Ep 43: Where Our Water Comes From (Part 1) - with Charles Fishman

When you turn on the tap or buy a bottle of water, do you ever wonder about where that water comes from and all the work and energy that is required to bring that water to you?  Are you curious to know what you can do individually to help conserve the world’s water supply and what you can do to help your community avoid a water crisis?

Listen as award-winning author and journalist Charles Fishman teaches us about our strange and complex relationship to one of the earth’s most vital resources, water.

Bio:
In the last four years, Charles Fishman has become one of the most forceful, challenging and inspiring public voices on water issues, speaking everywhere from MIT and UCLA, to Hershey chocolate and the US State Department.

Fishman’s book, “The Big Thirst: The secret life & turbulent future of water,” has become the best-selling water book in a generation, and is changing how people think about water, and how they confront the challenges of climate change. “The Big Thirst” does something few water books do — it restores a sense of wonder about water, along with a sense of urgency.

Fishman’s message is both blunt and optimistic. Everywhere in the world, climate change will make water problems that already exist worst. And many places that don’t think about water will suddenly have too much or too little. At the same time, the next decade will see a revolution in water akin to the revolution we’ve seen in computing, in medicine, in communication, in the last 10 years. Around the world, how people use water, how they get it, what they pay for it, and how they think about it — all will change. Because it must change.

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

He is the author, most recently, of “One Giant Leap: The impossible mission that flew us to the Moon” — a groundbreaking history of the race to the Moon in the 1960s that was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Fishman is the author of two other New York Times bestsellers, “The Wal-Mart Effect,” about Wal-Mart’s impact on how we live; and the #1 NYT bestseller, “A Curious Mind,” about the power of curiosity, with Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.

Fishman grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated from Harvard. After a stint in Mexico City, he now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, also a journalist, their two children, and their two Labradors. A two-foot wide creek runs through his backyard.

Books:
The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and HowIt's Transforming the American Economy

One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon