. His context of the past points to a future path that can ensure we strike this balance so everyone has access to water as a basic human right. The additional payoff is this book is accessible to all because of the way Gleick unfolds the story. It is a hopeful call to action grounded in fact, research, and analysis.

Water made us, Peter Gleick writes in his magisterial history and future of hydrology and the human planet. But what will we do to it, and what will we make of it now? What we think of as the Anthropocene, and worry over as the coming of global warming, is in many mind-bending and demanding ways a crisis of water - though a soluble one. And there is no better guide to that crisis, or its solutions, than Gleick.

Gleick lays out water's central role in human history and in our future. The Three Ages of Water is authoritative, far-ranging, and fascinating.

A magisterial read... crisp, well-crafted, and thoroughly engaging ... If there's anything about water that's not covered in Gleick's book, it's probably not worth knowing.

Gleick buoyantly conveys just how special water is... with crucial recommendations for managing the world's water.

What a wonderful book! To understand water is to understand ourselves, our origins, and what lies ahead for us. Gleick tells the story of water in an accessible way that not only warns us about the dangers we are approaching, but also provides us with a vision for a hopeful future.

Korean: Sejong University Pres

The honest name for our lovely blue planet probably should have been Water, since it covers most of the globe. And as Gleick makes clear in this sweeping, unprecedented, and positively necessary new book, our chances for a workable future depend on how seriously we take the oceans, lakes, rivers, and aquifers that surround us - indeed, that fill our own cells. This book will change your outlook in deep and motivating ways.

At a time of fraught political divisions and intensifying environmental disruptions, Gleick presents this timely and magisterial report on humankind's use and misuse of water. He traces the incredible and varied ways water has been used from the earliest civilizations right up to our modern age. Unbelievable technical feats, he says, are now being overwhelmed by a changing climate and vast destruction of life-support systems. Humans now face, Gleick warns, a stark choice: grim, dystopian future or find a sustainable way to live with and manage water