A revolution in water is coming, believes Charles Fishman, likening the changes to the organic and local food movements in his book The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. Arriving to Santa Barbara as the county revels in a rare April drenching, Fishman will deliver the 35th Annual Manley Memorial Lecture on Monday at Bren Hall.
“Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it,” he wrote in The Big Thirst. “We have a huge advantage over the generations of people who have come before us, because we can understand water and we can use it smartly.”
His book examines and even quantifies the many uses and sources of water, and for his talk, he narrows the huge range of his research down to California and what the state’s water future could be, if we just used our heads. Fishman, a former business reporter for the Washington Post whose book The Wal-Mart Effect was named a book of the year by The Economist, will deliver his talk on April 11 at 3:30 p.m. at UCSB’s 1414 Bren Hall.