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“Is the world’s water running out?” is the subtitle of Water Wars.
It takes author Marq de Villiers 311 pages to answer. His verdict? No: “It’s an
allocation, supply and management problem.” Some problem: most people in the
West use a tonne of water a week, making it a miracle that we haven’t had a
water war yet. De Villiers doesn’t explain our luck: instead he ducks the
question. It’s true we have here a measured and lucid travelogue through
“hydropolitics”, covering the convoluted history of the Nile, the terrible
Soviet legacy of the emptying Aral Sea and Israel’s theft of Arab water. But
other books have done this. We’re left with an unexplained assertion that human
inventiveness will carry on filling the well. Published by Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, £20, ISBN 0297842706.