Water Shelf Podcast

The dynamic writing team Bill and Rosemarie Alley discuss their latest book, The Water Recycling Revolution: Tapping into the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) . What's revolutionary about recycled water? How did we get over the "yuck factor"? What are recycled water developers currently getting right and wrong? Find out here! Dr. William M. Alley is Director of Science and Tec...

Cristy Clark explores the "pluriverse of water realities" in her new book, Legal Geographies of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations (Earthscan Routledge, 2025) . Enjoy our lively conversation about how legal geography can both explain and improve human-water relations, what the human right to water actually means, and how Marvel Multiverse films may actually...

Season 3 of the Water Shelf Podcast begins with a bang! Aaron Mead , author of Body in a Barrel: A Las Vegas Mafia Crime Novella , talks with me about his fictional treatment of Lake Mead’s slow, climate-change-induced unveiling of long-immersed depths. Building on his written Water Shelf interview , Mr. Mead discusses his water industry and theological studies roots, two layers that contributed c...

David Zetland gives a powerhouse interview on his many decades of writing on water, the commons, and climate change. He discusses his recently reissued book Living with Water Scarcity (2014/2023) which does a wonderful job explaining water economics to the general reader. We also get into why water managers fail and, in his opinion, why academic publishing has lost its luster. Professor Zetland is...

In this episode, Sayd Randle joins us from Kathmandu, Nepal, to talk about her fascinating new book, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025) . We discuss her ethnographic approach to water and the challenges and opportunities of localizing urban water supplies. She also gives us a peek at what she's now working on halfwa...

Paul Brown joins the Water Shelf Podcast to discuss his unique, trailblazing, and entertaining book, Too Good to Be True: Scottsdale and Privatization in the 1980s (2020) . His detailed account of a water treatment plant public-private partnership evokes both a specific time and place and larger themes of professional development and learning from your mistakes. Mr. Brown is President of Paul Redv...

Giulio Boccaletti provides a master class on water, politics, and social organization in this fascinating discussion of his book Water: A Biography (Pantheon Books, 2021) . His "story of people and water" traces the historical dialectic between the practical realities of water management and the development of political ideologies, and he argues for republicanism over authoritarianism in addressin...

Shimi Anisfeld kicks off Season 2 of the Water Shelf Podcast by introducing his fascinating book Water Management: Prioritizing Justice and Sustainability (Island Press, 2024) - an impressively comprehensive and immensely readable university textbook on this important topic supplemented by a free companion website . Dr. Shimon Anisfeld is Senior Lecturer II and Research Scientist in Water Resource...

Buzz Thompson joins the Water Shelf Podcast to talk about his innovative and extraordinary new book, Liquid Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the Freshwater Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2004) . Barton H. “Buzz” Thompson, Jr. is the Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law at the Stanford Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute...

I have the great pleasure to speak with Dr. David Sedlak about his remarkable new book, Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate (Yale University Press, 2023) . Dr. Sedlak is the Plato Malozemoff Professor of Environmental Engineering at University of California Berkeley. He is Director of the Berkeley Water Center, Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation's Engineering...

Erica Gies visits the Water Shelf podcast to talk about her fantastic and internationally distributed recent book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (University of Chicago Press, 2022) . Ms. Gies is an independent journalist covering science and the environment from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. Her work appears in the New York Times , Scienti...

In this episode, I talk with eminent scholars Drs. Manuel Teodoro , Samantha Zuhlke , and David Switzer about their recent book of immense importance to the water industry entitled The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government (Cambridge University Press, 2022) . Dr. Teodoro is the Robert F. & Sylvia T. Wagner Distinguished Prof...

On this inaugural episode of the Water Shelf Podcast, I interview Dr. Peter Gleick about his recently published and highly acclaimed book The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future (PublicAffairs, 2023) . Dr. Peter Gleick is renowned nationally and internationally for his more than four decades of water science and policy work, and is perhaps the world’...