Texts under Consideration:

The vice president of the World Bank has pronounced, "The wars of the next century will be about water." Increasingly, transnational corporations are plotting to control the world's dwindling water supply. In England and France, where water has already been privatized, rates have soared and water shortages have been severe. The major bottled-water companies--Perrier, Evian, Naya, and now Coca-Cola and PepsiCo--head one of the fastest growing and least regulated industries, buying up fresh water rights and drying up crucial reserves.   The consumption of water doubles every twenty years--more than twice the rate of the increase in human population. This book captures in striking detail the forces behind the depletion of the world's fresh water, and the human and ecological impacts it entails.	David Goodstein, the vice provost and professor of physics at Caltech, explains the underlying scientific principles of the inevitable fossil fuel crisis we face, and the closely related peril to the Earth's climate.   America's military and industrial might arose largely from the fact that it was the world's leading producer of oil, a geophysicists named M. King Hubbert, realizing that the discovery peak had already passed, predicted that oil production in the Lower 48 would reach its highest point around 1970 and would decrease rapidly after that.   Now a number of petroleum geologists have pointed out that worldwide discovery of oil peaked decades ago. As oil fields continue to be depleted and new discovery, including advances in oil technology, fails to keep up, the prospect of a global Hubbert's peak looms before us.	Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian) and the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award , the alternative Nobel Prize, exposes yet another corporate maneuver to convert a critical world resource into a profitable commodity. Using the global water trade as a lens, she highlights the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they lose their right to a life-sustaining common good.
In the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.	Marq de Villiers provides an eye-opening account of how we are using, misusing, and abusing our planet's most vital resource. Encompassing ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives, de Villiers reports from hot spots as diverse as China, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, where swelling populations and unchecked development have stressed fresh water supplies nearly beyond remedy. Political struggles for control of water rage around the globe, and rampant pollution daily poses dire ecological threats. With one eye on these looming crises and the other on the history of our dependence on our planet's most precious commodity, de Villiers has crafted a powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations.	With 50 percent of the world's landmass covered by shared river basins, competition over water resources has always had the potential to spark violence. And the burgeoning populations and fast-developing industries of today's Third World are putting ever greater pressures on already scarce water resources. Elhance explores the hydropolitics of six of the world's largest and most turbulent river basins: the Parana-La Plata Basin; the Nile Basin; the Jordan River; the Euphrates-Tigris Basin; the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Barak Basin; and the Mekong Basin. In each case, he examines the basin's physical, economic, and political geography; the possibilities for acute conflict; and efforts to develop bilateral and multilateral agreements for sharing water resources.
Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the 20th century, and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the 21st century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion, and all of the energy alternatives.	Six studies focus on the availability of water as a constraint on development and water scarcity as a source of international conflict. Scholars of hydrology, international relations, development, conflict resolution, and anthropology address the issues in the context of the shortage of fresh water steadily expanding from the southern to the northern hemisphere. The six case studies are The Nile: Source of Life, Source of Conlfict, Water and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Turkey, Syria and Iraq: A Hydropolitical Security, India: The Domestic and International Politics, Mainland Southeast Asia: Co-operation or Conflict, Looming Water Crisis: New Approaches.	Vaclav Smil considers the twenty-first century's crucial question: How to reconcile the modern world's unceasing demand for energy with the absolute necessity to preserve the integrity of the biosphere. After a century of unprecedented production growth, technical innovation, and expanded consumption, the world faces a number of critical energy challenges arising from unequal resource distribution, changing demand patterns, and environmental limitations. His fundamental message is that our dependence on fossil fuels must be reduced not because of any imminent resource shortages but because the widespread burning of oil, coal, and natural gas damages the biosphere and presents increasing economic and security problems as the world relies on more expensive supplies and Middle Eastern crude oil.
Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, The Prize is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world - oil. Founded in the 19th century, the oil industry began producing kerosene for lamps and progressed to gasoline. Huge personal fortunes arose from it, and whole nations sprung out of the power politics of the oil wells. Yergin's fascinating account sweeps from early robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, to the oil crisis of the 1970s, through to the Gulf War.	Lutz Kleveman has crafted a modern variant of the 19 th century clash of imperial ambitions of Great Britain and czarist Russia. Only this time the stakes are higher. Desperate to wean itself from dependence on the powerful OPEC cartel, the United States is now pitted in a struggle against Russia and China, as all three nations compete for dominance in the Caspian region and access to its resources and pipeline routes. Complicating the playing field are transnational energy corporations with their own agendas and brash new entrepreneurs who have taken control after the collapse of the Soviet Union.	Halliburton and its subsidiaries form the foundation of an intriguing story of cronyism and conflict of interest that has only increased in momentum over the last decade. Award-winning journalist Dan Briody cuts through the veil of secrecy that cloaks this controversial company, and reveals how the confluence of business and politics has led to questionable deals as well as financial windfalls for Halliburton and its executives.
In this landmark call to action, Colin Woodard confronts the major environmental problem of our time: the fate of the oceans. Once thought to be limitless reservoirs constantly renewing themselves, the oceans are in fact bounded seas that lie within our power to kill-and as Woodard convincingly shows, we are killing them, through pollution, harmful fishing practices, ignorance, and global warming.