DRY SPRING: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, by Chris Wood

“Climate change isn’t an abstract scenario for the distant future,” says award-winning Canadian journalist Chris Wood in his new book DRY SPRING: The Coming Water Crisis of North America. “It is upon us now.”

But DRY SPRING is not just “another book about ‘climageddon’,” promises Wood, a former Maclean’s editor and correspondent. It’s about protecting our water: “An extreme enough change in the climate could alter almost everything we know about our planet, but we’ll feel even a very small degree of change most personally and acutely in its effect on the distribution of fresh and ample water.”

After three decades of reporting natural phenomena for magazines like Maclean’s and The Walrus, Wood’s research for his latest book took him to the deck of a foreign freighter transiting the Great Lakes, the bed of the drained Colorado River south of the Mexican border, and the Rocky Mountain foothills where a century-old ditch recalls a long-forgotten standoff between Canada and the United States. Wood recorded scores of personal interviews with ranchers, vintners, fishermen, ship captains, families who have fled their homes - all so readers could “experience the impacts of climate change today through people like themselves.”

Wood focuses on the years immediately ahead, suggesting realistic solutions and offering guidance to policy makers, resource managers - and every citizen with a voice and a vote.

Not afraid to court controversy, Wood challenges activists like Maude Barlow who oppose the so-called ‘commodification’ of water. They are not saving the environment, Wood asserts, but instead setting it on a path to destruction. “Nothing inspires innovation faster than a problem that can be solved profitably,” he argues. “Once we shed our fear of mentioning water and markets in the same breath, a panoply of inexpensive, effective and adaptive solutions begin to recommend themselves.”

Ultimately, Wood stresses, DRY SPRING is about what we can all do, indeed must do, to ensure that we survive the changes in our climate: “There are many reasons to be apprehensive about the quarter-century ahead. Many things could go terribly wrong… Water, however, is at the heart of solving all these other problems. If we can get the water part right, we will have the chance to apply our astonishing collective ingenuity and adaptive capacity to all the rest.”

DRY SPRING is published by Raincoast Books in April 2008.

To request a review copy of DRY SPRING or to arrange an interview with author Chris Wood, please email Dan Wagstaff at Raincoast books: dan[at]raincoast.com.