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Book reviews tagged with ‘Water’
Often, books for kids about the environment or any complex issue are touted as “conversation starters.” At worst this notion results in books that barely scratch the surface of their subject matter and leave kids scratching their heads and their parents to fill in the blanks. At best, as in the case of E Is For Environment, the book is really designed to introduce a series of topics and supply the tools for further discussion
Click through for our full review…
David Brooks tells how the soft path strategy makes the most of the water we have.
Satisfying the world’s growing demand for clean water is a monumental challenge. With water supply infrastructure now stretched to the limit, editors David Brooks, Oliver Brandes and Stephen Gurman offer a new management approach in Making the Most of the Water We Have. Based on energy’s proven soft path strategy, the book goes far beyond touting water efficiency: it points the way toward decreasing worldwide demand for this precious resource and shows how we can save money getting there.
Kurtis Elton, one of the book’s many contributors, 
recently met with David Brooks for some background on this strategy as it begins to gain steam.
[Read the full interview]
Canadian Water Politics: Conflicts and Institutions
Mark Sproule-Jones, Carolyn Johns, B. Timothy Heinmiller (eds.)
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
2008, 360 pages.
Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers
Oran R. Young, Leslie A. King and Heike Schroeder (eds.)
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press
2008, 400 pages.
Admitting a keen interest in policy reform won’t make you popular at cocktail parties. Trust me. But policy is simply shorthand for decisions that determine our collective action, and those havea way of exciting people. The rights, rules and procedures that we use to make decisions and take action are woven 
together by the machinery of institutions. While confirming that institutions are important, both Canadian Water Politics and Institutions and Environmental Change describe how we might tinker with, or even renovate, institutions so that they make better decisions – particularly environmental ones.
Canadian Water Politics addresses a fundamental problem in managing water: the incompatibility between the fluid properties of the resource and the seemingly immutable characteristics of its management. Institutions give rise to social practices and guide social interactions, and in this context, Canadian Water Politics examines how institutions mediate, amplify,… [Click here to read more!]
The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage Jamie Benidickson Vancouver: UBC Press 2007, 432 pages. I confess that the word “culture” in the title of Jamie Benidickson’s book threw me off. I was expecting an anthro- pological take on how human waste has been treated through history and in different cultures. [...]
