I fell into a wonderful book by Paolo Bacigalupi called The Water Knife. Paolo B. is known for books such as Shipbreaker and The Windup Girl. The Water Knife strikes a lot closer to home by creating a world in the none too distant future where water is fiercely scarce to the point where states are fighting each other over water rights and cities are drying up in the desert heat. Water Knives are the ‘fixers’ who go into a city, bribe all the officials and gather all the info they can about the water the city gets. The Knives do more as well. Often they are employed to blow up water treatment plants and dams, effectively ending the cit’s access to water.
The story unfolds as a mystery surrounding a death and some high level information the dead man was privy to. I’ve thought about using it for a class or two in the spring because the book references several real texts about water scarcity in the midwest. Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert in particular is an eye-opening look at how unsustainable desert life is.
This is particularly important to me as a reader, because I live in the desert. While the book goes to extremes in terms of corruption (okay, maybe not THAT extreme, I mean this is Phoenix after all… we are on our third uncorrupt Governor), but the deep and important message is that the water cannot last.
So, what to do with this information?