Nukes Fires Floods The China Syndrome (1979)

The recent conflagration at the nuclear power plants in Japan after the horrifying earthquake/tsunami event has freaked nations all over the world. Restudying their own nuclear plants and emergency plans, countries have realized that many of them are sheer blue sky fantasies. Germany has now gone the whole nine yards claiming they will eliminate all nuclear power by the third decade of the 21st century.

Meanwhile in the USA nuclear power plants have come under close scrutiny and the studies are not positive. Licenses extended for aging plants that are leaking radioactive water into the environment is just one of many problems revealed in a recent two part series by the Associated Press last week called US Nuke Regulators Weaken Safety Rules.

In The China Syndrome, written and directed by James Bridges, and released on March 16, 1979, 12 days before the Three Mile Island disaster, a middle management plant operator discovers a fatal flaw in the plant design, one that could produce a "China Syndrome" where burning fuel would melt through the containment building, hit water and release deadly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. When he tries to notify the public he is harassed, discredited and ultimately killed, just as his plant almost loses all control and almost blows up.

While this fictional possibility has been discussed endlessly since Three Mile Island, other contemporary events are now making the China Syndrome a possibility again. One involves the raging forest fires around Los Alamos, New Mexico, threatening the nuclear power labs there and perhaps creating the possibility of nuclear contamination of the area.

The other two dangers involve the flooding of two nuclear power plants in Nebraksa, due to the unusually high water runoffs from dams in the area. Fort Calhoun's power plant has been shut down for refueling since April of 2011, but is still in danger, since it's secondary line of flood defense collapsed on Sunday, June 26th. If the water continues to rise, the plant may find itself in danger of losing all power and having its cooling systems collapse and its fuel rods may melt. It seems no one ever believed the waters would ever reach such staggering heights. If the dams north of the facility break these theories may soon be tested.

The Brownville nuke plant is near the Missouri River and is also in danger of seeing record high waters inundating the facility. It seems nobody took the time to truly put that plant on high ground and this one is fully operational as I write.

Watching The China Syndrome becomes a curiously contemporary event. As nuke plants all over the world fail in spectacular ways and large parts of the land around them have to be abandoned for centuries it would be prudent for everyone to try and figure out where the nuke plants are and how safe they really might be. Nebraska and everyone downstream on the Missouri River are learning that lesson right now and will be relearning it as long as catastrophic flooding remains a distinct possibility this whole summer and well into the fall of 2011.

National Film Board of Canada Films at ASLE

Elspeth Tulloch, from the Universite Laval in Quebec City, highlighted three important films questioning food industry practices, all of which can be found on the National Film Board of Canada's website: http://onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/home.php

Beef, Inc., Bacon: A Movie, and Animals all focus on the meat industry and its negative consequences, for example, connecting fecal matter and governmental policy. Beef, Inc. and Bacon: A Movie both rely on tropes of unveiling and talking head interviews to demonstrate problems with fecal waste and slaughtering practices. Although the filmmakers for Beef, Inc. did not have access to the slaughter houses, however, the absence of visuals and critical commentary on blood and flesh moved beyond shielding the self from the source of the foods we eat to the shock of absence.

Bacon: A Movie concentrated on the negative effects Quebec hog farming was having on air and water toxicity levels. The hogs are individualized through visuals of artificial insemination and separation from the mother, changing practices in industrial hog farms around Quebec. Contrasting pastoral images devoid of farm animals with shots outside slaughterhouses and images of hogs as food suggested there was no place for connections in this hyper-industrialized era.  

Animals, on the other hand, looks at the everyday slaughter of animals for food on a family farm where the animals are personalized as pets with names before the slaughter. Animals are included in the credits alongside their human filmmaker counterparts, as well, so the sentience of these farm animals is validated. These animals' faces are even reasserted onto the meat after their slaughter. In the film, actual slaughter of a rabbit and a  yearling are shown, but we only hear the filmmaker's acts of killing. The message is ambiguous in animals, but still points to the need to realize our meat comes from sentient beings.

