What is water? : the history of a modern abstraction

Summary: "We all know what water is, and we often take it for granted. But the spectre of a worldwide water crisis suggests there might be something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about water. Jamie Linton dives into the history of water as an abstract concept, stripped of its environmental, social, and cultural con texts. Reduced to a scientific abstraction - to mere H[subscript 2]O - this concept has given modern society licence to dam, divert, and manipulate water with apparent impunity. Part of the solution to the water crisis involves reinvesting water with social content, thus altering the way we see water. What Is Water? offers a fresh approach to a fundamental problem."--BOOK JACKET.

Record details

ISBN: 9780774817011 (bound)
ISBN: 0774817011 (bound)
Physical Description: print
xviii, 333 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Vancouver : UBC Press, c2010.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Foreword / Graeme Wynn -- Pt. I. Introduction -- 1. Fixing the Flow: The Things We Make of Water -- 2. Relational Dialectics: Putting Things in Fluid Terms -- Pt. 2. History of Modern Water -- 3. Intimations of Modern Water -- 4. From Premodern Waters to Modern Water -- 5. Hydrologic Cycle(s): Scientific and Sacred -- 6. Hortonian Hydrologic Cycle -- 7. Reading the Resource: Modern Water, the Hydrologic Cycle, and the State -- 8. Culmination: Global Water -- Pt. 3. Constitutional Crisis of Modern Water -- 9. Constitution of Modern Water -- 10. Modern water in Crisis -- 11. Sustaining Modern Water: The New "Global Water Regime" -- Pt. 4. Conclusion: What Becomes of Water -- 12. Hydrolectics.