The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

I put this nonfiction book on my reading list years ago, after a friend told me she thought about it every single day after reading it herself. In it Fishman argues that in many parts of the world, including here in the United States, we're at the end of our hundred-year "golden age" of water during which it's seemed to be easy and free to access—but really it's anything but. We're facing very real water problems, and if we don't fix our relationship to water soon, the consequences will be dire. The problem, he says, is that most of us simply don't understand how our relationship to water works, or should work. While Fishman brings plenty of stats to the text, I especially enjoyed the stories he tells about people who work in the water business (for it is definitely a business), and the way he demolishes common misconceptions about wise and wasteful use.