These films work well alongside popular U.S. food films such as Food, Inc. and King Corn, as well as European films such as We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread. That connection comes thanks to Elspeth's introducing us to the films available on the NFB site.

Ninth ASLE Biennial Conference: "Species, Space and the Imagination of the Global: http://www.indiana.edu/~asle2011/

I just returned from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Conference and wanted to highlight a plenary speaker whose work engages ecocritical approaches to water rights, species preservation, and climate change:

Subhankar Banerjee
Director's Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Fall 2011. As a photographer, writer, activist and founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org, Banerjee is a leading voice on issues of arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, resource development and climate change. He has also focused on global forest deaths from climate change, including the loss of old growth forests in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico caused by the recent out-of-control fires. His world-renowned blog, "Climate Storytellers: A Gathering Place for Stories on All things Global Warming" includes posts by James E. Hansen and Dr. Vandana Shiva.

See the Climate Story tellers blog here.

Robert Fischman
Law, Indiana University
author of The Meanings of Biological Integrity, Diversity, and Environmental Health and The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System through Law
Fishman is one of the leading U.S. scholars in environmental law and has written numerous books and articles on public land management, endangered speices recovery, animal migration, environmental impact analysis, feeralism, and global climate change. His work in the areas of resource management and conservation highlight the affects of property ownership on water and land rights. Work to promote Land Trust and Conservation Easements, for example, has preserved resources on at least 150 million acres, and the Refuge system has conserved only 20 million. The Property Clause in the U.S. Constitution and the Endangered Species act have both promoted an increase in public lands via legal channels. Such work also preserves the resources available on those lands, including water.

Hospitals as Deadly Ecosystems

There is a matter of fact statistic that gets bounced around a lot these days and for some reason it never seems to capture the attention of the media creators or their media obsessed viewers. It has to do with hospitals and the needless number of deaths that are caused every year because of millions of infections that are caught on site in these ecosystems. Let me quote something from today's Wall Street Journal (June 21, 2011). It is tossed off nonchalantly, as if we all know the grim news: "Hospital-acquired infections cause an estimated 100,000 deaths in the U.S. annually and are an increasing threat to patient safety around the world." That's one jumbo jet crashing to earth every day of the year with no Sundays off.

The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths cites the same number of deaths, but adds that there are over 2 million such infections caused by hospital stays and 30 billion dollars in yearly costs. Since many of these infections can be stopped by simple things like hand washing, testing of incoming patients, and other simple, cost effective actions, you would think this would lead the news every night, would be the source of great outrage by any publicity seeking politician and the source of many films, feature and documentary alike. Where is Paddy Chayevsky when you need him?

The great, late Chayevsky (Marty, Network) already took his shots at hospitals with his screenplay The Hospital which was directed by Arthur Hiller in 1971 and starred George C Scott as an anguished doctor, dealing with suicidal thoughts, while contending with his disintergrating home life and a series of deaths in the hospital that were in large part due to malfeasance, incompetence and possibly a mysterious, deadly character. Chayevsky's lacerating examination of the ecosystem full of doctors, nurses, orderlies and chaos was unsparing, but actually matched by a documentary by Frederick Wiseman a year earlier. Wiseman's Hospital focuses, using his veritae techniques, on the daily operations of a Manhattan hospital, but presents the daily grind of serving countless patients, many of them poor and helpless. Both films give audiences a sense of the enormous breathing, living thing a hospital is, but we have had few films like these in the last 40 years.

It intriques me that such a large number of yearly deaths, occuring in institutions that are supposed to be saving lives, has not been the subject matter of a wave of films. If the math is correct, over one million people have died since 9/11, because of "hospital acquired infections" and over 20 million people injured. And if the experts that have studied these ecosystems are correct, most of the traumatic deaths and injuries are "preventable".

The Wall Street Journal article I cited was focused on how cellphones are now seen as a source of new infections. Patients, doctors or visitors who carry them into the hospital ecosystems are introducing "disease-causing bacteria on 39.6% of patient phones and 20.6% of workers phones."

A conga line of deadly bacterium are then announced. What a dystopian film that information could help create. But we won't be getting that kind of film. It's summer and time for The Green Lantern, The X Men and Cars II. The characters in these films may save many, but none of their heroic acts will involve washing their hands or decontaminating anything as simple as a cell phone.

