What exactly is the tenuous connection between an individual and culture? When does a cultural tradition cease to offer security to its members and instead becomes so confining that one must protest or rebel to survive as an individual? These issues, which had often undercut the author's well-intentioned research plans, compelled her to pay attention to the subjective aspect of research as much as the objective ones. This was the beginning of an inner exploration which led her to become a Jungian psychotherapist and a different kind of observer of human nature and culture.

"I read this wide-ranging and thoughtful book while sitting on the banks of the Ganges near Varanasi-it's a river already badly polluted, and now threatened by the melting of the loss of the glaciers at its source to global warming. Four hundred million people depend on it, and there's no backup plan. As Steven Solomon makes clear, the same is true the world over; this volume will give you the background to understand the forces that will drive much of 21st century history." -Bill McKibben In Water, esteemed journalist Steven Solomon describes a terrifying-and all too real-world in which access to fresh water has replaced oil as the primary cause of global conflicts that increasingly emanate from drought-ridden, overpopulated areas of the world. Meticulously researched and undeniably prescient, Water is a stunningly clear-eyed action statement on what Robert F Kennedy, Jr. calls "the biggest environmental and political challenge of our time."