Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment

Jacques Leslie

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 15, 2007 - Nature - 368 pages

"If the wars of the last century were fought over oil, the wars of this century will be fought over water." -Ismail Serageldin, The World Bank

The giant dams of today are the modern Pyramids, colossally expensive edifices that generate monumental amounts of electricity, irrigated water, and environmental and social disaster.

With Deep Water, Jacques Leslie offers a searching account of the current crisis over dams and the world's water. An emerging master of long-form reportage, Leslie makes the crisis vivid through the stories of three distinctive figures: Medha Patkar, an Indian activist who opposes a dam that will displace thousands of people in western India; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist who studies the effects of giant dams on the peoples of southern Africa; and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager who struggles to reverse the effects of drought so as to allow Australia to continue its march to California-like prosperity.

Taking the reader to the sites of controversial dams, Leslie shows why dams are at once the hope of developing nations and a blight on their people and landscape. Deep Water is an incisive, beautifully written, and deeply disquieting report on a conflict that threatens to divide the world in the coming years.

What people are saying

DEEP WATER: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment

User Review  - Jane Doe - Kirkus

The struggle for control over water is "one of the great looming subjects of the twenty-first century."So suggests journalist Leslie (The Mark, 1995), who documents attempts to persuade water to ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jakkrits - LibraryThing

For the past few decades, those who have been working on the issue of big river development, including the Mekong, would probably notice great amount of publications that continue to be released and ...

About the author

Jacques Leslie is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. A draft of Deep Water has won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, judged by Ted Conover, Sara Mosle, and Jonathan Harr. Leslie lives in Mill Valley, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment
• Author: Jacques Leslie
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
• ISBN: 0374707855, 9780374707859
• Length: 368 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Industries / Energy; Nature / Natural Resources