Metamorphosis and Mutation in Context

The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) listserv has lately been discussing texts that address the metamorphosis of one creature into another, sparking descriptions of metamorphosis found in children’s literature, American Indian Mythology, and science fiction stories and novels. Mark Giles noted a Philip K. Dick story, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.”

H.G.Wells’ The Food of the Gods also highlights metamorphosis, growth of animals to a gigantic size, and has inspired multiple filmic adaptations. Bert I. Gordon directed two of these: The Village of the Giants (1965) and The Food of the Gods (1976). A third, Gnaw: Food of the Gods Part 2, directed by Damien Lee, was released in 1989. In The Village of the Giants, a young boy’s (Ron Howard) experiments result in the formula that expands the size of animals, including a  few ducks that become the centerpiece of a teen barbecue, and in Gnaw, scientists are the cause, but in The Food of the Gods, the source of mutation remains unnamed.

Many science fiction films center on animal growth or mutation, but the source of the metamorphosis varies according to the films’ contexts. For example, Them! (1954) highlights giant ants that grow to an enormous size because of atomic radiation. In Frogs (1972), however, after the creation of the EPA, frog mutations are blamed on toxic chemicals Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) uses to rid his property of pests. To emphasize the film’s environmental message, a free-lance photographer (Sam Elliott) unearths the consequences of Crockett’s chemical dumping for Ecology Magazine.  Mutated frogs and other animals avenge Crockett’s destruction of nature, in a campy conclusion to a film that mingles horror and eco-disaster.

John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy (1979) takes this genre further by extending it from individuals to corporations. The film warns of the real consequences of toxic waste dumping through a shocking monster movie with an environmental message: A lake, river, and its tributaries are polluted by the treatments used at a lumber company and paper mill in Maine, creating evolutionary monsters that attack indigenous people, both literally and through their deformed fetuses.

The lake at what one Indian elder calls “the Garden of Eden” is fed by the river where the mill treats lumber and extracts toxic waste. We see the industrial process from lumber in the river to paper in the huge mill. Once it is constructed, the pulp is bleached with chlorine and dried using a caustic solution. Although the lumber folk claim it is biodegradable, approved by the EPA, and does not get into the watershed, the chemical is revealed to be methyl mercury.

Ultimately Doctor Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) discovers that local tribal members, fish, and raccoons suffer from mercury poisoning and compares the disaster to an mercury poisoning catastrophe in Minimata, Japan that resulted in a hundred thousand deaths. Indigenous residents eat fish infected with mercury and act as if they are drunk because mercury attacks the nervous system. The same symptoms appear in a raccoon. The mercury also affects human fetuses because it jumps the placental barrier and results in freakism and stillbirths, even like a deformed bear monster that attacks backpackers.

The mutations continue in contemporary science fiction films. In ExistenZ (1999), for example, David Cronenberg uses mutated amphibians as a plot point to explore the ethics of reality-based videogames. A two-headed lizard is seen as a sign of the times, so mutated amphibians are raised deliberately in controlled aquatic farms, at least in the videogame world Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Ted (Jude Law) enter, presumably to infiltrate a videogame company and assassinate its chief game creator. The film’s message seems focused primarily on the ethics of videogames, but it also bases game play on mutations constructed by humans. Mutations continue in comic monster movies such as Eight Legged Freaks (2002) and Monsters Vs. Aliens (2009), suggesting the plot device will continue, but the type and source of the mutation will change. 

*Gasland* and Facebook

A new message and petition have been posted on Facebook that connects with and perhaps demonstrates the success of Josh Fox's Gasland (2010):

Tell your Senator: Protect our water from dangerous Fracking: act.credoaction.com

"It's no joke. Oil and gas companies are free to pump unchecked quantities of toxic and cancer causing chemicals   into our water, and thanks to the work of Dick Cheney, the EPA is handcuffed from taking action. The Senate needs to pass the FRAC Act to protect our water from dangerous Fracking."

