by Vandana Shiva
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Product Description
Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), exposes yet another corporate maneuver to convert a critical world resource into a profitable commodity. Using the global water trade as a lens, she highlights the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they lose their right to a life-sustaining common good.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Informative but lacking..., 2007-11-15
After reading Water Wars and going back through some things in the book I believe that many people will find this book interesting and informative. Shiva seems to believe that the root of all these wars is our disconnection from the water. We turn on a faucet and voila, water. Who cares where it came from, how much there is or where it's going. Now, take that and mix it with socio-political-economic factors and you can see why we are just beginning to see the emergence of water wars.
Those looking for any sort of solution to water wars should look elsewhere. She has the grassroots mentality that water need not be privatized but run and managed by the people who use it. I fully agree but the problem remains this is simply impossible for the majority of systems already entrenched.
Ultimately, if you have an interest in the state of water on a global scale this is a good book to get you started and asking questions.
P.S. I believe John Wesley Powell was quoted out of context on pg. 54. I have a hard time imagining that Powell said that rivers are wasting into the sea in the context of we should dam the Colorado.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 The Single Most Important Book You Can Read Today, 2007-02-27
the global water crisis is the biggest issue we will face in our lifetimes and not much is being done. This book puts things in a human light and makes solutions seem possible.
Stop Bottled Water Industries
Protect Global Commons
[...]
1 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
 Don't waste your money, 2007-01-07
Written by a so called academic, this is a series of essays which never should have been published. Over -priced and over reviewed, whoever approved of publishing this travesty should be fired.
22 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
Brutal. Brutal brutal brutal., 2006-04-03
In contrast to what others have written, this book is brutal. It isn't that Ms. Shiva doesn't have passion, she does. It isn't that she cannot write, she can. The book is brutal because it is painfully one-sided, seemingly written for no other reason than to pander to those that think as she does.
While the book highlights examples of water mismanagement, Ms. Shiva's ideology is so apparent one has to wonder what she has left out. For example, she repeatedly mentions the use of a small, electric motor to pump enormous amounts of water far more efficiently that human beings can. Eventually said motor pumps more water than the system can replace and does damage. Fine. While Ms. Shiva notes that the motor does damage, she seems unwilling to address the obvious: the farmer who turned the motor on could just as easily have turned the motor off, thereby avoiding the damage. Instead of working for hours to get water, the farmers could have used the motor to pump only what they needed, saving time and labor for other tasks. While she may have a personal preference to use humans for manual labor, blaming the little motor (and by extension, the modernization involved) is intellectually dishonest.
As another example, she mentions how the evil United States would not approve the Kyoto Treaty. She is right the U.S. has not. Yet she never notes that many people consider Kyoto to be fatally flawed--it exempts China, India, and others from emissions limits. One does not need to accept or deny Kyoto as an example of an efficient or effective solution to global warming, but given the partisan ideology presented in Water Wars, one can never be sure Ms. Shiva presented any information fairly or accurately.
Furthermore, Ms. Shiva continues with such platitudes as, "The corporation's selfish desire for profit causes all the problems; the WTO, World Bank and U.S. are run by corporations; only real democratic community control will solve these problems." The quote is representative of many social critics: argument by cliche--the discourse ends as quickly as it begins. Ms. Shiva often closes her argument in her topic sentences, for example on page 87, "Not only has the World Bank played a major role in the creation of water scarcity and pollution, it is now transforming that scarcity into a market opportunity for water companies." Or comments such as this on page xiii, "This forced apportion of resources from people is a form of terrorism--corporate terrorism." Comments like this suggest Ms. Shiva is unable to persuasively write for change, that she has no real arguments, just partisan ideology. Unfortunately, environmental thinkers like Ms. Shiva may be right. But with writing like this, they will never be heard except by those who already agree.
Sadly, Ms. Shiva also seems focused on spiritual matters at the expense of making her case. For example, she includes a multi-page appendix of the ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT different names for the Ganges River. Frankly, who cares how many names there are? There could be 763 of them--not one of which would matter if the locals drain the river for crops or if Halliburton drains the river and sells it back to them.
As a former physicist, Ms. Shiva would have done her readers a favor and written a fascinating book if she had simply applied the intellectual rigor of her physics training to her thesis--whatever that was. For those that want their ideology reinforced, this book is wonderful. For those trying to learn about the problems concerning water and water usage, there are plenty of other sources that present information without overt ideology and bias. `Nuff said.
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
 Right Versus Left, 2005-10-26
Vandana is an entertaining writer. She is passionate about injustice. Shiva is a welcome antidote to the rantings of right wing ratbags from noisy think-tanks.
A chapter of Shiva contrasted with a chapter of anyone from the Cato Institue, makes for an entertaining exercise in contrasting views of how our world should work.
One does not have to agree with all she believes to enjoy her writing or to learn from it.
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