Reviewer: Eugene N. Anderson, PhD (University of California, Riverside)
Description: This edited volume contains 17 essays on ethical concerns around water supply and management. Pragmatic questions range from treating contamination to supplying water in dry regions. Background ethical issues include market versus state management, utilitarian versus abstract (deontological) ethics, and human rights.
Purpose: The purpose of this book is to consider ethical issues of water supply and management and make recommendations for ethical practice. This is certainly an extremely worthy purpose, given the rapidly increasing squeeze on world fresh water supplies and the very poor quality of water purification, supply, and storage in many parts of the world. The objectives are met up to a point, but the essays are limited in range and scope. This is not a comprehensive treatment of the issue.
Audience: The focal target audience appears to be planners of water supply: bureaucrats, administrators, policymakers, and other agents responsible for treating and delivering water. More broadly targeted are environmentalists, individuals interested in rights to water and in the ethical issues of water supply, and persons concerned with environmental justice. The authors are social scientists and writers with records of serious contribution to ethics and management issues. They are well qualified to write on the ethics of water.
Features: This collection of 17 essays on the ethics of water management is a valuable and worthwhile contribution to the field, though not the last word on the subject. The editorship is Canadian, and the chapters take a Canadian perspective and largely use Canadian case studies, though excellent studies of Kosovo and of the Middle East broaden the geographic range. Notably, some of the authors are Canadian First Nations persons, and they bring in an ethical position very far from the standard European one - to the enormous benefit of the book. The essays range from broad and general works to narrowly focused case studies. An essay by Bruce Jennings and Kathryn Gwiazdon sets the ethical framework, introducing traditional philosophical approaches from Aristotle to Kant. Another by Alex Wellington deals with human rights thoughtfully and in depth. These are followed by shorter studies of ecofeminism and valuation. Issues of market pricing and water as "commodity" versus water as a human right or an integral part of the social environment are particularly well treated. Then come a number of place-based studies. Notable among these is Deborah McGregor's Indigenous perspective, noting that water in Indigenous thought is classified in several ways, has its own spirits related to humans, and is part of human society in a very literal way. Ilmas Futehally's essay on water in the Middle East covers recent water conflicts but does not discuss traditional cultural values; fortunately, a later essay by Kerry O'Neill does cover this. A final section of the book discusses "policy and decision making," and is more directly aimed at managers and policymakers. This book is not a comprehensive treatment of the subject (like, for instance, Troubled Waters: Religion, Ethics, and the Global Water Crisis, Chamberlain (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)). It is a collection of essays, some general, some very specific, that provide useful and valuable insights without totally covering the field or providing a full background on water ethics. Various chapters introduce different aspects of ethical philosophy, but none comes close to an in-depth treatment of ethical philosophy. Some essays, especially in the last section, use bureaucratic language with many acronyms. Particularly noteworthy are the Indigenous perspectives from Clifford Atleo and Deborah McGregor, coming from cultural backgrounds in which water is a living, sentient being closely related to human society and thus far more an ethical "subject" (in a Kantian sense) than it is in most western thought (in which water is often a mere commodity or "object").
Assessment: This book is a valuable collection of essays, especially useful to policymakers and administrators. It might be best if paired with more comprehensive treatments, such as Chamberlain's Troubled Waters and Peter Gleick's biennial reviews and studies. It would also go well with in-depth treatments of traditional management like Richard Foltz' treatments of Islamic religious usage or detailed studies of traditional irrigation systems like Water and Power in Highland Peru: The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development, Gelles (Rutgers University Press, 2000).