Gasland (2009), a well-regarded documentary, highlights the dangers to groundwater aquifers caused by natural gas drilling. As Robert Kohler of Variety asserts, “GasLand may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT” because it so effectively demonstrates and illustrates the horrific repercussions of injecting chemicals and extracting natural gas from underground shale—toxic water and poisoned aquifers. Visions of flaming water faucets and dying cattle, dogs, and aquatic animal and plant life make it clear in the film that hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” at least without effective regulations, may have catastrophic results for a region’s drinking and agricultural water. The film concentrates on the problem, however, without offering a solution other than perhaps eliminating hydraulic fracturing altogether.

GasLand begins by questioning responses to the premise that natural gas supplies in the United States are a virtual ocean in the shale basins of the East and West. The assertion from gas companies is that natural gas is good for the nation, for our economy, and our environment and poses no credible threat to drinking water because hydraulic fracturing, “fracking,” occurs deep under ground and is regulated by the EPA. Filmmaker Josh Fox, however, calls these claims into question by telling his and his region’s own “fracking” story. Fox first tells the story of his house in Milenville, PA, built in the 1970s near a stream connected to the Delaware River during the time when Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law. But the house is now atop the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, Fox explains, the Marcellus Shale Formation of the Appalachian Basin, and he is being offered nearly $100 thousand for leasing his 19 acres. The goal, he is told, is for Americans to adopt natural gas as the fuel of the future.

But because it is seen as such a necessary energy source, an energy bill passed in 2005 for Halliburton Technology, the source for some hydraulic fracturing technology, exempted “fracturing” from the Clean Water Act and local, regional, and national drinking water laws.

The film explains “fracking” in detail, demonstrating that the process requires the use of chemicals such as diesel fuel, which contains benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene, and naphthalene, as well as polycyclic oromatic hydrocarbons, methanol, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, glycol ethers, hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide. The process also requires approximately 7 million gallons of water each time fracking is used to drill a deep shale gas well.

Fox attempts to talk to Halliburton—or any other company—about this process, including T. Boone Pickens. But none of the companies will speak with him, so Fox draws on the nostalgia that opened the film, providing memories of the stream near his house before the rush for natural gas as “alternative” fuel. The images contrast dramatically with the 2010 context in which more than 40 gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania in a few months. The hydraulic fracturing process now is poisoning landowners water supplies. According to Fox, complaints are growing about wells going bad around the natural gas sites in Pennsylvania. A well exploded on New Years. Animals are losing their hair and vomiting. A cat now refuses t go outside. Horses now have no good water to drink. One family complains that they can light their drinking water on fire as it comes out of the faucet. If they turn on the water, it could explode because it is contaminated with natural gas. Water produced from the fracking process has been dumped into fields and onto streams, poisoning water for humans and their animals and crops. Fox finds similar repercussions in Nebraska and Wyoming and Texas.


Gasland reveals many of the disastrous repercussions of “fracking,” but as Sight and Sound reviewer Sam Davies asserts, “The effect is to leave the viewer with the disturbing sense of the sheer quantity of evidence amassed by Fox, and what Gasland has had to omit.”

When Vegetables Go Rogue

The recent tragic deaths and the thousands of cases of sickness caused by a new strain of E-Coli poisoning in Germany has been attributed to cucumbers, asparagus, sprouts and tomatoes. People are just avoiding the consumption of vegetables to be safe, many thinking that these food sources themselves are producing the toxins. Russia, for example, immediately banned the importation of vegetables from Western Europe and Germany, which intially blamed Spain for the outbreak, now has to admit they were wrong about the Spanish vegetables and that they still have not pinpointed the cause of this new food borne outbreak. While scientists now believe they can identify this new strain of deadly E-Coli, finding its source is another problem that has yet to be solved.

We do know one thing: vegetables do not produce E-Coli. They may be contaminated with such toxins by being exposed to them through irrigation water that contains fecal runoffs from farm animals or human beings, but vegetables do not produce these poisons. The impression that rogue vegetables exist may ease the need for children to avoid eating their veggies, but just this image deflects the real problem: industrial animal farming.

