The Big Thirst, Chapters 5-7

1. Precis:

In The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, by Charles Fishman, the importance of water on Earth is highlighted. Fishman continues to elaborate emphasize ways in which water is helpful and the various ways it is used. He gives staggering facts about the production of Coca- Cola, the long process of getting clean wool, and the "yuck" factor of water. As he does in his earlier chapters, Fishman gives examples of the mass use of water and reminds us that each gallon of water that we use "has an economic value". In the last chapters he stresses about the issue of other countries not having an efficient use of water and tragic event that occur in arid regions such as in Australia. He speaks about deaths that occur from people who have no access to water, such as a couple who both died due to lack of water and also a boy who went seventeen hours without water in hundred- degree heat who died as well. With his accounts on such heartbreaking stories it makes the audience take time to acknowledge how lucky they are to be able to access tap water at any time of the day they desire. Charles Fishman's purpose is to remind everyone of the many ways we use water in which many cases it is often gone to waste and not taken into much consideration. He also wants to remind all of us how lucky we are to be able to access clean water however, that there is a limited source and that we must begin to take smart actions to preserve the water we have. 

2. Vocabulary:

• bales (n.): great evil
• lanolin (n.): wool grease especially when refined for use in ointments and cosmetics
• spigots (n.): the plug of a faucet
• percolating (v.): to cause (a solvent) to pass through a permeable substance (as a powdered drug) especially for extracting a soluble constituent
• altruism (n.): unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others
• hermetic (adj.): impervious to external influence
• incandescent (adj.):  white, glowing, or luminous with intense heat
• emporium (n.): a place of trade
• benign (adj.): of a gentle disposition
• harrumph (v.): to comment disapprovingly
• acrimonious (adj.):  caustic, biting, or rancorous especially in feeling, language, or manner
• visceral (adj.): dealing with crude or elemental emotions
• halcyon (n.): a bird identified with the kingfisher and held in ancient legend to nest at sea about the time of the winter solstice and to calm the waves during incubation
• ludicrous (adj.): amusing or laughable through obvious absurdity, incongruity, exaggeration, or eccentricity 

3. Tone: Logical, Informative, Worried

4. Rhetorical Strategies:

• Epigraph: "When you start to think like we think, you don't see water in the pipes. You see dollar signs." -Eric Berliner, IBM water manager in Burlington, Vermont (112)
• " The "yuck factor" is a deeply ingrained psychological thing." -Alan Kleinschmidt, manager of water operations, Toowoomba, Australia. (145)

• Compare & Contrast: "IBM, in fact wants to do for water what Apple's iTunes has done for music. At the simplest level, iTunes is just what the corporate IT types would call a "dashboard: for managing your music..." "That's exactly what IBM wants to offer for water users"..."(One crucial difference, of course, is that iTunes is a closed system, valuable that hermetic water is the original open- source system.)" (131)

• Statistics: "In fact, the amount of bottles water bottled waters sold- which grew by 8.6 percent in 2004, by 10.8 percent in 2005, by 9.5 percent in 2006- peaked in 2007.

• Simile: "But running out of water is like slipping off the edge of a cliff-it's hard to be saved." (147)
• "That's like waving a red flag in front of a bull" (154)

• Imagery: "You can stand on the beach, looking south directly across the mouth of the Murray. The river comes in from the right, the sand dunes part, and the Mighty Murray meets the Indian Ocean. In the opening are huge windswept breakers..." (194)

• Anaphora: "Six gigaliters of water is an amount hard to imagine." "Six gigaliters of water is 6 billion one- liter bottles..." "Six gigaliters of water is really a lake of water." (185)

5. Discussion Questions

1. What exactly does "purple pipes" mean when it is talked about in chapter 5?
2. Why does Fishman begin certain phrases with all words capitalized? 
3. In which ways do you think chapter 6 relates to the overall theme of the book with the added information of the "yuck factor"? 

6. Quotation:

"What's really interesting about the business of water is that people who start to take the economic value of water seriously immediately start to use water differently, and also think about it differently." (144)