Water - A Biography

“This book caught my eye in my local bookshop. First, the cover, and then the title! Picture attached with one of my sketches” says BACA Director, Richard Coutts.

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Needless to say, the topic resonates, and for those who work in the water sector, urban design, or resilience planning, this will make a very enjoyable Christmas purchase.

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From the back cover: Giulio Boccaletti - Honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the early civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. He describes how these societies, made possible by sea level changes from the last glacial melt, incisively examining how this type of performance led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to population explosion and labor specialization.

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We see with clarity how irrigation’s structure informed social structure (Inventions such as the calendar sprang from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the grounds for democracy; Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with the legal framework for the development of water infrastructure. 'Water: A Biography' richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to - and fundamental reliance on - the most essential substance on Earth.’

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