A look at the documentary Food Inc. or the feature film Fast Food Nation is a good place to kick start the discussion. Each film uses the idea of E-Coli as a major narrative thread. Food Inc. argues that pernicious strains of E-Coli are produced through noxious industrial food production techniques and contrasts the raising of cattle on grass, with no antibiotics involved, as a safe means of producing food that will not endanger the consuming public. Fast Food Nation presents the existance of dangerous E-Coli in the food chain that starts at the feed lot, continues at the slaughter house and ends at the burger joints which serve the dangerous meat as cheap meals for fast eating. Everyone knows there is a problem, but noone cares to do anything that would stop the food chain from operating in the way it exists.

There are numerous other films that focus on the issue of food safety. While vegetables can carry the E-Coli toxins, they cannot produce them. It takes humans to become involved in the the food chain for that to happen. Or an industrial raised cow, chicken or pig. The irony of avoiding veggies and eating more meat to stay "safe" is one of the larger ironies of this latest food disaster. It certainly won't be the last.

Activism in Mountaintop Removal Films: Turn Off The Lights for Sustainability

             B.J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) opens with an assertion from anti-mountaintop removal mining (MTR) activist Julia (Judy) Bonds that restates one argument against MTR, its destruction of the Appalachian landscape. According to Bonds, “A sense of place pulls at you here. It’s a trait that makes Appalachians who they are,” and that sense of place is reinforced by pristine images of forest-covered hills, mountain streams, and wildlife seemingly untouched by the outside world. This is Appalachia, the images assert, and this view of Appalachia as a region, a place, and a way of life is validated with the accompanying mountain music in the background.

            This idyllic vision is shattered, however, when the scene shifts to reveal gruesome aerial shots of the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining in their end stages, showing mountaintops with browned, crushed tree strands, scattered like twigs. Other mountains, having lost their peaks, are as flat as billiard tables, their remains scattered down on the adjacent valleys as fill. From the distance, a 15 million pound dragline crane looks like a child’s Tonka toy, but the landscape is gray, brown, and completely barren. This is the perfect spot for Gomorra’s (2008) toxic waste dumping, except the coal companies have beaten them to the punch. As the film’s narrator explains, the mountains’ “guts [have been] blown out.”

            By effectively juxtaposing images of the pristine mountains that may become a memory with the hell mountaintop removal leaves in its wake, Rise Up! West Virginia successfully argues against MTR, but the narrator’s claim, “Coal mining hasn’t saved the state yet,” takes the argument further. Although all ten of the anti-mountaintop removal documentaries we viewed effectively demonstrate the disastrous effects of mountaintop removal mining, only B. J. Gudmundsson’s Mountain Mourning ( 2006) and Rise Up! West Virginia successfully support arguments against mountaintop removal mining while offering viable non-fossil fuel energy alternatives, alternatives that, according to the films, will eventually end America’s addiction to coal, and Appalachia’s over-reliance on a coalmining economy.

            Mountain Mourning and Rise Up! West Virginia succeed where other anti-MTR documentaries fail. Because Gudmundsson’s films support alternatives to coalmining, both MTR and underground, they provide a map toward a solution unbridled by hope in the face of hopelessness, destructive visions of progress, and perpetuation of our addiction to coal energy and the negative environmental and economic consequences associated with its mining and burning. You can read more in our upcoming article exploring anti-MTR films.

Flooding and Memory

We have studied a lot of films about flooding and written about how memory quickly disappears about such events. The River(1937) warns about why future catastrophic events will occur unless the country takes action and uses examples of the incredibly destructive floods in earlier years to make its case. But even when the country did take action, our knowledge of these events is meager, and we always seem surprised when catastrophes occur. Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans is just one more example. The failures of levees and other flood containment structures led to the destruction of much of the city. Failures to maintain these structures were, in large part, the loss of memory , the ability to forget how destructive floods will be when they happen.

