Steven Solomon : Water The epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

Steven Solomon presented a comprehensive history of the impact of favorable or unfavorable hydrologic conditions on civilizations and their successes or failures to meet water challenges. In the tradition of Arnold Toynbee, who espoused that environmental forces shaped human history, the author traced man's relationship to water. Solomon also cited the work of Karl A. Wittfogel, who correlated "centralized authoritarian states and specialized, mass irrigation systems" (p. 24).

Solomon attributed five principles or themes in his account to major water concerns-- "domestically for drinking, cooking, and sanitation; (2) economic production for agriculture, industry, and mining; (3) power generation, such as through waterwheel, steam, hydroelectricity, and as coolant in thermal power plants; (4) for transportation and strategic advantage, militarily, commercially, and administratively; and of growing prominence today, environmentally to sustain vital ecosystems against natural and man-made depletions and degradations." (pp. 16-17)

The author divided the book into four parts: Water in ancient history, water and the ascendancy of the West, water and the making of the modern industrial society, and the age of scarcity. The last part consisted of four chapters, Water the New Oil, Thicker than blood: The water famished Middle-East, From Haves to Have-Not: Mounting water distress in Asia's Rising Giants, and Opportunity from Scarcity: The new politics of water in the industrial democracies.


Current realities, such as deteriorating water infrastructure, the disparity between the water Haves and Have Nots, and the increase of fresh water consumption (two times greater than the growth of population), have changed the thinking on the classic water construct. Solomon posited, "from the traditional paradigm based on centralized, mass-scale infrastructure that extracted, treated, and delivered ever greater, absolute supplies from mature to a new efficiency paradigm built upon more decentralized, scaled-to-task, and environmentally harmonious solutions that make more productive use of existing supplies" (p. 369).