Talking with Alex Prud'homme

Water, water everywhere -- or so it seems these days. Open a paper, and you'll see American towns flooded out, forest fires sparking from extended drought and natural gas drilling practices polluting drinking water supplies. Alex Prud'homme, co-author with his great-aunt Julia Child of "My Life in France," believes this is the new normal. In "The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty- First Century" (Scribner, $27), Prud'homme, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, posits that water will become our primary focus in the decades to come. In a recent telephone call, Prud'homme discussed the declining quality of our water, the evils of antibacterial soap and how we're drinking the same water as the dinosaurs.

Historians say oil was the defining resource of the 20th century. Is water the new oil?

Oil certainly defined geopolitics for the last century, and water will define geopolitics in this century. But unlike oil, water is something all life requires -- there is no substitute for it. We can't live without it. Water is an essential resource.

Your title refers to the series of unseen consequences set off every time we use water. Can you give examples?

Every time you turn on your computer or use hot water, this requires power, which requires water. Nuclear reactors have giant cooling towers that are tremendously inefficient, coal requires immense amounts of water -- and as population grows, climate changes, and there is greater pressure on our water supply. If you wash your hands with antibacterial soap, it goes down the drain and kills bacteria that are the foundation of life, impacts the health of fish -- and their endocrine system is very similar to humans.

Your book is divided into sections including Quality, Drought and Flood. Which is scariest?

All are equally scary for different reasons. Forty years after the Safe Drinking Water Act, the quality of our water is getting worse, not better, often because our laws are outdated or ignored, politicized. People think of drought in Africa or Asia, but Atlanta had a drought last for three years, and the governor prayed for rain on the steps of City Hall -- then they had unprecedented floods! Floods will be more and more common in this country as sea levels rise and weather patterns change. We'll see more storms and more intense storms.

In your book, you say we are polluting our water at an alarming rate. Can't we just make more?

The earth has always had the same amount of water that it has today -- from the days of the dinosaurs to before. Any notion of new or unused water is a fallacy. What's different is the number of people using that water and the ways we're using it -- for energy, for food production, for manufacturing plastics, for computer-chip fabrication and much more. Unless we start taking this seriously now, in the coming decades we could have real water wars on our hands.