AVAILABILITY: Active Record (Readily Available)

Publication Date: March 2007
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Binding: Paperback
Topics: Greywater, Social Movements, Water Protection

Description: Both radical history of water and DIY guide to sustainable technologies, 'Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground' combines an analysis of water's history with the active fight for its future. Bringing together hundreds of national and international projects, organizations, and strategies, 'Dam Nation' investigates political economy and environmental impact of water consumption. It also gives readers easy, cheap, and thought-provoking ways to join the 'water underground' themselves. The book illustrates:

* How corrupt water policy led to bloody battles during the settlement of the American West

* How a Michigan town being drained by the Nestle Corporation is fighting to block water privatization nationwide

* How to reuse household water to create lush gardens

* How to build a composting toilet and a pedal-powered washing machine

* How to cultivate a pond filled with edible plants and mosquito-eating fish

* How residents jump started municipal eco-projects in such diverse locales as Tijuana, Mexico City, Zimbabwe and Arcata, California

* How a 'protest village' in Thailand and a neighborhood association in Louisiana both beat back dam and canal expansion with grassroots organizing

* How a coalition of Native American tribes organized cross culturally, leading Scottish shareholders to stand up for tribal salmon rights

* And much more!

Check out their on-line greywater plans at: .

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a lover of desert places. Co-founder of the Guerrilla Greywater Girls (now the Greywater Guerrillas) and the notorious Pollinators exchange, he prefers swimming in rivers to writing about them. Cleo is the editor of 'Urban Wilds: Gardeners' Stories of the Struggle for Land and Justice' and author of 'Sink or Swim: a History of Sausal Creek', a kid's book (brilliantly illustrated by Annie Danger) that he wrote for the Oakland middle-school students that he takes on explorations of urban creeks.

Laura Allen lives in the Bay Area and is an active gardener, elementary school teacher and aspiring inventor. As well as the three R's (readin', ritin' and rithmetic), she teaches urban gardening, creek restoration, and sustainable technologies. Co-author of the notorious 'Guerrilla Greywater Girls Guide to Water', she has been scheming and constructing greywater systems throughout the north coast for the last six years. Her writings can be found in 'Urban Wilds: Gardeners' Stories of the Struggle for Land and Justice', Clamor, and Home Power magazine. Her favorite activities are smashing concrete, hanging out in wetlands, visiting people's eco-toilets, and drinking tea.

July Oskar Cole learned to swim in the TVA lakes of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and to identify wild plants in the forests of the Cumberland Plateau. He learned most of the rest in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest: philosophy and astronomy in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, alternative building and "charco" style greywater practices in the Rio Grande bosque, and in the Basin and Range territory more things than can be listed. In the San Francisco Bay Area, he keeps bees, designs and installs greywater treatment wetlands, and sells books. He has also been published in ColorLines magazine and the '2006 Best Gay Erotica' anthology.

They can be contacted directly at .

Review(s): "The politics of water - as this brilliant anthology makes clear - are the politics of human survival. Read this, and believe me, you'll never flush with the same equanimity again." - Mike Davis, author of 'Dead Cities' and 'The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu'

"Water, water everywhere, and all of it controlled. This collection is essential reading for anyone - no, EVERYONE - in the least interested, not only in the prospects for human liberation, but survival itself." - Ward Churchill, author of 'A Little Matter of Genocide', 'Acts of Rebellion', and 'On the Justice of Roosting Chickens'

"Water has joined oil as the key political liquids of our epoch, and this book will join Amita Baviskar's 'In the Belly of the River' as a powerful weapon in the struggle of commoners everywhere against the neoliberal makeover of our world and its waters." - Iain Boal, author of 'Resisting the Virtual Life', 'The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure', and 'The Devil's Glossary'

"An accessible and energizing resource for the next generation of activists and radical plumbers." - Art Ludwig, author of 'Water Storage' and 'Create an Oasis with Greywater'.

"Two centuries of what Lewis Mumford called megatechnics have so altered the earth's hydrologic cycle that all life on the only water planet we know has grown as endangered as the bellwether salmon. An ever-ramifying network of dams, conduits, and pumps coerces water from riverbeds and aquifers, turning it toward cities and the fields that feed them in order to grow the most lucrative crop of all - land value. Like the alienated inhabitants of imperial Rome and Babylon, few urbanites know of the toxic deserts that are the city's price, nor of their peril as safe water and food run out. 'Dam Nation' takes you to front line water battles around the world as told by young and indigenous peoples fighting to reclaim the earth's arteries, lakes, and seas. More than merely witnesses to the multiple crises engulfing our world, these committed activists tell us how biotechnics can make the water we have killed live again. If you love your children and the world that sustains as it delights them, listen to these voices, then act." - Gray Brechin, author of 'Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin' and 'Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream'

"As the world faces a water crisis, this collection of thoughtful essays, illuminating profiles, and personal narratives is interwoven with constructive, practical suggestions that range from harvesting rainwater to installing composting toilets. 'Dam Nation' is a call to action, a conservation manifesto to create a movement one person at a time. I believe that many people will respond to this passionate plea to rethink how each of us uses water." - Robert Glennon, author of 'Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters'

"A sweeping overview of water use issues. 'Dam Nation' is an accessible and energizing resource for the next generation of activists and radical plumbers." - Art Ludwig, author of 'Create an Oasis with Greywater'