Managing Water Scarcity, or Scarcely Managing?

摘要

John Fleck's Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West is a valiant effort to make sense of the behavior of water managers and politicians in the western United States. As anyone familiar with the complexities and intrigue of water management will attest, it is hard to imagine how the apparently random set of laws, rules, and policies that govern water in the United States came to be. To the uninitiated the whole system makes no sense. But Fleck gives us the personal stories that bring the regulatory and voluntary components of local and regional water management into focus. He provides a new view of some of the same issues illustrated in Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner's classic history of western land development and water policy, without that book's judgmental overtones.