100 Books Like Water

“The river’s rhythm runs through my veins. Runs through my people’s veins.” This Caldecott Medal-winning picture book about the Indigenous-led movement to protect water as a sacred resource deserves all the accolades it has received. In a clear and powerful voice, Lindstrom’s young narrator reflects on the critical importance of water to her community, its spiritual significance, and the need to come together and stand up against an oil pipeline that threatens it.

I love how the book uses abstract language and imagery to tell a sweeping story of environmental justice and resistance that starts with one community’s fight to save its waterways and zooms out to include the whole world. At a time when environmental stories can be scary, sad, and overwhelming, Lindstrom’s poetic text encourages us to “Take courage!”

I love this book because it introduces our beloved children (6-10 years old) to one of the most mysterious and elusive creatures on Earth: the giant squid. Just think about it: until 2006, no humans had even seen one of these animals alive!

I study dolphins and whales, and sperm whales hunt these creatures in the cold and dark depths of the oceans. But while even kids know something about sperm whales, giant squid remains a mystery to most of us. How do they hunt? What do they eat? How do they breed? Award-winning author Candace Fleming and illustrator Eric Rohmann do a wonderful job of describing and painting this little-understood species.

Awe, beauty, and a satisfying amount of information—The Blue Whale has it all. I love the curious child we follow through the book, as well as the visual comparisons that turn astonishing facts about the world’s largest living creature into subtly humorous images that I can relate to on a more personal level. In the final pages of the book, the child—our surrogate adventurer—falls asleep and dreams, amazed by a world that contains such tremendous creatures. 

To me, this book feels like a walk along the beach. I pick up each poem, sink into the swirls and splashes of color, and let my mind wander. Books that encourage such meandering strolls near the ocean have a special place in my heart: the idea for my horseshoe crab book started on just such a walk. Water Sings Blue is a great reminder that you never know what wonders you will discover when you go outside and let your curiosity guide you. 

Author Brahma Chellaney is India’s most prominent geopolitical expert. He lives in Delhi, at the epicenter of the battle for water.

India’s water crises are numerous. For starters, India’s groundwater is running out, and there’s no way to replenish it. Water means survival, and across India, water shortages are critical, not just for people but also for agriculture and industry. Few solutions are in sight at this point.

Chellaney’s book considers the much larger picture of how Asian nations will "share" water sources—if that is at all possible. Due to flooding and sea-level rise, a third of Bangladesh may disappear in the coming decades.

The shrinking of the Aral Sea is arguably the greatest manmade environmental disaster of the 20th century. Kazakh writer Rollan Seisenbayev uses the catastrophe as the backdrop for his novel, exploring the impact on local people through the eyes of a fisherman and his son who are confronted not only with the vanishing sea but as a result also the disappearance of their livelihood and future. The Dead Wander in the Desert was long-listed for the PEN Translation Prize and deserves to be much more widely read. 

In the ancient Middle East Scheherazade had to begin a compelling story each night to stave off a bloodthirsty king’s tendency to murder his lovers. Journalist Lockwood traveled the world collecting the modern-day equivalent—myriad accounts of how climate change has already affected people living in numerous countries. The stories are simultaneously heartfelt and commonplace, out of this world and very much of it, perfect illustrations of how the global settles on the local like so much radioactive dust. If humanity is to have a vibrant future, the art of telling and listening to such stories will no doubt be as critical a life skill as Scheherazade’s was.

As you can already tell, I love a good travelogue. And as someone who was drawn to the Great Lakes originally via canoe, I found a fellow-traveler in Margaret Wooster.

Her vantage point comes from the hull of her boat, as she canoes and portages her way around the rivers that drain into Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the St. Lawrence River. In canoeing these waterscapes, she recounts the many centuries of history of the area but also shares her perspective as a conservationist when it comes to the challenges of protecting the Lakes and their rivers in our current moment.

Her attention to ecological detail, her rapt descriptions of wetlands riches, and her local storytelling invoke the intwined human and aquatic histories of this region. 

This is a classic by a leader in the field. It’s a hefty tome combining philosophy, economics, and history, but is well worth the time and energy required. Worster emphasizes that lack of water resources is a massive problem for the modern American West, necessitating increasingly complex and far-reaching irrigation systems that come at high social and economic costs. The result is an “empire” whose power is based on who controls the water vital to the urban, suburban, and rural life of the hydraulic west.

By comparing the struggles against water charges in Ireland with struggles over the extraction of unconventional gas in Australia, Madelaine Moore provides a fascinating account of common roots of resistance underpinning different forms of water grabbing.

Drawing on feminist Social Reproduction Theory she clearly demonstrates how these moments of contestation not only contest profit-making with water, but capitalist reproduction as a whole.