The one indispensable resource, water is increasingly controlled and even owned by private capital. By 2012, water was a trillion-dollar industry—and as population growth, industrial production, and ecological change make scarcity ever-more common, water may well become the source of military and political conflict in the years to come.
 
This book looks at how we got here and what we can and should do next. Laying out the complex arguments surrounding water, its ownership and access to it, Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes make the technical and scientific aspects of the discussion clear and accessible—and thereby enable themselves to make the political questions more urgent. Pushing back against the market fundamentalists, the authors argue that it is both possible and necessary that considerations of equity and social justice prevail in the debates about water. Powerful and polemical, The Last Drop will be a vital resource for water activists worldwide.

Mike Gonzalez is emeritus professor of Latin American studies at the University of Glasgow. Marianella Yanes is a Venezuelan journalist and writer for television and film.
 

— LSE Review of Books

— Richard Boyd Barrett, member of Irish Parliament

— Marcela Olivera, coordinator, Red VIDA

— Marcelle Dawson, University of Otago, New Zealand

— Jonathan Neale, author of Stop Global Warming, Change the World

— Times Literary Supplement