Fishman - The Big Thirst: The Marvels, Mysteries & Madness Shaping the New Era of Water

THIS BOOK STARTED AS A SUGGESTION, really a single drop of water, in the form of an e-mail. The day I finished writing my first book, The Wal-Mart Effect , my friend Eric Mlyn wrote in a note, I want to see an article on bottled water.

A few months later, my family was staying in a hotel where the rooms were stocked with FIJI Water. Wed never seen FIJI Water before. My wife opened a bottle, took a long swallow, and declared FIJI Water superior to her favorite, Evian.

My editors at Fast Company magazineKeith Hammonds, Mark Vamos, and Bob Safianrealized that with water coming, in shipping containers, all the way from Fiji to hotels and convenience stores in the United States, the business of bottled water was worth a story. They let me follow the reporting all the way to the north coast of Fijis main island, Viti Levu. The Fast Company story, Message in a Bottle, was published in August 2007; the response made it clear that readers wanted to know more about their water.

Raphael Sagalyn, my agent, showed his usual understated brilliance. Over dinner, he persuaded me that the book proposal I had labored over was inside outthe real book idea appeared in a single paragraph on page 8 of the seventeen pages I had written. Rafe has the ability to inspire the most ambitious work, while also keeping me firmly planted in reality.

Emily Loose, who edited The Big Thirst at Free Press, as she previously edited The Wal-Mart Effect at Penguin, is the kind of editor that authors hope for. Sometimes it seemed as if she was thinking about water as much as I was, and our dozens of conversations shaped my reporting and crystalized my thinking. Her text editing is always graceful and respectful, often inspired.

Learning about water has taken me literally around the world, and it has been eye opening and challenging, fun, and frequently humbling. I am consistently amazed at how willing people are to share their hard-won knowledge and their time. It was not possible to land in a country like Australia or India, where I knew no one, and be effective without a lot of help and hospitality.

In Australia, the following people provided advice and connections, insight and time; some also offered a bed to sleep in: sa Wahlquist, Mike Duffy, Liz and Robbie Burns, Tim Calkins, Phil Kneebone, Jim Gill, Sue Murphy, Jorg Imberger, Laurie and Deb Arthur, Ross Young, Wayne Meyer, Mike Young, Bruce Naumann, Kevin Flanagan, Alan Kleinschmidt, Stephanie Simms, and Ken Harnett.

Before I got to India, David Strelneck of Ashoka opened doors for me with Ashokas Fellows on the ground, introductions that were indispensable. David Foster provided valuable advice.

In India, the following people took me to places, introduced me to people, and allowed me to experience things I never would have found on my own: Mehmood Khan, Jyoti Sharma, V. S. Chary, Vimlendu Jha, Venkatesh D, Adrien Couton, Amit Jain, Kushal, Sanjay Desai, and Mohan B. Dagaonkar. Bridget Wagner and Steve Matzie welcomed me into their apartment in Defence Colony, giving me a base and a place to call home. It was an island amid the swirl of Delhi. And theyve been endlessly patient with questions about daily life in India.

No less vital were those back here in the United States: Professor Geri Richmond at the University of Oregon; Eric Wilson in Galveston, Texas; J. C. Davis at the Las Vegas Valley Water District, and Yvette Monet at MGM Resorts, in Las Vegas; Janette Bombardier at IBM in Burlington, Vermont; Mark Fuller at WET Design; Jeff Fulgham at GE Water; Jane Lazgin at Nestl Waters North America; the staff at Aqua America in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; and the staff at Campbell Soup in Camden, New Jersey.

At Free Press, Im grateful for the confidence, patience, and help of Martha Levin, Dominick Anfuso, Edith Lewis, Nicole Kalian, and Alexandra Pisano. At the Sagalyn Literary Agency, I rely on Bridget Wagner, Shannon ONeill, and Jennifer Graham. And I couldnt get by without the help of Cheryl Maynard, Renae Vaughn, Heather Craige, Ken Wiley, Lily Shapiro, and, of course, Myrtle Kearse.

You cant write a book like this without good friends, friends who have both patience and good humor: G. D. Gearino, Chuck Salter, Kevin Spear, Ruth Sheehan, Keith Hammonds, and John Dornan; as well as my siblings, Matthew, Betsy, and Andrew.

My parents, Sue and Larry Fishman, are always among my first and most enthusiastic readers; their support is vital.

Nicolas Fishman and Maya Wilson have offered insight, inspiration, enthusiasm, fun, music recommendations, and during one memorable car ride, a string of a dozen excellent title ideas. They make the sun come up each morning.

As always, two people deserve special mention.

No one is closer to the creation of this book than Geoff Calkins. Every day for months, he has heard chapters read aloud, and then offered the kind of editing most writers never get, let alone having it available on-demand, eighteen hours a day. He can spot the dull parts and enliven them; he can hear the tangled sections and disentangle them. He is never too tired, too busy, or too distracted by his own responsibilities to offer advice, support, and inexhaustible cheerfulness. Geoff is that rarest of people, a best friend for thirty years.

And finally, my wife, Trish Wilson, has really had two jobs the last two yearsher own, and editing this book. Her editing is so true that once shes made a pointabout a sentence, a paragraph, or the arc of a whole storyits not possible to go with the lesser version. Her enthusiasm and her love are as resilient as water itselfproviding both steady support and that essential splash of magic.

As a reporter, Charles Fishman has tried to get inside organizations, both familiar and secret, and explain how they work. Fishmans previous book, the New York Times bestseller The Wal-Mart Effect , was the first to crack open Wal-Marts wall of secrecy, and has become the standard for understanding Wal-Marts impact on our economy and on how we live. The Economist named it a Book of the Year.

In the course of reporting about water, Fishman has stood at the bottom of a half-million-gallon sewage tank, sampled water directly from the springs in San Pellegrino in Italy and Poland Spring in Maine, and carried water on his head for three kilometers (more than a mile and a half) with a group of Indian villagers.

Fishman is a former metro and national reporter for the Washington Post , and was a reporter and editor at the Orlando Sentinel and The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since 1996, he has worked for the innovative business magazine Fast Company . Fishman has won numerous awards, including three times receiving UCLAs Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious award in business journalism.

Fishman lives outside Philadelphia with his wife, also a journalist, their two children, and their yellow Labrador. He likes his water from the refrigerator spigot, with ice, or splashing across the bow of a Sunfish.

Learn more at www.charles-fishman.com .

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what it is.

D. H. Lawrence, The Third Thing

AT T MINUS 16 SECONDS in the launch sequence of NASAs space shuttle, the launch control computers would trigger the release of water from a 290-foot-high water tank that stands next to the launchpad at Floridas Kennedy Space Center. The two pipes that delivered the water to the pad are each seven feet in diameter. Just before the shuttles rocket motors ignited, 300,000 gallons of water would cascade across the base of the pad, eventually flowing at a rate of nearly a million gallons a minute. As the shuttle roared off the pad, the blast from its five engines poured down into the 2.5-million-pound cushion of water. The water was flowing so furiously it ran out nine seconds into liftoff.