Susan J. Marks. Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America. New York: Bloomberg Press, 2009. xii + 226 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57660-332-1.

Reviewed by Abraham Hoffman (Los Angeles Valley College)
Published on H-Water (March, 2010)
Commissioned by Justin M. Scott-Coe (Monte Vista Water District; Claremont Graduate University)

Can We Sustain the Unsustainable?

The recent flood (excuse the pun) of books dealing with water issues, among them Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out (2006), Maude Barlow’s Blue Gold: The Battle against Corporate Theft of the World's Water (2002) and Blue Covenant: The Global Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (2008), Robert Glennon’s Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to Do about It (2009), and James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West (2008), strive to awaken public awareness about the waste and misuse of water, the consequences of prolonged drought, and the need to make water a sustainable resource. They cover water issues in the United States, water as an international problem, and/or the threat of global warming. Susan J. Marks, a freelance journalist, focuses on water problems in the United States. She provides considerable information on contamination of water supplies, population growth, political timidity, and a crumbling infrastructure. Some writers have focused on drought in the Southwest; Marks demonstrates that water problems are a nationwide matter. She cites locales as varied as Atlanta, Georgia; Las Vegas, Nevada; interstate disputes between Texas and Oklahoma, as well as Virginia and Maryland; and the limitations and overexpectations of the capacity of the Colorado River to serve the needs of seven states, Mexico, and Native American tribes.

Much of this will be familiar to specialists, but Marks aims for a broader audience. She describes the challenges that farmers and ranchers face in meeting water needs, and presents the viewpoints of urban businessmen, environmental organizations, and government officials. Marks punctuates her text with bullet points that summarize factoids about water, such as one bathtub requires between fifty to seventy gallons of water to fill (five-minute showers use much less water). Marks calls attention to such imperative demands as modernizing outdated and inefficient infrastructures, overdevelopment, and the need for people to learn to adapt to using much less water, indicating that business as usual is no longer acceptable.

What will it take to make people aware that the nation is already in crisis mode in its shrinking water resources? Marks attempts to dispel long-standing myths about water. One example would be the view that potable water is an inexpensive and obtainable product. Public officials, particularly at the municipal level, must resist the wheeling and dealing of developers and stand firm in insisting that builders of new homes must demonstrate that there is water available for these tracts. She acknowledges that whereas some solutions are talked about--desalination, conservation--other answers are going to be expensive and require a major awakening of public awareness.

Marks’s research is largely based on interviews and extensive use of Internet Web sites for federal, state, and local government agencies. As a result, she provides little historical perspective and overgeneralizes on such past controversies as the Owens Valley-Los Angeles water dispute. However, the Web sites she cites and recommends provide easy access to information beyond her narrative and hopefully will further educate people about the seriousness of the nation’s water crises.

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Citation: Abraham Hoffman. Review of Marks, Susan J., Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America. H-Water, H-Net Reviews. March, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29289

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