The Blues

This review aspires to fulfill an almost impossible mission: a tandem assessment and a reconciliation of two very different books on one of the broadest of all subjects — water. One of them, Maude Barlow’s Whose Water Is It, Anyway?, is a slim and easy read. Part memoir, part manifesto, part rant, and part promotion, it will give the reader no difficulty whatsoever in determining where Barlow stands on such issues as Canadian sovereignty over its waters, the folly of privatizing public water utilities, the evils of bottled water, and the struggle around the world to resist neo-liberal, state-propelled erosion of publicly controlled water rights.

The second book, Jamie Benidickson’s Levelling the Lake, is the opposite of a slim and easy read. It might — by way of Benidickson’s thoughtful presentation of historical facts — actually upset some readers, including those who object to profitable corporations that pass along the environmental costs of their...