A comprehensive sourcebook for ensuring that Earth has water to support human life

Climate change is scary. The enormity of the environmental problems we face can be overwhelming. What should we do? Where should we begin?

Dr. Kathleen Luske Brooke is a researcher, a writer and activist who is in the process of a huge project to collect sources, inspire thinking discussion and action. Dr. Lusk Brooke started with water, perhaps the first requirement for life and she has compiled facts, research, work of others, and how to get involved into a comprehensive source book and roadmap for ensuring that Earth has water to support human life, Renewing the World: Water.

Humans are great builders, as is well documented in Building the World: An Encyclopedia of the Great Engineering Projects in History, cowritten by Kathleen Lusk Brooke with Frank Davidson, the MIT engineering professor who helped build the “Chunnel”, the tunnel under the English Channel, using System Dynamics to model currents and terrain such that when starting from both ends they connected perfectly despite a distance of twenty miles.

Humans are also great despoilers. There are pollutants in our water. There’s a lot of plastic in the oceans and rivers and microplastics in our bodies. Rising seas and floods threaten our living spaces. Droughts are threatening agriculture. Fires are destroying whole communities, some more than once. Water infrastructure can last 100 years, but many developed countries’ infrastructure is fast approaching the end of its’ natural life.

Yeah, climate change is scary.

Humans are also great problem-solvers. Renewing the World: Water  describes the background of the problems we face with water, and frames ten specific challenges and a call to action for each.

Perhaps the greatest value for me was the many QR codes and weblinks. I was gifted a print copy of this book, and the color photography is stunning, but I went back and bought the electronic copy so that I have easy access to the links.

Hopefully many will follow this roadmap to action.

Very helpful case discussion companion to Renewing the World: Water, the first two elements of the Think – Talk – Act paradigm.

Renewing the World: Casebook for Leadership in Water is a companion to Renewing the World: Water.

Who will solve our problems with water? Those who work in corporations today? Maybe. Those who work in government today? Maybe. Those studying in universities? Maybe.

How will these problems be solved? There is a paradigm: Think – Talk – Act. Graduate programs in business and social sciences often use case discussion to place students in a situation and let them solve a problem. The learning theory behind case discussion is that the aft of solving a problem in simulation will help to transfer skill to the real world. Case discussion is the first two elements of the Think – Talk – Act paradigm.

There are 10 cases each framing a specific “water” problem: Infrastructure, Agriculture, Land development, Rights, Rising Seas, Deep Sea mining, Biodegradables, Hydraulic Fracturing, Fashion messaging, Eliminating microplastics. Dr. Lusk Brook suggests a System Dynamics model as a problem-solving methodology. Like the companion volume  Renewing the World Water, I was gifted a print copy, but purchased the electronic one for easy access to the many thinking tools, sources, and links to people and organizations already working on these problems.