A Wicked Researcher and Writer

Thanks to Clare for nominating Karen Piper as a non-fiction writer to celebrate this week. Karen Piper is the author of The Price of Thirst, Cartographic Fictions and Left in the Dust, which the Los Angeles Times has called an “eco-thriller” that every “tap-turning American” should read. A regular contributor to Places magazine, Piper is also a winner of Sierra’s Nature Writing Award and has published in numerous academic journals. She is professor of postcolonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri.

I'm particularly interested in The Price of Thirst. For those who have no access to clean water—a fifth of the world's population—the price of water isn't $2.99 a bottle, it's thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper leads us through in the book—one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations.

In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns.

The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.

Wanna do something this year to support the millions of people living without access to clean water around the world. Support organizations like charity: water, Water Charity (yes, they are two different organizations), and others who are working on this issue. 

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