Now the great floods of 2011 have begun and Spring thaws are just starting to melt some of the largest snowpacks seen in the West and upper Mid West. Will the dams hold? What dams and where? This morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch has published an essay by policy expert Bernard Shanks. Shanks has studies the earthen dams of the upper Missouri for years and finds them disasters waiting to happen. These dams were built in the 1940's and 1950's and because of their flawed construction may not be able to withstand the enormous amounts of water being created this year. The failure of Fort Peck Dam, "built with a flawed design that suffered a well-known fate for this type of dam-liquefaction-in which saturated soil loses its stability,"might mean the loss of every similar dam down river. These dams are massive in scale. Some are three miles in length. The failure of one might mean flooding so massive that St. Louis might find itself underwater. These hydraulic dams have been outlawed in California, according to Shanks, and "no other large dams have been built this way since".

But who knows about these problems? Have they been forgotten or just seen as "500 year events"? Have we even begun to examine what would happen if all these earthen dams fail at once? Here is Shanks on this scenario: "It would probably wreck every bridge, highway,pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly."

Dams are not easily built, reconfigured or replaced. If it takes a disaster the scale of the great floods of 1927 to do it then we are all in for some "interesting times". The floods of 1927? Read John Barry's book Rising Tide to understand the national catastrophe of the 1927 floods. Maybe it will prepare us if the great dam failures of 2011 occur.

*Blue Gold* and the Appropriative Doctrine

            As the title suggests, Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008) examines the worldwide consequences of commodifying water.  Blue Gold is grounded by its opening claim: “This is not a film about saving the environment. This is a film about saving ourselves,” narrator Malcolm McDowell declares. “Whoever goes without water for a week cries blood,” and an historical overview of ancient cultures’ attempts to manage water reinforces the film’s premise. The Egyptians and Romans succeeded, where the Mayans did not because they had too little water, the film argues. Today water is a source of profit for a few but necessary for us all. Negotiating a viable resolution between these two worldviews serves as an objective for the film.

            To move toward a solution to this conflict between profit and need, Blue Gold establishes the problem and supports it with illustrations from around the world. Our water is in crisis, a title card explains, and a World Social Forum in Nairobi is examining the evidence to determine the best ways to ensure water is available and affordable for everyone. According to Maude Barlow, fresh water only comprises three percent of the total water on Earth; yet, most of that is undrinkable because it is polluted by farmers, cars, and indistrial wastes that cause miscarriages, low sperm rates, and disease. The Rio Grande River in the United States, for example, is so polluted that anyone entering it would need eighteen vaccines and shots to survive.  Around the world, cholera, a water disease, kills more than wars because of this overt pollution, and over 60 percent of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed.

            The water crisis is a product not only of water pollution; however, it also is a repercussion of the mining of water for factories, farming, and the bottled water industry. The world’s fresh water supply is becoming polluted so fast that corporations are mining it faster than it can be replenished. In Urbur, Southern Oman collapsed into the desert in a sinkhole due to overuse of groundwater. Individuals, factory owners, and farmers overuse groundwater, sometimes because of the doctrine of prior appropriation that states if farmers or factory owners do not use the water, they may lose their water rights. Urban overdevelopment accelerates groundwater depletion because a paved land devastates the water cycle. Dam projects exacerbate the problem, according to Vandana Shiva, “choking the artery of the planet” and breaking a sustainable water cycle.

            To overcome this water crisis, Blue Gold declares that we need to work on a renewable supply and determine how much we really have to work with and live within those limits. The film asserts that water should be a public commons rather than a privatized source of profit, as it is now around the world—with help from big companies such as Veolia, Suez, SwE, Vivereli, and Nestle. The last scenes of the film highlight ways to solve this water crisis. The title “The Way Forward” introduces multiple examples of local residents usurping the power of these corporate giants. Bolivia kicked out its private water companies and began a sustainable water plan. Dr. Peter Marshall provides ways to farm in sustainable ways through hydroponics. Uruguay rid itself of the Suez Water Treatment Company by changing its constitution. And the town of Freiburg, Maine poured Nestle’s bottle water back into its aquifers. The film ends here, but the suggestion is that together, and primarily on a local level, the water crisis can be solved. Although the Nairobi summit’s solutions are not discussed, and the local solutions seem limited, the multiple problems associated with water rights are revealed and illustrated well in Blue Gold.