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Zusatztext 72105461 Informationen zum Autor Cynthia Barnett is a long-time journalist whose awards include a national Sigma Delta Chi prize for investigative magazine reporting and eight Green Eyeshades, which recognize outstanding journalism in the Southeast. Her first book, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. , won the gold medal for best nonfiction in the Florida Book Awards and was a “One Region/One Book” selection in thirty Florida counties. Barnett earned a master’s degree in environmental history and was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she spent a year studying water. She lives with her family in Gainesville, Florida. Klappentext Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes! for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world! much to quench what's now our largest crop-the lawn. Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to our taps! irrigates our food! and produces our electricity. And most don't realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble. Blue Revolution exposes the truth about the water crisis-driven not as much by lawn sprinklers as by a tradition that has encouraged everyone! from homeowners to farmers to utilities! to tap more and more. But the book also offers much reason for hope. Award-winning journalist Cynthia Barnett argues that the best solution is also the simplest and least expensive: a water ethic for America. Just as the green movement helped build awareness about energy and sustainability! so a blue movement will reconnect Americans to their water! helping us value and conserve our most life-giving resource. Avoiding past mistakes! living within our water means! and turning to "local water" as we do local foods are all part of this new! blue revolution. Reporting from across the country and around the globe! Barnett shows how people! businesses! and governments have come together to dramatically reduce water use and reverse the water crisis. Entire metro areas! such as San Antonio! Texas! have halved per capita water use. Singapore's "closed water loop" recycles every drop. New technologies can slash agricultural irrigation in half: businesses can save a lot of water-and a lot of money-with designs as simple as recycling air-conditioning condensate. The first book to call for a national water ethic! Blue Revolution is also a powerful meditation on water and community in America. From Chapter 1 The Illusion of Water Abundance During America’s retreat to the suburbs in the 1950s, large home lots, disposable incomes, and a nifty concrete spray called gunite gave families a new marker of success: the backyard swimming pool. For the rest of the twentieth century, residential pools symbolized upward mobility and offered a sense of seclusion not possible at city pools or even private clubs. The following decades redefined our relationship with water itself—from essence of life to emblem of luxury. By the time of the twenty-first-century housing run-up, even the plain blue pool had lost its luster. Adornments were needed. Aquatic affluence meant floating fire pits, glass portholes, and vanishing edges, which create the illusion of never-ending water. The amenity to envy was no longer the diving board. The musthave, now, was the waterfall. No community glorified the trend like Granite Bay, California. Granite Bay is nestled on the north shores of Folsom Lake, commuting distance east of Sacramento. The upscale suburb is named for the Cretaceous age rock that underlies this region in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. But during the housing boom, Granite Bay’s developers were determined to upstage the area’s natural geologic outcroppings. In Granite Bay’s best backyards, rocky waterfalls cascade artful...
