Brad Plummer interviews John Fleck on the politics and empirics of the Western water crisis. Rather than doom and gloom, Fleck argues that when you look behind the headlines you find communities, users, and governments working to solve the problems. Fleck argues:
And the reason is that all across the West, when people are confronted with the fact that there’s not enough water, they’ve been really successful at using less. So rather than the catastrophe I’d been led to expect, what I found instead was people working hard to figure out how to adapt.
Water crises and their variability, Fleck argues, are not natural but rather:
the difference has a lot to do with the socioeconomics of land use planning and infrastructure in poor communities.
Check out Fleck's new book Water is For Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West.